Why EIP-2981 Is a Flawed Standard

Blur's strategy exploits EIP-2981's optionality by bypassing it entirely for its core order book.\n- Royalty enforcement is only applied to a small subset of NFT collections via a separate, non-standard contract.\n- This creates a two-tier market where creators must choose between liquidity (Blur) or royalties (other marketplaces).\n- The result is a race to the bottom on creator fees, with many collections forced to set royalties to 0%.

OpenSea's Seaport protocol, the dominant NFT marketplace infrastructure, has a critical vulnerability.\n- While it respects EIP-2981, its open-source nature allows any marketplace to fork it and simply remove the royalty enforcement logic.\n- This has led to the rise of 'royalty-skipping' aggregators and marketplaces like Sudoswap and Blur, which use modified Seaport code.\n- The standard provides no on-chain enforcement mechanism, making compliance purely a policy choice.

EIP-2981 is a read-only standard; it cannot enforce payments, only suggest them. True enforcement requires protocol-level changes.\n- Solutions like Manifold's Royalty Registry or 0xSplits add a secondary enforcement layer but are not universally adopted.\n- This fragmentation forces creators into a defensive posture, relying on blocklists and legal threats instead of code.\n- The core failure is separating the royalty info (EIP-2981) from the royalty enforcement (marketplace logic).

EIP-2981 is a passive reporting standard, not an enforcement mechanism. It tells a marketplace what fee to pay, but cannot stop a marketplace from ignoring it. This has led to a race to the bottom where major platforms like Blur and OpenSea have slashed or optionalized royalties to compete on price, directly harming creator revenue.

• Key Problem: No on-chain enforcement.
• Result: Creator royalties dropped from a standard 5-10% to often 0% on secondary sales.

The standard hardcodes a single, static recipient address and fee. This prevents advanced business logic critical for professional creators and DAOs, such as split payments, time-based fee decay, or revenue sharing with co-creators. It's a Web2-style, one-size-fits-all approach in a Web3 world.

• Key Limitation: No support for programmable payout logic.
• Workaround Required: Forces reliance on off-chain indexers or custom, non-standard implementations.

EIP-2981 centralizes power with the marketplace interpreting the call. A malicious or non-compliant marketplace can simply not call the royaltyInfo function, or return false data. This makes creators dependent on the goodwill of centralized platforms, undermining the decentralized ownership promise of NFTs.

• Key Vulnerability: Trusted third-party execution.
• Real-World Impact: Platforms like LooksRare and X2Y2 have toggleable royalty support, making fees optional.

New standards like ERC-721C from Limit Break introduce a allowlist/blocklist mechanism at the contract level. The NFT contract itself validates and enforces royalty payments before a transfer is approved, removing marketplace discretion.

• Key Benefit: Royalties are a property of the asset, not the marketplace.
• Adoption: Gaining traction with major collections as the enforcement alternative.

Emerging proposals move beyond a simple fee pointer. They embed logic for multi-party splits (inspired by EIP-3668), dynamic fees based on sale price or time, and delegate-call architectures that let the NFT contract itself define complex royalty rules.

• Key Benefit: Enables sophisticated creator economies and partnerships.
• Future-Proofing: Prepares NFTs for use in gaming, licensing, and physical asset tracking.

For new projects, treating EIP-2981 as the final solution is a strategic error. Builders must either implement a complementary enforcement layer or adopt a next-generation standard from day one. The cost of retrofitting enforcement is high and often impossible.

• Action Item: Audit new standards like ERC-721C and EIP-7504.
• Critical Design: Make royalty logic a core, upgradeable module of your NFT contract.