Recently, I’ve seen people arguing again about whether royalties should be enforced in the secondary market, and honestly, I’m pretty conflicted. To put it plainly, the original purpose of royalties is to give creators a steady cash flow, but once it turns into something like “you must pay,” buyers and sellers will find ways around it—going to those zero-slippage routes instead. In the end, it turns into all kinds of on-chain refreshing and retrying, queuing up to find pools where trades can actually go through, and the user experience becomes really awkward. Not to mention, some projects conveniently expand “creators” into a team budget pool—collecting a bunch of signatures from a lot of signatories—and when you ask how the money is spent or where it ends up, they just act like they can’t hear you.

I still remember that whole play-to-earn-style collapse to this day: once inflation kicks in, studios come in and once they do, the token price spirals, and all those “incentives” end up becoming a game of shoring up leaks in other places. If royalties were to go down a path of fixed extraction plus unlimited incentive emissions as well, the final result would just be driving liquidity away. Anyway, whenever I see proposals like “ongoing incentives/support for creators,” my first reaction is still to get the budget, execution KPIs, and the conditions for withdrawal written out clearly first—otherwise I’ll probably keep voting against.