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.

DNA Holdings Venture co-founders Brock Pierce and Scott Walker are named in an explosive, albeit quietly filed, lawsuit, which accuses them of “running pump and dump schemes between drug and alcohol induced benders and illegal high stakes poker games.”

Filed back in March, the suit, which requests a jury trial, is just another bit of bad news for Pierce, who in recent months has been heavily linked to infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and took part in an interview with a pro-Putin doomsday cult.

Among the suit’s most startling claims are those concerning Pierce and Walker’s hosting of two illegal poker games in Puerto Rico — or more accurately, the aftermath of said games.

According to the lawsuit, the games, held in October and December of 2021, “had a minimum buy in of $100,000” and a one BTC entrance fee.

A portion of the proceeds was supposed to be donated to a Puerto Rican charity called Integro.

The day after the event, however, a participant “reported that his iPhone had been hacked through the wifi network created for game participants and his sim was ‘swapped,’ giving the hackers access to his email and social media accounts.”

It’s also alleged that winners weren’t paid out, while another individual going by “Jacob” admitted to “stealing all of the money and said he was giving it to his family and committing suicide.”

Despite the players being skeptical of this story, millions of dollars have never been recovered, “Jacob” has never been identified, and Integro never received a donation.

Blockchain.com has secured a definitive Virtual Asset Service Provider custody licence from the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, expanding its regulated crypto services after meeting all licensing conditions on July 22.

According to a Thursday announcement from Blockchain.com, the approval grants the company a full Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) custody services licence through its Cayman Islands subsidiary, replacing the conditional approval issued by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA) in December 2025. The company said it had satisfied all of the regulator’s conditions before receiving the definitive licence.

Alongside custody services, the licence authorizes Blockchain.com to offer exchanges between virtual assets and fiat currencies as well as exchanges between one or more convertible virtual assets. Before obtaining the licence, the company had operated under a VASP registration in the Cayman Islands since May 2022.

The latest approval adds to a series of regulatory milestones for Blockchain.com over the past year. The company recently obtained a Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) licence in Europe and completed registration with the UK Financial Conduct Authority, developments that co-CEO Lane Kasselman said strengthen its regulated presence across multiple jurisdictions.

Blockchain.com expands regulated services in the Cayman Islands

With the definitive licence now in place, Blockchain.com said it can offer a regulated suite of institutional and retail services from the Cayman Islands. The company identified institutional custody as a core offering, providing secure digital asset storage for organizations managing crypto holdings.

The licence also supports institutional staking infrastructure, allowing organizations to participate in blockchain network validation while earning staking rewards. Retail staking has also been included under the regulated framework, giving eligible users access to staking services within a compliant environment, according to the company.

Lane Kasselman said the CIMA approval builds on the company’s recent regulatory progress in Europe and the United Kingdom.

“Our VASP custody services licence builds on the regulatory momentum we’ve established with our recent MiCA and FCA approvals,” Kasselman said. “We believe strong regulation is essential to the long-term development of digital assets, and these approvals further strengthen our ability to serve customers across the region.”

The company described the approval as the final stage of its licensing process in the Cayman Islands, moving its local operations from conditional authorization to full regulatory status.

The Cayman Islands Monetary Authority had granted Blockchain.com conditional approval for the licence in December 2025. The company said all licensing requirements were fulfilled before the regulator issued the definitive approval on July 22, 2026.

The licence authorizes Blockchain.com to provide regulated custody services together with crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto exchange services in the Cayman Islands.

Cayman licence follows local expansion plans

Beyond regulatory approvals, Blockchain.com said it is increasing its presence in the Cayman Islands through a partnership announced in June with TechCayman, an organization that helps international technology companies establish operations in the territory.

According to the announcement, the partnership will support Blockchain.com’s first local employee, who will join the company’s Cayman Islands operations as it expands its presence in the jurisdiction. TechCayman will provide sponsorship, operational support and access to its local business network as part of the arrangement.

The company said local hiring forms part of its effort to establish a permanent operating presence rather than maintaining only a regulatory registration.

Founded in 2011, Blockchain.com said it has processed more than $1.1 trillion in transactions and serves over 43 million verified users worldwide.

Regulatory expansion has continued across multiple markets

The Cayman licence follows several operational and regulatory initiatives undertaken by Blockchain.com during 2026.

In May, the company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a potential initial public offering. The filing started the SEC’s review process but did not disclose the proposed offering size or valuation. Blockchain.com said at the time that any public listing would proceed only after regulatory review and subject to market conditions.

Earlier in April, the company introduced perpetual futures trading within its non-custodial DeFi wallet through Hyperliquid. The feature allows users to trade more than 190 cryptocurrency markets with leverage of up to 40 times while keeping control of their private keys instead of transferring assets to a centralized exchange. Blockchain.com also said it intends to add forex, stock, and commodity markets to the platform over time.

Geographic expansion has also continued this year. In March, Blockchain.com launched retail operations in Ghana after reporting significant user growth in the country, while describing Nigeria as one of its fastest-growing markets following the establishment of local operations in Lagos.