Buy an NFT on a primary drop and resell it later, and you will often see a line mentioning a creator royalty, some percentage of the sale that is supposed to go back to the person who made the collection. Most people assume this works the same way a coupon or a tax applies automatically at checkout. It does not. Royalties on NFTs are closer to a request than a rule, and understanding why matters if you buy, sell, or create on Base.
What a royalty is supposed to do
The idea behind an NFT royalty is simple. An artist or project mints a collection, sells it once, and then wants a small cut every time it changes hands afterward. A five percent royalty on a piece that resells for ten times its original price is meaningful ongoing income, and it is one of the arguments NFT creators made early on for why the format was better than a one time sale.
The problem is that a blockchain by itself has no concept of a sale. A smart contract can see that token ownership moved from one address to another. It cannot see whether that move happened because of a purchase, a gift, a transfer between two wallets you own, or a marketplace trade. Royalties have to be bolted on top of that limitation, and how they get bolted on is where things get complicated.
The standard: EIP-2981
Most NFT contracts that support royalties follow EIP-2981, an Ethereum standard that also works on Base since Base is EVM compatible. The standard adds one function to a contract, called royaltyInfo, which takes a token ID and a sale price and returns two things: an address that should be paid, and how much.
That is the entire standard. It tells a marketplace who to pay and how much, if the marketplace decides to pay. EIP-2981 does not touch the transfer function itself, and it cannot force a payment to happen. It is a read only suggestion that a marketplace can check before completing a sale. Whether it actually deducts that amount and sends it is entirely up to the marketplace's own code.
This is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. Baking a mandatory royalty into the core transfer function would mean the contract needs to know a transfer is a sale, at what price, and through what venue, none of which a plain token transfer carries with it. Trying to force that check onto every transfer also breaks ordinary uses like moving an NFT between your own wallets or sending one as a gift.
Why marketplaces started making royalties optional
For the first few years of the NFT market, most major marketplaces respected EIP-2981 and paid royalties by convention, even though nothing forced them to. That changed as competition between marketplaces increased. A marketplace that skips the royalty step can offer a lower effective cost to sellers, which makes it more attractive for pure trading. Once one large marketplace made royalties optional at the seller's discretion, others followed to stay competitive, and royalty payment across the market became inconsistent rather than guaranteed.
This is often described as creators losing a source of income that they had counted on, and that framing is accurate. It is also a direct consequence of how the standard works. A rule that only exists as a polite suggestion will not survive contact with a market where skipping it is profitable for at least one participant.
How some projects try to enforce payment anyway
Because a plain EIP-2981 flag is easy to ignore, some projects moved to contract designs that try to enforce royalties directly rather than hope a marketplace pays them voluntarily. One common approach uses a transfer hook that checks whether the marketplace attempting the sale is on an approved list, and blocks the transfer if it is not. Newer contract standards built specifically for this, along with custom implementations from individual projects, take a similar approach.
Zora, a creator focused NFT protocol that runs natively on Base, is a notable example of a project that builds royalty logic directly into its own contracts rather than relying on marketplaces to cooperate. This is part of why royalty enforcement on Base tends to vary by which platform and which contract a given NFT was minted through, rather than being one fixed rule across the network.
None of these enforcement methods are universal, and none of them are guaranteed to work against every possible marketplace or workaround. The space has settled into a mix of honor system payment, contract level restrictions, and marketplaces that simply do not pay royalties at all.
What this means if you are buying, selling, or creating
A few practical points follow from all of this.
If you are buying a secondary NFT, do not assume a listed royalty percentage is automatically deducted. It depends on the marketplace you are using and whether the contract enforces it. Two identical listings on two different marketplaces can result in different amounts actually reaching the creator.
If you are selling, check whether the marketplace you are using honors royalties before assuming a creator receives anything from your sale. This is not something you are doing wrong by using a cheaper marketplace, it is simply worth knowing.
If you are creating a collection, understand that EIP-2981 alone will not guarantee income from resales. Decide up front whether you want to rely on marketplace cooperation, build in a stricter enforcement mechanism, or treat royalties as a bonus rather than a planned revenue source.
You can check what a specific contract does by looking it up on a block explorer for Base and reading whether it implements royaltyInfo, and if so, what percentage and recipient it returns. That tells you what the contract claims. Whether a given marketplace actually respects it is a separate question you have to check on the marketplace itself.
The bottom line
An NFT royalty is not a network level fee like gas. It is a value that a contract can suggest through a standard like EIP-2981, paid only if the marketplace processing the sale chooses to honor it. Some projects, including ones native to Base, have built stricter enforcement directly into their contracts, but there is no single guarantee across the ecosystem. If a royalty matters to you, whether you are the buyer, the seller, or the creator, it is worth a few minutes to check how it actually works for the specific contract and platform in front of you, rather than assuming the percentage on the label is what changes hands.