NFT royalty percentages typically range from 5% to 10%, but vary by platform. ERC-2981 standardizes how royalties are encoded, but enforcement is voluntary. Creators rely on royalties for ongoing income, while traders sometimes bypass them-creating tension in the ecosystem.
ERC-2981: What It Is and Why It Matters for NFT Royalties
When you buy an NFT, you’re not just getting a digital image—you’re buying into a system that should reward the person who made it. That’s where ERC-2981, a smart contract standard that defines how NFTs pay royalties to creators on secondary sales. Also known as NFT Royalty Standard, it lets artists set a percentage that automatically goes to them every time their NFT changes hands. Before ERC-2981, there was no universal way to enforce royalties. Some marketplaces paid them, others ignored them, and creators lost money every time their work resold.
ERC-2981 fixes that by embedding royalty info directly into the NFT’s smart contract. It doesn’t force platforms to pay—it just gives them a clear, standardized way to find out how much they should pay. Think of it like a receipt that says, ‘This NFT owes the creator 10% on every resale.’ The problem? Not every platform follows it. OpenSea, Blur, and others still handle royalties differently, and many NFTs launched before 2022 don’t even include the standard. That’s why you’ll see artists complaining about unpaid royalties, even when their NFTs sell for thousands.
What makes ERC-2981 powerful is how simple it is to implement. It doesn’t need complex code or new blockchains. It just adds two functions to a smart contract: one to declare the royalty address and percentage, and another to answer when someone asks, ‘How much should I pay the creator?’ That’s it. And because it’s built on Ethereum, it works with any wallet, marketplace, or tool that supports ERC-721 or ERC-1155 tokens. It’s not magic—it’s just better engineering.
But here’s the catch: the standard only works if everyone plays along. If a marketplace decides to ignore ERC-2981, the artist gets nothing. That’s why some creators now use off-chain agreements or launch on platforms that pledge to honor it. Others are pushing for legal recognition of on-chain royalties. Meanwhile, buyers should check if an NFT supports ERC-2981 before purchasing—if you care about supporting artists, you want to know their cut is protected.
The posts below dive into real cases where ERC-2981 mattered—or didn’t. You’ll find breakdowns of NFT projects that got royalties right, others that lost them, and how scams exploit the lack of standardization. You’ll also see how tools like wallet trackers and marketplace analytics are starting to show royalty data, making it easier to spot which NFTs actually pay their creators. Whether you’re an artist trying to protect your income or a collector who wants to support fair systems, understanding ERC-2981 isn’t optional anymore—it’s the baseline for doing crypto right.