Recently I’ve been playing an on-chain NFT project, and when I look at the trade records, it just feels off. The transactions clearly show as executed, yet the royalties don’t match. Later I figured out what’s going on: there’s latency on the node and the RPC side, the indexer hasn’t caught up, and the data is actually “arriving late.”

People think on-chain data is real-time broadcasting, down to the second; in reality, it’s more like a water pipe in a vegetable field—once you open the valve, you still have to wait a few seconds for the water to reach the seedlings. Anyway, as a small retail user like me, sowing seeds and removing bugs is fine; what I hate most is irrigation latency—what you see as “the harvest” might already be from the previous batch, not the latest one.

In the past few days, the back-and-forth fight over NFT royalties is basically the same story. Creators think every single handoff automatically routes money to them, but once liquidity moves fast and the indexer can’t keep up, royalties turn into “theoretically paid, but in practice not received.” Planting vegetables still requires you to keep a closer eye on things yourself.