It’s been ridiculously hot lately. When I’m typing, the fan hums nonstop, and my coffee gets cold twice as fast as usual. I also happened to scroll through the group chat and saw people passing around news about an audit of a certain stablecoin reserve—plus screenshots of “depegging” being circulated back and forth—making everyone’s mood even more restless than the temperature.

To be honest, about this dispute over secondary-market royalties, I actually think it’s something worth cooling down and thinking through. In creator economies, NFT royalties are essentially a “soft promise”: on-chain, there’s no way to enforce them. When the market turns cold and trading volume drops, people start complaining that platforms either don’t make it convenient to collect royalties or collect too little. But from another angle, if a royalty mechanism really could be implemented at the protocol level—for example, something like ERC-721C—then that would be the true value anchor. Otherwise, it’s just like those reserve-audit screenshots from the group chat: whether you believe it or not depends entirely on emotion.

Forget it, let’s leave it at that. After all, I’m the one drawing sketches—someone has to make the complex stuff clear. Feel free to correct me.