What is an NFT Royalty? A Clear Explanation for Beginners (2026)
When I first heard about NFT royalties, I thought it sounded almost too good. You create something, sell it once, and then every time it changes hands after that, you automatically get a percentage. No chasing invoices, no middlemen, no asking permission. The blockchain handles it.
I believed that for a while. Then I started reading more carefully and found out the situation is more complicated — and honestly, more interesting — than that first impression suggested.
The Basic Idea
A royalty is a percentage of a sale that goes to the original creator. In traditional industries — music, books, film — royalties are contractual. Someone tracks sales, calculates the percentage, and sends a payment. It works, but it depends on contracts being honoured and people doing their jobs.
With NFTs, the idea was to make royalties automatic. When a token is sold on a marketplace, the smart contract splits the payment — a percentage to the seller, a percentage to the original creator — without anyone needing to manually track or process it. The creator set the percentage when they minted the NFT, and it applies forever.
On paper, this is a genuinely new thing. A musician could sell a song as an NFT and earn a cut every time it resells for the rest of its existence. A digital artist could benefit from their work appreciating in value over time, not just from the first sale. That’s not how traditional art markets work at all.
Where It Gets Complicated
The problem is that NFT royalties aren’t enforced at the protocol level. They’re enforced at the marketplace level — and marketplaces are optional.
When you set a royalty on an NFT, you’re not writing an unbreakable rule into the blockchain. You’re writing a suggestion. A marketplace that wants to honour it will check the royalty setting and split the payment accordingly. A marketplace that doesn’t want to honour it — or a direct peer-to-peer transfer that bypasses any marketplace entirely — can ignore it completely.
This became a real issue around 2022-2023 when several NFT marketplaces made royalty enforcement optional to compete for trading volume. Creators who had built revenue models around royalties suddenly found them unreliable. The promise of automatic, guaranteed creator income turned out to depend on market participants choosing to participate.
ERC-2981 is the standard that was created to make royalty information readable across platforms — it lets any marketplace query what royalty a creator set. But “readable” isn’t the same as “enforced.” The standard tells you what the creator intended. It doesn’t make anyone pay it.
What This Means in Practice
If you’re buying or selling NFTs on Polygon, royalties will depend on which marketplace you use and whether that marketplace enforces them. Some do. Some don’t. Some make it optional for buyers. It’s worth checking before you assume a creator is receiving anything from secondary sales.
If you’re creating NFTs and planning to earn from royalties, the honest picture is: it’s possible, but not guaranteed. Platforms like OpenSea have changed their royalty policies multiple times. What a platform enforces today may not be what it enforces in a year. Building a revenue model entirely on secondary royalties carries real risk.
Royalties were one of the things that made NFTs feel genuinely different to me when I first learned about them. The idea that creators could benefit from appreciation in their own work — automatically, without contracts or middlemen — felt like it solved a real problem.
Learning that it’s not actually enforced at the protocol level was disappointing. Not devastating — I understand why the blockchain itself can’t force payment in every possible transfer scenario. But it shifted how I think about what NFTs actually guarantee versus what they make possible. There’s a gap between those two things, and royalties sit right in that gap. Worth knowing before building anything around them.
On-Chain Royalty Enforcement
There are ongoing efforts to solve this properly. One approach is to build royalty enforcement directly into the smart contract — making the token itself refuse to transfer unless the royalty is paid. This works, but it limits where the NFT can be traded, since it can only be sold through platforms that support the specific enforcement mechanism.
Another approach is to use soulbound or restricted transfer tokens for cases where the creator wants tight control. But these come with their own trade-offs around liquidity and resaleability.
None of these are perfect solutions. The tension between open tradability and creator compensation is real, and the space is still working through it. What I can say is that if you see a project marketing guaranteed creator royalties as a core feature, it’s worth understanding exactly how that’s being enforced before taking it at face value.
Where I’m Still Uncertain
I have a reasonable grasp of what royalties are and why enforcement is inconsistent. What I’m less clear on is the current state of royalty enforcement across specific marketplaces on Polygon in 2026 — which ones enforce them, which ones don’t, and whether any new standards have emerged that I haven’t caught up with yet. If you’re actively trading or creating on Polygon and have more current information on this, I’d genuinely like to know.
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