Why Cross-Chain Royalty Enforcement Is Impossible Today

Sovereign State Incompatibility: Each blockchain maintains its own canonical state. An NFT minted on Ethereum has no native way to prove its provenance or royalty terms to a marketplace on Solana. This creates a technical sovereignty gap that bridges like LayerZero or Wormhole cannot solve, as they transfer assets, not legal or economic conditions.

The Bridge Abstraction Leak: Bridges and wrapped assets (wETH, wBTC) break the original token's programmable logic layer. A royalty-enforced ERC-721 becomes a generic SPL-22 on Solana, stripping its fee mechanism. Protocols like Across and Stargate optimize for asset transfer, not stateful contract logic preservation.

Universal Registry Absence: There is no cross-chain global state equivalent to DNS or ICANN for digital assets. While projects like ENS offer naming, they lack the authority to enforce rules across chains. This absence makes a unified royalty policy a coordination problem, not just a technical one.

Evidence: The 2022-23 NFT bear market saw royalty payments on major collections plummet over 90% on secondary markets outside their native chains, demonstrating the complete failure of voluntary enforcement in a fragmented landscape.

Sovereignty precludes enforcement. A blockchain's finality is its core property; no external protocol can force a state change. This means a royalty mechanism on Ethereum cannot compel Solana to revert a non-compliant NFT sale.

Bridges are not courts. Protocols like LayerZero and Axelar facilitate message passing, not judgment execution. They lack the authoritative state to interpret and enforce complex, subjective rules like royalty compliance across chains.

Smart contracts are locally sovereign. A contract's logic only governs assets on its native chain. An NFT minted on Polygon with royalty logic is powerless against a marketplace contract on Arbitrum that simply ignores it.

Evidence: The failure of on-chain enforcement is visible in the EVM ecosystem itself. Even within a single standard like ERC-721, marketplaces like Blur and OpenSea have successfully bypassed royalty enforcement by deploying alternative sale contracts.

Cross-chain state is subjective. Bridges like LayerZero and Wormhole transport assets, not the authority to execute smart contract logic on a foreign chain. A destination chain's virtual machine sees a wrapped NFT as a token, not a license agreement.

Oracles create data, not law. Chainlink or Pyth can attest a sale occurred on Ethereum, but they cannot force Solana's program to execute a royalty payment. This is a sovereignty gap, not a data problem.

Interoperability standards are insufficient. ERC-7281 (xERC-20) standardizes bridging, but it does not encode royalty logic into the asset's core state transitions. The bridged representation loses its original chain's execution context.

Evidence: The collapse of creator earnings on Solana and Polygon after major marketplaces disabled royalties demonstrates that enforcement relies on a single chain's centralized sequencer or validator social consensus, which evaporates across domains.

Sovereign state machines are asynchronous. An NFT on Ethereum and its bridged copy on Solana exist in separate, non-communicating universes. A royalty rule on the source chain cannot programmatically stop a sale on the destination chain.

Bridges are data pipes, not enforcers. Protocols like LayerZero and Axelar pass messages; they do not interpret or enforce application-layer logic like fee extraction. The destination chain's marketplace logic is the final authority.

Universal state is a fantasy. A cross-chain smart contract would require a shared security model and atomic composability that does not exist. This is the fundamental barrier that projects like Cosmos IBC or Polygon AggLayer are only beginning to address for simpler assets.

Evidence: No major NFT marketplace (OpenSea, Magic Eden) or bridge (Wormhole, Stargate) implements enforceable cross-chain royalties. The technical proposals that exist are governance-based social compacts, not cryptographic guarantees.