Creator Royalties: How Blockchain Lets Artists Earn Every Time Their Work Sells

When you create something—a piece of art, music, or even a digital avatar—creator royalties, a payment system where the original maker earns a percentage every time their work is resold. Also known as secondary sales royalties, it’s the closest thing crypto has to a fair pay system for artists. Before blockchain, if your painting sold at an auction for ten times what you originally charged, you got nothing. Online platforms took your work, sold it, and kept all the profit. Blockchain changed that by letting you program royalties directly into the asset using smart contract royalties, self-executing code that automatically sends a cut of resale value back to the original creator.

These royalties aren’t theoretical. They’re built into NFT royalties, a standard that ensures artists receive ongoing payments whenever their digital collectibles change hands on marketplaces. If you minted a digital artwork on Ethereum or Solana and set a 10% royalty, every time someone flips it, you get 10% of the sale price—no middleman, no paperwork. That’s the power. But here’s the problem: most big platforms like OpenSea and Blur have started ignoring or disabling royalties. Why? Because buyers hate paying them. And platforms want more volume, even if it means stealing from creators. So now, creator royalties are stuck in a fight between ethics and economics.

It’s not just about art. Think about musicians releasing songs as NFTs, writers selling short stories with embedded royalties, or game developers selling in-game items that keep paying them. The same code that powers NFT royalties can work for any digital asset. But without enforcement, it’s just a promise written in code. Some creators are turning to decentralized marketplaces that refuse to disable royalties. Others are building their own platforms. And some are walking away entirely, tired of fighting for what should be basic.

What you’ll find in these posts isn’t theory. It’s real cases—like how a single NFT artist earned $200,000 in royalties over two years, or how a game token’s royalty structure collapsed because the team didn’t plan for resale volume. You’ll see how platforms like Rarible and Foundation still honor royalties, while others don’t. You’ll learn why some creators are switching to Ethereum Layer 2s for better royalty enforcement, and how to spot a project that’s just pretending to pay creators. This isn’t about hype. It’s about who gets paid when the market moves—and whether you’re on the right side of that equation.