NFT creator royalties are no longer guaranteed on most marketplaces. When NFTs first took off, royalties got paid because platforms chose to enforce them, not because the blockchain required it. The underlying technical standard, EIP-2981, only lets a contract report a royalty percentage. It never forces a marketplace to actually pay that amount. OpenSea tried to enforce royalties on-chain with a tool called the Operator Filter, launched in November 2022, then rolled that enforcement back after creator backlash and competition from Blur, a trader-focused marketplace that launched with zero fees and optional royalties. OpenSea made creator fees fully optional for new collections starting August 31, 2023, and the last enforced collections lost that protection by February 29, 2024. Today, whether a creator gets paid on a resale depends on the specific marketplace’s policy and whether the buyer chooses to pay, not on any guarantee built into the NFT itself.
Creator royalties were one of the original selling points of NFTs: an artist sells a piece once, then collects a percentage every time it resells. That promise is now unevenly kept, and the reasons come down to a technical gap and a two-year fee war between the biggest marketplaces.
Royalties were never a blockchain guarantee
NFT royalties feel like a smart contract feature because the percentage is often written into the contract’s metadata. But storing a number isn’t the same as enforcing a payment. EIP-2981, the Ethereum standard most NFT royalty systems are built on, defines a single read-only function: a marketplace asks the contract what royalty applies to a sale, and the contract answers with an address and an amount. That’s it. The standard has no mechanism to block a transfer if the royalty isn’t paid, and it doesn’t touch what happens on marketplaces that skip the lookup entirely.
In practice, this means royalty payment has always depended on marketplaces choosing to honor it at checkout. For years, most of them did, largely because OpenSea, the dominant marketplace at the time, built royalty payments into its own checkout flow and collections followed that norm. The moment a serious competitor stopped doing that, the norm broke.
OpenSea’s enforcement tool rose and fell in under a year
In November 2022, OpenSea launched the Operator Filter, an on-chain tool that let creators block their NFTs from trading on marketplaces that didn’t honor creator fees. The pitch was straightforward: bake royalty enforcement into the contract itself so no marketplace could route around it.
The backlash was immediate. Critics, including some of the same creators the tool was meant to protect, argued it was anti-competitive because it effectively locked new collections into OpenSea and marketplaces that mirrored its policy. Smaller platforms couldn’t compete if adopting a collection’s contract meant also enforcing its royalty terms. Facing pressure, OpenSea delayed the enforcement deadline and said some of its initial choices had been hasty.
The bigger threat came from Blur, a marketplace built for high-volume traders that launched in October 2022 with zero marketplace fees and made royalty payments optional by default, rewarding users who opted in with token incentives rather than requiring payment outright. Blur’s argument was blunt: royalties were never enforceable on-chain in the first place, and traders already had plenty of venues where they didn’t have to pay them. As Blur captured trading volume, OpenSea matched its posture rather than lose market share, a shift Decrypt covered in detail at the time.
The move to fully optional fees
By 2023, OpenSea had reversed course entirely. According to OpenSea’s own announcement, creator fees became optional for new collections starting August 31, 2023, and the Operator Filter was retired the same day. Collections that had already opted into the filter, along with existing collections on non-Ethereum chains, kept enforced royalties on OpenSea through February 29, 2024. After that date, every collection’s royalty status became optional, meaning payment depends on the buyer’s willingness to pay rather than any platform requirement. The Block’s coverage of the shift quoted OpenSea’s reasoning directly: the company said unilateral enforcement required buy-in from the whole industry that never materialized, and that creator fees “aren’t going away, simply the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them.”
That framing is doing some work. Fees not “going away” technically means the option still exists in marketplace settings. It does not mean buyers pay them by default anymore.
A narrower fix: enforcing royalties at the transfer level
After the 2023 fee collapse, a studio called Limit Break introduced an alternative called ERC-721C, built as an extension of the standard NFT contract format rather than a replacement for EIP-2981. Instead of just reporting a royalty percentage, an ERC-721C contract checks every transfer against a validator contract before allowing it to go through. If a sale tries to route through a marketplace that doesn’t honor the creator’s fee settings, the transfer can be blocked outright rather than just under-paid.
OpenSea confirmed support for creators using ERC-721C to set and enforce their own creator earnings, and Magic Eden adopted it as well. The catch is that enforcement only works across marketplaces that choose to honor the validator check. Blur never adopted ERC-721C, so a creator using it effectively narrows where their collection can trade in exchange for a real shot at getting paid on every sale. Critics have also raised a centralization concern: a contract that can block transfers to specific marketplaces is a long way from the permissionless trading NFTs were originally pitched on. It’s a real option for new collections, but it’s a trade-off, not a fix that restores the old guarantee industry-wide.
What this means if you’re buying or selling NFTs today
For collectors, the practical effect is small: most marketplaces still show a suggested or optional royalty percentage at checkout, and you can usually choose to pay full price, including the royalty, or a reduced price without it. Our guide to how NFT marketplace fees actually work breaks down how those checkout totals get calculated across platforms.
For creators, the effect is larger. Royalty income on secondary sales is no longer something you can count on from contract design alone. Some creators have moved to newer contract standards with built-in transfer restrictions that only allow trading through marketplaces honoring their fee, trading reach for guaranteed payment. Others have accepted that royalties are now closer to a tip than a fee, and priced their primary sales accordingly. If you’re comparing where to list a new collection, our breakdown of OpenSea, Blur, and Magic Eden covers each platform’s current fee and royalty defaults.
Does every marketplace handle royalties the same way?
No. Policies differ by platform and can change without much notice, since nothing in the underlying NFT standard forces a particular behavior. Always check a specific marketplace’s current fee settings before listing or buying, rather than assuming a royalty will be paid or skipped.
Can a creator force royalty payment today?
Not through EIP-2981 alone. Some projects use newer, more restrictive contract standards that block transfers to non-compliant marketplaces, but these trade liquidity for enforcement and remain less common than the original, unenforceable royalty model.
Were royalties ever actually guaranteed?
No. They relied on marketplaces voluntarily paying out what a contract reported, a convention rather than a rule. That convention held while OpenSea dominated the market and broke down once a serious low-fee competitor arrived.
Royalties remain part of the NFT ecosystem’s vocabulary, but the mechanism behind them turned out to be a lot more fragile than most buyers assumed in 2021. Understanding that gap, standard versus enforcement, explains most of what changed between 2022 and 2024, and why the answer to “will the creator get paid” now depends on which marketplace you’re using.