Ten dairy cows backed a loan in Brazil. A 300-year-old violin became tokenized collateral. Somebody bought blockchain rights to a patch of a tennis player’s arm. Somewhere, a consultant is putting all three into a PowerPoint titled The Future of Finance and charging enough to buy the remaining arm.

Tokenization started with a reasonable. But humans do weird stuff. And crypto people do even weirder stuff because crypto people began looking around the room for anything that hadn’t been bolted down. And a few things that had.

The important detail is what the token gets you. Sometimes it’s ownership. Sometimes it’s revenue. Sometimes it’s a tracking record attached to a fish. Read the terms. You do not want to discover during bankruptcy proceedings that your uranium investment was a commemorative JPEG. 🖼

In 2021, professional tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova sold an NFT granting rights to commission a tattoo or body art on a 15-by-8-centimeter section of her right arm. The winning bid was 3 ETH, worth roughly $5,400 at the time. The patch sat on the inside of her upper arm, above the elbow. Prime advertising territory whenever a right-handed tennis player raises her racket.

The buyer could commission artwork, leave the space blank, or resell the rights. There were restrictions on the content, including gambling-related material. Buying the token did not convey ownership of the woman or authorize showing up with a tattoo gun and an exceptionally bad idea.

The investment thesis was tied to her career: more success, bigger tournaments, more viewers seeing the same patch of skin. Athletes usually sell space on shirts. Oliynykova removed the textile middleman. Somewhere, a marketing department was calculating impressions per backhand while a dermatologist discovered an entirely new category of professional liability. 🎾

Part of Dream describes an investment structure built around the breeding careers of real stallions. Its proposed token categories distinguish between the ecosystem’s payment token and tokens tied to breeding revenue. A $STUD token, according to the project, represents a 1/1,000 fraction of revenue from a foal’s future breeding career. $STUDshare represents a share of a stallion’s breeding career.

So no, buying the general $POD token does not automatically buy you part of a horse. Exposure to breeding earnings sits in the specific rights-bearing tokens. The business depends on factors such as pedigree, racing performance, breeding demand, and the animal’s ability to produce valuable offspring.

Your portfolio can now contain Bitcoin, bonds, and a financial interest in a horse having a successful romantic life. The horse has a clearer revenue model than most governance tokens. He also has the decency to conduct investor relations without a podcast. 🎙

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A farm in Paraná, Brazil, used 10 dairy cows valued at R$120,000 to support a R$100,000 rural credit transaction. Cowmed’s smart collars supplied health, behavior, and location data. Those records generated digital identifiers tied to the livestock collateral and the financing contract. The associated credit rights were registered on B3, Brazil’s main exchange.

The practical problem is straightforward. A lender wants to know whether the cow listed on the paperwork exists, remains healthy, and hasn’t been sold to somebody else. Occasional farm inspections leave gaps. Continuous monitoring can give lenders better evidence between visits and support more useful collateral valuations.

A blockchain entry cannot milk the cow or keep it alive. The collars and financing contracts provide the connection to reality. Still, it’s a meaningful application for farmers trying to borrow against valuable livestock. Your collateral can wander off, get sick, or die. Also, it’s probably a first for DeFi needing risk disclosures that requires a veterinarian. 🩺

In November 2021, TungstenDAO paid 56.9 ETH, approximately $250,000 at the time, for an NFT representing a roughly 2,000-pound tungsten cube. The physical cube remained at Midwest Tungsten Service’s Illinois headquarters. The ownership terms allowed an annual visit to see, photograph, or touch it.

The owner could also burn the NFT to trigger delivery of the cube by freight. An unusually literal redemption process. Destroy the digital asset and receive something that may require checking the load-bearing capacity of your floor.

Not surprisingly, this whole episode grew from a joke.

A fake headline about crypto traders buying tungsten cubes helped inspire real purchases, which produced real coverage and eventually the enormous cube sale. Annual visitation rights made the arrangement sound like divorced parents negotiating custody of a very dense child. At least management cannot drain the treasury…because management is a cube. 👔

In June 2024, $GLXY ( ▼ 9.03% ) announced the tokenization of “Empress Caterina,” a Stradivarius violin crafted in 1708 and owned by Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu. Galaxy valued the instrument at approximately $9 million. Its history includes ownership by European royalty, with Catherine the Great among the figures identified in its provenance. She liked wood after all. Anyway.

Galaxy’s GK8 business handled the tokenization, and Siu used the tokenized instrument as collateral for financing through Galaxy’s Global Markets business. The transaction demonstrated borrowing against a valuable physical object without requiring the owner to sell it.

This wasn’t a public offering where retail traders bought $20 slices of a violin. It was a specific asset-backed financing arrangement. Three centuries of craftsmanship, preservation, and musical history finally met somebody asking whether it could support a loan. 📞

A cask of 1991 Macallan Scotch sold through Metacask in 2021 for $2.3 million, accompanied by an NFT featuring artwork by Trevor Jones. The physical cask contained approximately 600 bottles’ worth of whisky at 51.1% alcohol by volume. The headline price worked out to roughly $3,880 per eventual bottle.

