Recently, I’ve again been seeing the secondary market arguing about royalties. Honestly, I can understand both sides pretty well: creators want long-term returns, while trading parties complain that the friction costs are too high. In the past, I would have sided with the view that “it should be paid morally,” but after writing contracts and reviewing audits more often, I’ve gotten a bit more cold about it: anything that can be enforced on-chain ultimately comes down to the execution path and the boundary conditions. No matter how tightly you try to tie it down, someone will always find a way around it—forcing it just pushes people into even darker markets.

And lately, those on-chain data tools and tagging systems have also been criticized for being “lagging behind / misleading.” Basically, it means you think you’re seeing real users, but in reality, they might only have been tagged with a nice-looking label. If the royalties discussion only focuses on “who should pay,” while ignoring softer links like distribution, discovery, and reputation, then in the end, it’s likely they’ll just fight it out and then go their separate ways.

My more conservative approach now is: I’d rather miss out on the fun than bet that “some platform will definitely carry royalty enforcement through to the end.” If it can be written into a contract, then I put it in; if it can’t, then I’ll treat it as if it doesn’t exist… for now. That’s it.