I just got into an argument-fueled post about royalties being a mess again at midnight. Honestly, it’s pretty heartbreaking. I used to think that letting NFT creators share in royalties was the most romantic thing about web3—until the moment we moved into the secondary market, when all the traffic and the “fat” got taken by platforms and big wallets. Creators’ little bit of royalty is basically like scraps left in a garden after birds peck through it. As a small-cap player, I didn’t really take part in any high-price trades, but I’ve seen a lot of people break down and quit the scene directly because royalties dropped. It feels very real—still, ideals are ideals, and everyone has to eat.

The recent cross-chain bridge hacks and the whole oracle pricing situation have made me so cautious that whenever I see a new protocol, I wait about half an hour for confirmation before I dare to move—like waiting for the pesticide’s toxicity to dissipate before picking vegetables from a treated garden, otherwise one bite and you’re down. As for the royalty problem, there’s no real fix in the short term. Creators either accept the reality of floor-price traffic, or they come up with something like a subscription model or offline perks. I’ll stick to the same “vegetable farmer” logic: grow slowly, avoid pitfalls, and whatever you can harvest, you take.