In 2021, during the height of NFT-mania, an angel investor and macroeconomist named Tascha Che (aka Tascha Labs) announced her plan to buy a $5,000 diamond, create an NFT of it, then smash it to pieces.

The stunt, intended to prove that, while physical objects can be destroyed, digital footprints can forever retain value, was widely criticized by most outside of cryptocurrency and NFT circles.

But since the complete collapse of the NFT markets and liquidity falling to near all-time lows, how has the shattered diamond NFT performed?

Diamond background

Che came up with the idea after posting a hypothesis to Twitter:

Once the tweet got enough traction, she pursued the concept. In August of 2021 she purchased a 1.3 carat diamond online, had it delivered, and then started to work on ways she could destroy it.

Her initial plan — to hit the diamond with a hammer — failed miserably, but she was eventually able to go to a mechanic who used some type of drill to obliterate it for free.

The next step was to mint the now-destroyed gem on an NFT marketplace so that people could bid on it.

This proved to be successful.

In September of 2021 a user purchased the NFT for 5.5 ETH, valued at +$17,000 at the time and over three times the price Che paid for the diamond.

While Che instantly took to social media to proclaim that her hypothesis had been proved correct, the reality was that a single sale couldn’t possibly prove that all digitized assets could retain value in spite of their destruction.

Read more: NFT firm founder indicted for using treasury to support ‘DJ hobby’

Diamond hands

After purchasing the NFT, Ivan Zhang, a decentralized finance proponent and investor, held it until finally selling in October of 2025 — for an astounding 11 ETH, or $43,000 at the time.

The destroyed diamond NFT had once again nearly tripled in value, despite one carat diamond prices plummeting in value nearly 40% over that same time period.

So, was Che’s hypothesis correct after all?

Not at all.

Not value retention, an internet artifact

As admitted to by Zhang when posting about the sale, diamond prices will continue to go down as synthetics become easier to make and demand from retail dries up.

But somehow the NFT has continued to gain value.

If the NFT was simply designed to retain the value of a destroyed physical good, one would expect to see an equal rise or decline in value.

However, a similar 1.3 carat diamond available for purchase on the same website that Che purchased hers from is now worth between $3,500-$4,000, a decline of over 20%.

Over that time period, the destroyed diamond’s value has ballooned to $43,000, or an increase of 760%.

If anything, Che’s experiment has proven positively that there’s little to no expectation of value retention of real world, physical goods that are digitized and made into an NFT. One just has to be lucky and hope that their idea goes viral.

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A reported $3.58 million outflow from the Bitwise XRP ETF drew attention on Aug. 6 after social media accounts described the move as an unusual sale by the asset manager. 

The available evidence supports a narrower conclusion: the fund reportedly experienced a net redemption during the Aug. 5 U.S. session.

No public transaction details show that Bitwise made a discretionary market call against XRP. The distinction matters because the fund is a trust holding XRP for shareholders. Bitwise Investment Advisers sponsors the product, while authorized financial firms handle share creation and redemption orders under the trust’s operating documents.

Bitwise XRP ETF outflow is a shareholder redemption

The Bitwise XRP ETF creates and redeems shares in blocks of 10,000 through authorized participants. A net outflow therefore indicates that more fund shares were redeemed than created. It does not, by itself, reveal why investors reduced exposure or show that Bitwise changed its view of XRP.

The trust can settle a redemption in two ways. For an in-kind redemption, it transfers the corresponding XRP to an authorized participant or its designee. For a cash redemption, the sponsor arranges for the required XRP to be sold and sends the cash proceeds. A redemption can therefore involve an XRP sale, but it remains part of the fund mechanism rather than a proprietary trade by Bitwise.

Moreover, Bitwise’s official page showed 293.93 million XRP in the trust as of Aug. 4, valued at $314.39 million. It also listed 26.31 million shares outstanding, net assets of about $314.37 million and an $11.95 net asset value per share. The page had not advanced to Aug. 5 holdings when checked.

That timing prevents the public holdings page from confirming the reported $3.58 million reduction. The post behind the claim also did not provide a transaction hash, wallet address or identified counterparty. Calling the report “onchain data” does not establish whether XRP was sold for cash, transferred in kind or reflected through a change in fund shares.

