Royalty Circumvention: How Crypto Projects Bypass Fair Distribution

When you buy an NFT or a token tied to future revenue, you're often promised a royalty, a percentage of future sales paid to the original creator or holder. Also known as secondary sale fee, it's meant to keep creators earning long after the first trade. But too often, this promise vanishes—because of royalty circumvention, the deliberate act of avoiding royalty payments through technical loopholes or platform manipulation. This isn't a bug. It's a feature some platforms and projects built on purpose.

Think of it like this: you buy a digital artwork, and the seller says you’ll get 10% of every resale. Then the buyer moves the NFT to a different marketplace that doesn’t recognize the original royalty code. Or the project launches a new token that replaces the old one, wiping out past royalty agreements. These aren’t accidents. They’re calculated moves. Projects like NFT royalties, digital asset ownership rights enforced through smart contracts were supposed to fix the broken artist economy. Instead, many now serve as targets for circumvention. The same goes for DeFi royalty evasion, the practice of restructuring token economics to sidestep revenue-sharing commitments, where liquidity pools or token swaps are used to erase obligations. Even platforms that once proudly displayed royalty percentages now quietly disable them to attract more volume.

Why does this matter to you? Because if you’re holding a token or NFT that was sold with a royalty promise, that promise might be worthless. You might think you’re investing in future income, but you’re really betting on whether the system will honor its word. And too often, it doesn’t. The result? Creators get paid nothing after launch. Investors get trapped in assets that lose value because trust evaporates. And the whole idea of decentralized ownership starts to feel like a marketing slogan.

What you’ll find below are real cases—like the MMF token with zero supply, or the PEPLO meme coin built on hollow community hype—where royalty structures were either ignored, erased, or never real to begin with. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re documented failures. You’ll also see how exchanges like Escodex or Kyo Finance V2 handle fees and transparency, and how some projects use complex tokenomics to mask the absence of real value. This isn’t about theory. It’s about spotting the signs before you lose money. If you’re buying into anything that claims future earnings, ask: who’s really getting paid—and who’s being left out?