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Blockchain Glossary

Glossary

ERC-2981

An Ethereum standard that lets an NFT contract advertise a royalty percentage and recipient address for secondary sales — enforcement is up to marketplaces.

ERC-2981 finalized in 2021 as the simplest possible royalty interface: royaltyInfo(tokenId, salePrice) returns (receiver, amount) and that's it. Marketplaces can read the royalty before completing a sale and route the indicated amount.

The standard standardized how royalties are advertised, not how they are enforced. In 2022–2023, Sudoswap, Blur, and others began ignoring or making royalties optional, and the on-chain protocol has no way to stop them. Most NFT royalties today are honored as a marketplace norm rather than enforced by code.