NFT royalties

The ERC-2981 royalty standard was proposed in 2020 and finalized in July 2021. It exposes a single function, royaltyInfo(tokenId, salePrice), which returns the recipient and the royalty amount. The nuance matters: ERC-2981 only informs, it does not enforce payment. A standard ERC-721 or ERC-1155 transfer withholds no fee, so applying the royalty happens in the marketplace's logic, outside the token contract. It is therefore inaccurate to claim royalties are collected automatically on-chain.

Royalties are a pillar of the business model for creators and brands in the NFT space, generating recurring income on resale. Enforcement at the protocol level has been the central economic and technical challenge. OpenSea launched its Operator Filter in November 2022 to favor royalties by restricting sales to marketplaces that honored them, but the arrival of zero-fee platforms changed the landscape. From August 2023 OpenSea stopped enforcing them, and from 29 February 2024 the Operator Filter no longer guaranteed them for existing collections; today they work as a voluntary suggestion.

The OpenZeppelin library implements ERC-2981 in its ERC2981.sol contract, widely used by issuers. The Manifold Royalty Registry is an on-chain registry that resolves royalties for collections that did not implement ERC-2981 natively. To reinforce collection, some projects combine the standard with transfer-lock mechanisms or with marketplaces that agree to honor the fee, a path to sustain creator income.