Solana NFT Royalties

When you sell an NFT you created, you get the sale price. When someone else sells it later (a secondary sale), you may want a cut. That cut is the royalty. On Solana, royalties are not enforced by the chain itself. They are stored in the NFT metadata, and marketplaces that choose to support the standard read that value and pay you. So the chain holds the number. The marketplace decides whether to honour it.

Where Royalties Are Stored

Following the Metaplex convention, the royalty is stored as seller_fee_basis_points in the metadata. One basis point is 0.01 percent. So 500 basis points is 5 percent. The metadata lives off-chain (we have a metadata guide that goes into this). The on-chain metadata account holds a URI to that JSON. When a marketplace loads your NFT, it fetches the JSON and reads the royalty field. If the marketplace supports it, it will send you the specified percentage of the sale price when a secondary sale happens.

What You Can Set When You Mint

On our Create NFT flow you can set a royalty between 0 and 10 percent. We write that into the metadata as basis points. Common choices are 5 or 10 percent. Some creators use 0 if they do not care about secondary sales. Once the NFT is minted, that value is in the metadata. Changing it later would require updating the metadata, which is not something we support in the current flow. The mint is final. To get started, check our pricing and then create your NFT on Solana.

Enforcement: It Depends on the Marketplace

Solana does not automatically deduct royalties on every transfer. Transfers are just token movements. Royalties are paid when a sale happens on a marketplace that reads the metadata and implements royalty payouts. Major marketplaces that support the Metaplex standard do this. Some venues or peer-to-peer sales might not. So setting a royalty does not guarantee you get paid on every resale. It gives marketplaces the information they need to pay you when they support it.

This is a design choice of the ecosystem. On-chain enforcement would require program-level logic on every transfer, which is more complex and not how the current standard works. For most creators, setting a sensible percentage (e.g. 5 to 10 percent) is the right move. Then list and sell on marketplaces that honour it.

Why It Matters for Creators

If your NFT gains value and is resold, a royalty lets you participate in that upside without doing anything else. You set it once at mint. We handle writing it into the metadata correctly. After that, it is up to the marketplaces and the buyers and sellers. For more on how we handle metadata and minting, see our features page.

If you want to create and mint your NFT without coding you can use our Solana NFT creator tool which lets you generate metadata and mint NFTs directly on the Solana blockchain.