The NFT landscape is maturing beyond speculation. As standards for metadata, royalties, and intellectual property evolve, a long-term infrastructure for digital ownership is being built from the ground up.

• NFTs are transitioning from speculative assets to digital infrastructure powered by metadata and legal IP frameworks.
• Standardized metadata is crucial for NFT interoperability, searchability, and permanence across platforms.
• Royalties are central to creator economies, but enforcement remains technically and legally complex.
• New IP models, including on-chain licensing frameworks, are testing boundaries between ownership and rights.
• Builders in Web3 are laying the groundwork for NFTs as enduring primitives for digital content, not just collectibles.

The Quiet Engineering Behind NFTs’ Next Evolution

When NFTs (non-fungible tokens) first captured public attention in 2021, headlines focused on eye-popping prices, celebrity launches, and generative art drops. But today, the crypto-native community is asking far deeper questions: what does it mean to own something digitally? What rights come with NFT ownership? How do NFTs persist, function, and evolve across platforms and contexts?

We’re entering what many are calling the NFT infrastructure phase, a time when NFT standards, royalty mechanisms, and intellectual property (IP) frameworks are undergoing serious refinement. This article explores these foundational components, with a focus on metadata standards, royalties, and legal models of NFT-related IP.

Why Standardization Matters: The Role of Metadata in NFTs

Metadata is the descriptive information that gives an NFT its identity. It includes attributes such as title, artist, description, media file URL, traits (for PFPs), and more. Most NFTs on Ethereum or other smart contract platforms use a metadata structure outlined in standards such as ERC-721 or ERC-1155.

The Metadata Chain: Why It’s Often Off-Chain

While the NFT token lives on-chain, the associated metadata typically lives off-chain, often hosted on traditional web servers or decentralized file storage like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). Here’s a simplified flow:

ERC-721 token → metadata URI (JSON file) → media reference (e.g., image, video)

This poses risks:

• Impermanence: If a metadata URI links to a centralized server that goes offline, the NFT “breaks” in many interfaces.
• Manipulation: Changing metadata post-mint raises concerns about trust and immutability. This is crucial for art, games, and composable assets.

This has led to community efforts to standardize metadata structures more tightly and ensure permanence.

Pushing Toward On-Chain Metadata

Projects like Zora and Nouns DAO embody a “fully on-chain” ethos. All data, including media files, is rendered from smart contracts.

Examples of fully on-chain metadata setups include:

• Nouns DAO: Each Noun is procedurally generated and stored on Ethereum itself, making it censorship-resistant and permanent.
• Chain-bound art: Projects use Solidity code to generate SVGs directly on-chain, bypassing URI dependency entirely.

The trade-off? Higher gas costs and developer complexity. But for institutions and builders seeking robust digital provenance, it’s a price worth paying.

Royalties and the Future of the Creator Economy

NFT royalties were hailed as a breakthrough for digital creators. Artists could earn a percentage of every resale, theoretically guaranteeing lifelong income from a single original mint.

But here’s the reality: royalties are not enforced by the Ethereum protocol. They rely on off-chain platforms (like marketplaces) voluntarily reading royalty information from metadata or on-chain registries.

Where Royalties Live

Royalty data is typically embedded via:

• on-metadata JSON via optional “creator fee” fields (non-standardized)
• on-chain interfaces like Royalty Registry from Manifold
• Marketplace-specific mechanisms (e.g., OpenSea’s Operator Filter Registry)

This fragmented landscape has led to:

• Creator vs. Marketplace conflicts: Platforms like Blur and OpenSea have implemented different standards and enforcement policies.
• Royalty bypassing: Traders can sell P2P or on no-royalty marketplaces, sidestepping artists’ intended fees.

Protocol-level Royalty Experiments

Several new approaches aim to bake royalties deeper into the infrastructure layer:

• ERC-2981: An Ethereum improvement proposal that formalizes royalty info queryable on-chain, but it’s still optional for enforcement.
• Zora Protocol Rewards: Offers built-in rewards splits at the protocol and marketplace layers.
• Sudoswap: An AMM-based NFT marketplace that pointedly does not honor royalties, sparking debate across creators.

There’s a growing realization that the solution may be a combination of social norms, legal enforcement, and incentive-aligned architecture, rather than just smart contract logic.

Who Actually “Owns” an NFT? Untangling IP Rights

Arguably the most misunderstood dimension of NFTs is what ownership entails. Does owning the token mean owning the art? The brand? The commercial rights?

Traditional IP Frameworks vs. NFT Culture

In Web2, intellectual property rights are controlled via copyright law (automatic protection) and licenses (like Creative Commons). NFT tokens themselves don’t inherently confer these rights, they’re proof of ownership of a specific token, not the media or underlying concept itself.

Let’s compare:

• Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC): License grants commercial rights to holders. You can use your Ape for branded TV shows or merch.
• CryptoPunks (pre-Yuga): Initially offered almost no IP rights. Later shifted toward more permissive licensing.
• Nouns DAO: Uses a CC0 license, placing content in the public domain, an aggressive pro-composability stance.

New Protocols for On-Chain IP

Some projects are building smart contract-based systems for expressing IP rights. For example:

• Async Blueprint: Encodes licensing logic in token logic, restricting use cases or access per buyer class.
• Story Protocol: A programmable IP layer being developed to manage collaborative, modular storytelling and rights attribution among creators.

These systems seek a modular, reusable approach to IP, think “Lego bricks of rights and permissions” rather than monolithic licensing contracts.

NFTs as a Digital Primitive for the Web

To understand how crucial this infrastructure phase is, it’s worth comparing NFTs to a foundational internet tool: the URL. URLs enabled the linking economy, accessible, durable, addressable content. NFTs, in their more advanced state, could play a similar role for ownership and programmability in digital experiences.

Emerging Use Cases Fueled by NFT Infrastructure

• Gaming: Interoperable assets (e.g. weapons, avatars) that are usable across titles because of consistent metadata schemas.
• Music: Fractional ownership, portable royalties, and on-chain distribution rights baked into the mint.
• Media and publishing: Mirrors, editions, and collector-based access models (e.g., Mirror) enabled by NFT primitives.

In each case, metadata standards define usability, royalties define monetization, and IP structures define permission.

The Road Ahead: Interoperability, Legal Recognition, and Programmable Rights

As NFTs mature into primitives for digital infrastructure, we can expect stronger links among smart contract logic, legal frameworks, and platform infrastructure. Some future-facing efforts to watch include:

• Cross-chain standards like ERC-725 for identity and object properties
• Open metadata registries for shared indexing across markets and dApps
• Hybrid legal-technical structures, such as wrapping NFTs in OpenLaw agreements or legally-recognized DAOs

Ultimately, NFTs are entering a phase where the tech must meet the social contract. This includes:

• Rights declaration clarity: What can and can’t a token holder do with their NFT?
• Trustless revenue mechanics: Can creators get paid automatically, forever?
• Composability of ownership and licensing: Can rights be forked, inherited, or traded as easily as tokens?

Closing Thoughts: NFTs Beyond Collectibles

The infrastructure phase is essential if NFTs are to fulfill their promise as more than momentary digital trading cards. This means prioritizing:

• Structured, machine-readable metadata that persists as platforms change
• Royalty systems that balance creator incentives and market efficiency
• IP frameworks that align legal and smart contract realities

Just as HTTPS and DNS quietly run the most visible layers of the internet, the standards being built today will form the invisible structure supporting NFTs tomorrow. For developers, investors, and creators, understanding these systems will be critical, not just for building, but for surviving and thriving in the tokenized internet to come.