NFT Royalties on the Robinhood Chain: How They Actually Work

A royalty is a share of each secondary sale that goes back to the creator. The confusion — and every argument about royalties across the industry — comes from one distinction:

• The contract declares a royalty rate and recipient, typically through the ERC-2981 standard.
• The marketplace decides whether to honour it.

ERC-2981 is a way of asking. It is not enforcement. A marketplace that ignores it is not breaking anything.

Most collections land between 2.5% and 7.5%. Higher rates are legal and increasingly ignored — both by marketplaces and by traders who route around them.

The practical case for a moderate rate: royalties only pay if people trade. A rate that suppresses trading volume earns less than a lower one on a liquid collection, and the difference is not close.

The royalty recipient is an address baked into your contract. Depending on how the collection was deployed, changing it later may be impossible.

Use an address you will still control in three years. A multisig is worth the setup time here if more than one person is involved — a personal wallet that becomes inaccessible takes the royalty stream with it.

State the rate and the recipient publicly, before launch. Both are readable on-chain by anyone who looks, so publishing them costs nothing and pre-empts the accusation that something was hidden.

If you later reduce the rate, say so and say why. Quiet changes to something people can verify are how projects lose trust that took months to build.

Setting up a collection now? How to launch on the Robinhood Chain covers the rest of the configuration.