Do Secondary Sales Always Trigger A Royalty Payment?
Creator royalties are often described as one of the appealing features of NFTs — a way for an original creator to earn something every time a piece resells. In practice, whether that royalty actually gets paid depends on details most buyers and sellers never think to check.
The short answer
No, secondary sales don’t always trigger a royalty payment. Royalties on NFTs are generally enforced by the marketplace facilitating a sale rather than by the underlying blockchain itself, so a sale routed outside a royalty-enforcing marketplace — such as a direct wallet-to-wallet transfer — can bypass the royalty entirely, even though ownership of the NFT still changes hands.
Why royalties aren’t automatic at the protocol level
It’s a common misconception that royalties are baked permanently into an NFT’s code in a way that always applies. In reality, most royalty mechanisms rely on a marketplace choosing to check for and honor a royalty setting at the moment of sale, similar to how an NFT listing works on a blockchain through a combination of on-chain ownership records and off-chain marketplace logic. If a transaction doesn’t pass through that marketplace’s sale process, there’s no built-in enforcement mechanism forcing the payment to happen.
Ways a royalty can end up skipped
- Peer-to-peer transfers. Two people can agree on a price privately and simply transfer the NFT wallet-to-wallet, with payment handled outside the transaction entirely, leaving no sale event for a marketplace to detect.
- Marketplaces with optional royalty enforcement. Some platforms let sellers set royalties to zero regardless of the percentage the creator originally set, prioritizing lower fees for traders over royalty enforcement.
- Cross-platform sales. A sale conducted through a marketplace that doesn’t recognize or respect another platform’s royalty metadata can process the transaction without paying it out.
- Wrapped or bridged assets. Moving an NFT to a different format or network can sometimes separate it from the royalty logic tied to its original listing structure.
Why this shifted over time
Royalty enforcement was largely a voluntary courtesy built into marketplace software rather than a rule guaranteed by blockchain infrastructure. As trading volume and competition between marketplaces increased, some platforms began making royalties optional to attract traders who preferred lower total costs, which shows how trading volume can influence the incentives around NFT valuation and trading behavior well beyond the sale price itself.
What this means for buyers and sellers
Anyone buying or selling an NFT secondhand is generally not doing anything wrong by using a route that doesn’t pay a royalty — it’s a function of how the marketplace or transfer method is built, not a rule being broken. It does mean that the original creator’s earnings from resale activity can vary significantly depending on where and how buyers and sellers choose to transact, which is worth understanding for anyone evaluating an NFT project’s ongoing revenue model. Compared with a fixed-price listing versus an auction, the sale format itself doesn’t determine whether a royalty gets paid — the platform handling the transaction does.
The takeaway
Royalty payments on NFT resales depend on the marketplace or method used to complete the sale, not on some fixed rule attached permanently to the asset. Recognizing that distinction helps explain why royalty income for creators can be unpredictable, and why the phrase “royalty-enabled” describes a feature of a specific sales channel rather than a guaranteed property of the NFT itself.