Riding the subway and overhearing a debate about secondary market royalties again, it feels like an old trope being recycled: the platform says users don’t want to be “taxed,” creators say if they don’t get royalties, they might as well be posting in vain. Honestly, everyone wants to embed incentives into the rules, but on-chain, it’s hard to rely on moral constraints.

Lately, when I review contracts, it feels even more awkward: royalties are often just “recommendations,” and if the market doesn’t recognize them, they become meaningless. If you enforce them strictly, you risk choking liquidity, and ultimately people will trade off-chain or find indirect routes—kind of like the “regulatory boundaries” debate around privacy coins and mixers— the more you try to control, the more people will look for loopholes.

Anyway, I now prefer to see if projects turn “sustainable income” into other mechanisms, like profit sharing, memberships, or future rights… Royalties can serve as subsidies, but not as a lifeline. That’s all for now; I’ll revisit and dismantle this tentacle later.