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In June 2021, during my first-ever interview with a prominent non-fungible token (NFT) collector, I learned about a Web3 silver bullet. As a freshly self-employed writer who left a salaried media job to pursue a freelance career, scarcity was on my mind.
I wasn’t preoccupied with the “good” kind of scarcity we talk about in Web3 (the kind that makes digital art more valuable due to a limited supply). I was, instead, concerned about the scarcity of resources available to creatives to protect their intellectual property (IP) – this includes writers like me who continuously generate new ideas for corporate entities that can then repackage, repurpose, republish and resell creative works in as many different forms as they’d like.
I chose self-employment after realizing that companies I’d written for in the past would forever have the right to turn my articles into newsletters, ebooks, social media threads, digital courses and more, yet I would never be entitled to additional compensation other than my fixed salary once that work was completed.
In a traditional creative industry, it often doesn’t matter how much value someone’s creative work generates. And unless you’re familiar with intellectual property designations or can afford skilled lawyers to negotiate on your behalf, artists are usually expected to create while big businesses handle the rest.
I soon learned that Web3 had already considered this dynamic and developed a tool to ensure NFT artists could continue to make revenue from their intellectual property. By utilizing smart contracts, artists could program lifetime royalties into all non-fungible token sales, which would automatically deliver a percentage of their profits to their crypto wallets in perpetuity.
Smart contract-based NFT royalties have been embraced by independent artists as a much-needed protection. But while smart contract-automated NFT royalties are…
