Recently, I’ve seen the debate over the “optional royalties” in the secondary market again, honestly it’s just that creators want a long-term income stream, and traders just want smoother transactions. I used to chase after who was right or wrong, which protocol was more “just,” but now I’m a bit tired of explaining and just accept randomness: the market will sway in waves of emotion.

What I care more about are permissions and pathways: are royalties enforced strictly by smart contracts, or are they self-enforced by the market front-end? Which steps can be bypassed, and which can be easily smoothed out by bridges, aggregators, or plugins? Also, those on-chain data tools and tagging systems have recently been criticized for being laggy or misleading, resulting in you thinking you’re supporting creators when you might just be supporting a certain narrative tag… Anyway, I now prefer to hold back and watch how several settlement rounds actually play out, for now.