Brazil’s B3 stock exchange made headlines last month when its tokenized cows went viral.

A farmer in southern Brazil was able to use 10 cows as collateral for a 100,000 Brazilian real ($19,600) loan by virtually herding them into a blockchain based holding pen, demonstrating how farmers can literally milk their assets to access credit.

And it raises an obvious question: if cows can be tokenized, what can’t be?

From dairy cows to a year’s worth of farts, here are 10 of the strangest things to be tokenized onchain.

1. A year’s worth of farts

When BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said every asset will eventually be tokenized, he probably wasn’t thinking about flatulence. Yet, that’s exactly what happened here.

Every bit as appealing as, well, a year’s worth of farts, it has to be a contender for the strangest thingever to make it onchain.

It was during the pandemic, when most people were baking bread or leveling up on Duolingo, that filmmaker Alex Ramírez-Mallis recorded his own farts and minted each one as a nonfungible token (NFT).

They say farts are like children, and you only love your own. But the novelty factor meant that Ramírez-Mallis was able to sell his for 0.05 ETH each (about $85 at the time), proving that every asset has its price.

2. Cows

Better known as a prime source of protein in Bitcoin circles, the idea of turning 10 Brazilian cows into tokenized cattle… er, tokenized collateral, is not the most obvious use case.

The deal was structured by Brazilian investment fund Target FIDC, giving each cow a unique digital token linked to an encrypted digital identity.

Larry Fink says every asset can be tokenized. Source: BlackRock

The first loan may have been worth just $19,600, but it was a proof of concept that shows the potential to eventually support around $80 million in livestock-backed financing across its farms.

While it sounds somewhat bizarre on first glance, the agriculture industry generated around $4 trillion in global value added in 2023, so watch out for tokenized sheep, goats and chickens as collateral next.

3. Whiskey barrels

When you think of sharing a whiskey, you probably have the liquid gold kind in mind, but whiskey barrels are a natural candidate for tokenization.

Related: Tokenized RWAs get an agent-ready research layer with a new protocol

That’s because, like high-end art and collectibles, Scotch whisky typically increases in value as it matures — talk about lifting your spirits!

Several projects are experimenting with putting whisky casks onchain so investors can buy whole units or fractional ownership of tokenized whisky stored in bonded warehouses.

Just remember that if the market crashes, you can’t actually drink a digital JPEG of a barrel.

4. Racehorses

Racehorse ownership has long been reserved for the ultra-wealthy, those with deep enough pockets to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in breeding, training and upkeep, and a fancy hat to wear at the racetrack.

But tokenization is beginning to chip away at those elitist barriers, dividing ownership of real thoroughbred racehorses into digital shares.

Investors can buy a stake in an animal and share in any prize money, breeding income, or future sale proceeds, without purchasing an entire horse.

Own part of a racehorse. Source: Stablemans

A word of caution for would-be investors in this style of asset, though, whether its watches or whiskeys or large four legged animals, from Chris Turner, co-founder of impact investment firm KULA:

“Putting a collectible or luxury item on a blockchain doesn’t automatically make it more liquid or valuable if the legal rights, transfer process, and market structure remain unchanged.”

5. Uranium

If your mind turns to treasuries and private credit when thinking about tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), it might be a shift to consider uranium, the radioactive metal better known for its role in nuclear power.

But that’s what Tezos-backed metals.io is doing. Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman says blockchain technology excels at building “reliable, auditable and cost-efficient financial rails for any asset,” but is particularly aligned with “technology-flavored commodities” like uranium.

Breitman says trading volume between November 2024 and July 2026 was $21.5 million over approximately 18,200 trades and around 7,400 unique wallets.

Related: RWAs become Hyperliquid’s largest trading category

He acknowledges that growth remains modest, telling Magazine that institutional players have shown interest but are “still shy about tokenized rails.”

6. Fishy revenue

One of the most unusual proposals tokenization platform Brickken received came from a Chilean fish-processing company that wanted to issue tokenized debt with returns tied to the value of the fish it sold.