The transaction combined a collectible physical asset with a digital component. Jones created an abstract representation associated with the cask, titled The Angel’s Share. His original oil painting was not included in the purchase. Buying the token did not entitle the owner to every object mentioned in the marketing material.

Whisky also evaporates while it matures, reducing the contents of a cask over time. That loss is the angel’s share. Crypto investors know plenty about assets disappearing. Usually the angels have a Telegram account and an urgent need to relocate. 👼

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More booze. WiV describes NFTs representing physical cases of wine. Owners can trade the token or redeem it for the underlying bottles. The company also describes bundled collections of vintages packaged into an NFT product, with investment horizons of several years.

For fine wine, storage conditions and provenance help determine value. Keeping the bottles in appropriate custody while transferring the digital ownership record can reduce some logistical friction. The token still depends on the wine being there, correctly identified, and properly stored.

There’s also a separate ecosystem token, $WIVA, which WiV describes as a utility and governance token. That is a different asset from the NFT tied to a particular case of wine. Read carefully. You want to know whether your purchase gets you Bordeaux or voting privileges in a Discord server. 🗳

Agrotoken turns agricultural commodities into digital tokens that can be used for payments, exchanged for other assets, or pledged to obtain financing. Its initial grain categories included soybeans, corn, and wheat. The aim is to let farmers use the financial value of stored grain without immediately completing a conventional cash sale.

The tokens are connected to agricultural inventory, with the commercial arrangements and verification needed to support that connection. A blockchain does not improve the corn harvest. It can help move the ownership and financial claims around the corn harvest.

Algorand’s project profile describes a Starbucks purchase paid for with 0.021 tons of corn. That’s about 21 kilograms of grain exposure financing a coffee order. The farmer gets another way to use stored production. The rest of us get to imagine a barista asking whether we’re paying with cash, card, or December corn. ☕

Fishchain describes a system where each fish receives a digital token carrying information recorded at capture: species, vessel, date, and other details. The record follows the product through auction, transportation, and sale. Fish markets can add prices and buyer information, while restaurants and consumers can consult the history.

I’m sorry, I just have to interrupt my writing here to say I have never once in my life ever, in the history of ever, at any restaurant, at any time, for any food, ever, not once, thought to ask the for proof of capture, vessel, date, handling, etc. of the animal I’ve eaten. Anywho.

The token records the fish’s journey rather than automatically turning dinner into an investment security. A consumer scanning a QR code can check the recorded origin and handling information.

I’m sorry, breaking in here again, am I just a Great Plains/Midwest person who isn’t aware and is ignorant that there must be a vast demand for people wanting to know this kind of information at a meal?

A fish can now arrive at your table with a more complete employment history than the guy applying to run your exchange. Caught here. Transported there. Sold at this auction. Served tonight. LinkedIn for something that will be dead before you endorse its skills. 🪦

Ever heard of Kettle? Kettle lets owners send watches to vaulting partners for authentication and storage. Once the physical watch is authenticated, a digital token represents the asset and can be used to transfer ownership, arrange borrowing, or redeem the watch from custody.

Borrowers can propose financing terms or consider loan offers from lenders. If a borrower defaults, the ownership NFT can transfer to the lender, who can sell it or redeem the physical item. The watch is the collateral. The token is the mechanism used to represent and transfer the associated ownership claim.

There’s a real business here: collectors can seek liquidity without immediately selling a valuable possession. There’s also a less dignified version: buy a Rolex, put it in a vault, borrow against it, and continue insisting the purchase was about craftsmanship.⏰

Kettle does shoes, too. The general process is similar to watches: authenticate the physical item, place it in custody, and issue an NFT representing ownership. That token can support redemption or serve as collateral for a loan.

Condition, authenticity, and the specific model still determine what you own and what someone might lend against it. Putting a shoe on-chain does not make every pair equally valuable. A scarce collectible and a beaten-up lawn-mowing sneaker remain different credit propositions. I wonder how much my grass stained slip on Sketchers would be worth…

The shoes can sit untouched in a vault while their digital counterparts acquire financial obligations. We have taught footwear how to participate in a credit cycle. Thus continuing the cycle of finding more sophisticated ways to make the original purchase worse. 🤷

Tokere describes tokenizing verified plastic credits, with each credit representing a tonne of plastic collected or recycled. The underlying claim is tied to a recovery project and location. The token records ownership and eventual retirement of that credit.

A company using a cleanup credit to support a claim needs a record showing the credit has been retired - used up, not left lying around for somebody else to make the same claim. The blockchain can help track those transactions. Verification of the physical cleanup still happens outside the blockchain.

So the asset is a certified environmental activity. Real plastic was collected or recycled, and the record follows the resulting credit. Somebody can point to a place and explain what happened there. This puts it in uncomfortable competition with projects whose only measurable achievement is adding another token to the trash. 🗑

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