Everyone understands this: royalty disputes, in essence, come down to a matter of how interests are allocated. But sentiment shifts in the secondary market happen faster than the candlestick chart. Last weekend, I watched data from several NFT projects and found that when royalties were adjusted from high to low, the outcry on social media and the funding rate were actually moving together—the harsher the backlash, the faster the capital flowed in, yet the activity of token-holding addresses dropped sharply instead.

In other words, the “the protocol layer is justice” logic in the creator economy, when applied to the secondary market, becomes a magnifying glass for collective game theory: some people see it as “decentralization,” while others are simply focused on running fast at the floor price. Either way, I’ve recently been manually going through the trading-volume distribution of AI Agent on-chain, and I found that many arbitrage bots are already treating royalties as a signal. The ones that hype the narrative and the ones that obsess over security each play their own game—but the sentiment indicators end up being clearer.

I don’t know who is manipulating whom in the end, but judging by the fluctuations in the funding-rate curve, everyone has a pretty good idea.