“The token represented the lender’s contractual claim, while the interest payable adjusted according to the company’s verified sales performance. In effect, it was a tokenized, revenue-linked debt instrument,” explains Edwin Mata, chief executive of Brickken.

Mata argues that the idea highlights an important principle:

“Almost any cash flow can support a tokenized financial instrument, provided the underlying rights and data can be independently verified.”

In the end, the fish never made it onchain. The underlying fish sales still relied on audits, commercial reporting and legal agreements that couldn’t yet be automated, proving that, sometimes, the biggest obstacle to tokenization isn’t the blockchain; it’s the real world.

7. Music royalties

Music royalties have also found their way onchain, with one of the earliest high-profile examples in 2021, when DJ and producer 3LAU gave fans 50% of the streaming rights to his single Worst Case through his blockchain platform Royal.

Then, in 2022, rapper Nas used Royal to sell streaming royalty rights to two of his songs, Ultra Black and Rare.

While the idea of onchain royalties gained traction during the NFT boom, tokenized music royalties have yet to become a mainstream asset class. Maybe that’s because the streaming platforms pay peanuts.

Nothing says “financial freedom” quite like owning 0.001% of a track and realizing it needs to be played five million times just to buy a cup of coffee.

8. Human Skin

If tokenizing farts and cattle wasn’t weird enough, what about parts of your own body? That’s exactly what Croatian tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova did in 2021, when she auctioned the advertising rights to a 15-by-18-centimeter patch of skin on her right arm as an NFT.

The winning bidder paid 3 Ether (around $5,400 at the time) for the right to choose which tattoo she would wear during tournaments for a year.

Athletes have long sold sponsorship space on shirts, helmets and race cars. Oliynykova just took the idea one step further, giving a whole new meaning to having skin in the game.

9. A Burned Banksy

Most art collectors try to preserve masterpieces; crypto collectors set them on fire to make a point about “digital ownership.” In 2021, a group calling itself Burnt Banksy bought a Banksy print titled Morons (White) for around $95,000. They livestreamed themselves burning it, and then minted the destruction.

If that leaves you scratching your head, there was method in the madness; the idea was that while the physical artwork no longer existed, ownership would live on forever through the blockchain.

The NFT sold for around $382,000, sparking fierce debate over whether the group had destroyed a valuable work of art or simply transformed it into a new one. It was probably the first time in history someone made a 300% profit from a “fire sale.”

10. The first tweet

Also in the year of our NFT Lord, 2021, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tokenized his first-ever tweet — “just setting up my twttr” — and sold it as an NFT to crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi for $2.9 million, quickly becoming a symbol of the NFT boom.

The first-ever tweet sold for $2.9 million. Source: Jack Dorsey

One year later, Estavi tried to resell it for $48 million, but only received bids worth a tiny fraction of the asking price, with the highest reported offer coming in at just $6,800.

While anyone can still read the tweet on X, only one person owns the blockchain certificate tied to it. Whether that’s valuable or not remains an open question. As Mata says:

“Tokenization can improve access, administration, settlement and transferability, but it cannot transform a poor investment into a good one.”

Magazine: The 100x obsession: Fundamentals grow in importance as crypto matures

Labour Defence Secretary Wes Streeting reportedly received £37,000 ($50,000) from a Labour-supporting think tank whose founder was gifted $610,000 by notorious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The Telegraph reports that David Lawrence, founder of the Labour for the Long Term (LLT) think tank, was gifted the sum by Bankman-Fried in June 2022.

This gift was made one month before his think tank donated £30,000 ($40,300) to Streeting, who used the funds to pay for policy advisor Dr. Thomas Gardiner. A year later, LLT would donate another £7,000 ($9,400) to Streeting. 

Lawrence reportedly created his think tank’s website on June 20 and it was only 10 days later that Bankman-Fried gave the money to Lawrence.

The Telegraph reports that “it is thought” that Lawrence and Bankman-Fried were introduced to each other through William MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement.

This movement was a central part of Bankman-Fried’s spree of donations that took place across 2020 and 2022 when he became one of the largest donors to the US democrats.