10 Unusual Assets That Have Been Tokenized Onchain

A farmer in southern Brazil recently used ten cows as collateral for a 100,000 Brazilian real loan by linking each animal to a unique digital token stored on a distributed ledger. The arrangement was structured by investment fund Target FIDC as a proof of concept and organizers estimate the model could scale to roughly $80 million in livestock-backed financing across farms. Each token ties a physical animal to an encrypted digital identity intended to simplify verification of ownership and collateral claims.

During the pandemic, filmmaker Alex Ramírez-Mallis recorded his own flatulence and minted multiple audio clips as nonfungible tokens. Each clip sold for 0.05 ETH, about $85 at the time of sale, with the blockchain entry functioning as a certificate of digital ownership for the recordings.

Whisky casks are being offered in fractional form on some platforms, allowing investors to buy shares in barrels stored in bonded warehouses. Fractional owners receive rights tied to the cask and any value change as the spirit ages, while the physical barrels remain in warehousing facilities subject to custody rules.

Racehorses have been divided into digital shares so that investors can buy partial ownership in an animal. These arrangements assign rights to prize money, breeding income or future sale proceeds to token holders, rather than requiring a single owner to purchase the entire horse.

Music royalties have been sold through tokenized instruments. Artists and rights holders have issued tokens tied to future streaming income, allowing buyers to receive a share of royalties. Early examples involved sales of portions of streaming rights for individual releases.

Commodities have entered the market as well. A Tezos-backed project, metals.io, issued tokens tied to uranium and reported trading volume of $21.5 million between November 2024 and July 2026 across about 18,200 trades and roughly 7,400 unique wallets. Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, described blockchain as a way to create auditable and lower-cost financial rails for assets such as uranium.

A tokenization platform received a proposal from a Chilean fish-processing firm to issue tokenized debt with returns linked to fish sales. Edwin Mata, chief executive of the platform, described the structure as revenue-linked tokenized debt in which interest payments would adjust with verified sales. The project did not launch because required audits, reporting and legal automation were not in place.

Some tokenization cases were symbolic or promotional. A group that purchased a Banksy print publicly burned the physical work, minted an NFT of the destruction and later sold the token. A Croatian tennis player auctioned the advertising rights to a 15-by-18-centimeter patch of skin on her arm as an NFT for one year, with the winning bidder securing the right to choose a tournament tattoo for a set period. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold the NFT tied to his first tweet for $2.9 million; the tweet itself remains publicly viewable while the blockchain entry serves as a certificate of ownership.

Industry participants have highlighted limits and requirements for tokenizing real-world assets. Chris Turner, co-founder of impact firm KULA, warned that placing collectibles or luxury items on a blockchain does not automatically increase liquidity or value when legal rights, transfer processes and market structures remain unchanged. Edwin Mata noted that tokenization can improve access and settlement but does not change the underlying quality of an investment.

The cases above reflect a range of experiments in applying digital tokens to physical goods and income streams. Market participants continue to address questions about legal enforceability, auditability, custody and market infrastructure as they test these models.