Most NFTs cannot get paid. Here is the machinery that lets one hold its own money, take a tier, and collect — and every place it can break.
An ERC-721 token is a number in a mapping. tokenId → owner. It has an owner, it has metadata pointing at a picture, and that is the whole of it. It cannot hold a balance. It cannot sign anything. It cannot be sent a payment.
So when a collection says its NFTs "earn", something else is doing the earning. A separate contract keeps a list of which address held which token at which block, and pays the addresses on that list. The token is a ticket stub. The money never touches it, and the moment the project stops running that list, the token goes back to being a picture.
INK BROKERS is built the other way round. A broker is not a ticket stub — it is a desk with a drawer. It holds its own assets, it signs its own transactions, and when it changes hands the drawer goes with it. This is how that works, and what it costs.
