Royalty Enforcement Is a Partnership Term, Not a Contract Setting

Nearly every brand NFT drop I audit lists royalties as a solved problem because the contract returns ERC-2981 data. That is a signal, not enforcement. Marketplaces choose whether to honour it, aggregators route around it, and secondary volume quietly migrates to venues where the creator share is zero. Buyers, meanwhile, are underwriting something else entirely: whether the asset's custody chain is legible and whether the brand will still be standing in three years.

The practical fix is to treat provenance and royalties as a single disclosure artifact published before mint, not after. One page per drop: chain and contract standard, royalty registry used, named marketplaces that honour it, the resale language in your licence, and a verifiable index of holder addresses linked to your own canonical record. I have watched partnership deals stall for weeks on exactly this ambiguity; the teams that ship a spec up front negotiate faster and get better collab terms, because the counterparty can price the risk.

For co-branded collectibles, add one clause: the partner acknowledges the resale policy and the disclosure page as binding, and any marketplace listing that ignores it is a breach. Unromantic, but it converts a hope into a contract.

Who owns that sign-off in your organisation today — legal, brand, or the platform team?