EIP-2981 (NFT Royalty Standard)
An Ethereum standard letting an NFT contract specify a royalty percentage and recipient address on-chain, giving marketplaces a consistent way to look up royalty terms for any compliant NFT.
EIP-2981 is an Ethereum token standard that lets an NFT collection's smart contract specify a royalty percentage and the address that should receive it, in a single standardized format any compliant marketplace can query. Before this standard existed, each NFT marketplace typically implemented its own separate, inconsistent royalty system, meaning a creator's intended royalty might be honored on one marketplace but ignored entirely on another that didn't recognize that marketplace-specific system.
A key limitation of EIP-2981 is that it only standardizes how royalty information is reported — it doesn't itself enforce payment, since a marketplace could technically read the royalty information the standard provides and still choose not to actually pay it. This gap is part of why royalty enforcement (see Kaavon's "Royalty Enforcement" glossary definition) has remained a contested, evolving area, with some NFT projects building additional, more forceful mechanisms directly into their contracts specifically because EIP-2981 compliance alone doesn't guarantee a marketplace will actually honor the specified royalty.
Examples
- An NFT collection implementing EIP-2981 lets any compliant marketplace automatically look up its specified royalty percentage and recipient address, rather than each marketplace needing its own separate system.
- EIP-2981 standardizes how royalty information is reported but doesn't itself force a marketplace to actually pay it, which is why some creators have pursued additional royalty enforcement mechanisms.