You mint a second for 0.001 ETH. Later, maybe, someone buys it from you. The About page puts a number on what happens next: a 10% creator royalty. It is one of the four stats on that page, sitting next to the supply and the mint price, and it is easy to read past. This is a primer on what that 10% is, where it lives in the contract, and the part most royalty explainers skip: it does not apply to every move a token makes.
As usual, I am reading what the code and the site actually expose, not guessing at anything they leave unsaid.
The About page says 10%. The contract stores the same idea in a less friendly unit. In the ABI the front end loads, there is a read-only view: ROYALTY_BPS() view returns (uint96). BPS is short for basis points, the standard way fee rates get written onchain because contracts deal in whole numbers, not decimals with a percent sign.
The scale is simple once you have seen it once. One basis point is one hundredth of a percent, so 100 basis points make 1%, and 10,000 basis points make 100%. A 10% royalty is therefore 1000. Storing it this way lets a contract compute a cut with plain integer math: multiply the sale price by the basis points, divide by 10,000, and you have the royalty amount without ever touching a fraction. The ROYALTY_BPS view is just that number, published so anyone can read the rate straight from the chain instead of taking a web page's word for it.
These two numbers describe different moments and it is worth keeping them apart. The 0.001 ETH mint price is the primary sale: the one time a second goes from unclaimed to claimed, paid to the contract when you call mint. The royalty is a secondary-market idea. It only has anything to talk about once a second already has an owner and that owner sells it to someone else. If a second never resells, its royalty rate is a number that never gets used.
So the 10% is not a tax you pay to mint, and it is not something the buyer pays on top of the mint. It is a share of a future resale price, in a future that may never arrive for any given second.
Here is the part that trips people up, and it is true of NFT royalties in general, not just this project. A royalty is not automatically pulled out of every token transfer. An ERC-721 token can move by a plain transfer: one address hands it to another, the ledger updates, and no money changes hands at all. Gifts, moving a token between your own wallets, and moving one into a smart contract all look like that. There is no sale price in those cases, so there is nothing to take a percentage of.
A royalty enters the picture when there is a sale, and in practice it is the marketplace handling that sale which reads the rate and routes the cut to the creator. The royalty is honored at the point of sale, by the venue running the trade. That is why the same token can change hands twice with two very different outcomes: sold through a marketplace that honors the rate, the creator gets their share; handed over by a direct transfer with the payment arranged privately somewhere else, the on-chain move carries no royalty because, as far as the chain can see, it was not a sale.
ROYALTY_BPS value, and from the About page that the project describes it as 10%, which is 1000 basis points. What the ABI in the front end does not spell out is the full mechanism a marketplace uses to discover and honor that rate for a given token. The general behavior above is how NFT royalties work across the ecosystem; the exact interface this contract offers for it is a detail of the deployed contract on Base, which is the authority, not this page.
Reading ROYALTY_BPS tells you the intended rate. It does not tell you that any second will resell, or for how much, or that every venue will honor the number. Some marketplaces over the last few years have made creator royalties optional or dropped them entirely, which is a live tension in the whole space, not a quirk of this project. The honest way to hold the 10% is as a stated rate that applies if a sale happens somewhere that honors it, not as income you can count on.
That framing matters more than it sounds. A second is not an investment, and nothing here says its price will go anywhere. The royalty is a rule about how a resale, should one occur, is meant to split, and it points the creator's share back toward the project. It is a number describing a maybe, not a yield.
If you own a second, the practical takeaways are small and concrete. Selling through a marketplace is what triggers the royalty; a bare transfer does not, so do not read a wallet-to-wallet move as a taxable sale, because on-chain it is not one. The rate is public, so you never have to trust a screenshot; you can read ROYALTY_BPS off the contract yourself the same way you would read who owns a second. And the usual caveats hold regardless of any royalty: a real fee on Base to move or trade, transactions that cannot be undone, keys that cannot be recovered if lost, and phishing pages that imitate the real contract and the real marketplace. None of this is financial advice.
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ROYALTY_BPS() view returns (uint96) alongside mint(uint256 _second, string _url, address _referrer) payable and MINT_PRICE() view returns (uint256); MINT_PRICE = '0.001' ETH on chain ID 8453 (Base mainnet).