When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that every asset would eventually be tokenized, he probably was not thinking about flatulence. And yet, that is exactly what happened. Blockchain technology has long since moved beyond simple cryptocurrencies and now covers some of the most unexpected assets imaginable — from livestock to parts of the human body.
Real-world asset tokenization (RWA) turns physical objects and ownership rights into digital tokens on a blockchain, opening up new opportunities for investment and liquidity.
During the pandemic, while most people were baking bread or learning languages on Duolingo, filmmaker Alex Ramirez-Mallis recorded his own farts and minted each one as a non-fungible token (NFT).
They say farts are like children — you only love your own. But the novelty factor allowed Ramirez-Mallis to sell them for 0.05 ETH each, around $85 at the time, proving that every asset has its price.
The project became one of the strangest examples of NFT tokenization, showing that blockchain can record literally anything — even the most intimate and ridiculous manifestations of human biology.
Brazilian investment fund Target FIDC structured a deal that turned 10 Brazilian cows into tokenized collateral. Each cow was assigned a unique digital token linked to an encrypted digital identity.
The first loan amounted to just $19,600, but it served as a proof of concept demonstrating the potential to support around $80 million in livestock-backed financing for farms.
The agricultural industry generated around $4 trillion in global value added in 2023, so tokenized sheep, goats, and chickens may well be next in line as collateral.
This case shows how traditional assets can gain a new life through blockchain by improving traceability, transparency, and access to financing for farmers.
When you think about sharing whisky, you probably mean the liquid gold itself, but whisky barrels are actually a natural candidate for tokenization.
Like fine art and collectibles, Scotch whisky typically increases in value as it ages. Several projects are experimenting with putting whisky barrels on-chain so that investors can buy entire units or fractional ownership in tokenized whisky stored in bonded warehouses.
Just remember: if the market crashes, you cannot drink a digital JPEG of a barrel. But you can at least sell your stake to another investor without physically moving a heavy cask.
Owning racehorses has long been the privilege of the ultra-wealthy — those with pockets deep enough to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in breeding, training, and maintenance costs, plus a stylish hat for race day.
Tokenization is beginning to break down those elite barriers by dividing ownership of real thoroughbred racehorses into digital shares.
Investors can buy a stake in an animal and participate in prize money, breeding income, or future proceeds from a sale without having to purchase an entire horse.
Chris Turner, co-founder of impact investment firm KULA, warns: “Putting a collectible or luxury item on a blockchain does not automatically make it more liquid or valuable if the legal rights, transfer process, and market structure remain unchanged.”
If your mind immediately jumps to treasuries and private credit when you think about tokenized real-world assets (RWA), uranium may feel like a major shift — a radioactive metal better known for its role in nuclear energy.
But that is exactly what metals.io is doing with support from Tezos. Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman says blockchain technology excels at building “reliable, auditable, and cost-efficient financial rails for any asset,” but is especially well suited to “technology-oriented commodities” such as uranium.
Breitman reports that trading volume from November 2024 through July 2026 reached $21.5 million across approximately 18,200 trades and around 7,400 unique wallets.
He acknowledges that growth remains modest, saying institutional players have shown interest but are “still hesitant about tokenized rails.”
One of the strangest proposals received by tokenization platform Brickken came from a Chilean fish-processing company that wanted to issue tokenized debt with a yield linked to the value of the fish it sold.
“The token represented a contractual creditor claim, while the interest payable adjusted according to verified company sales metrics. In essence, it was a tokenized revenue-linked debt instrument,” explains Edwin Mata, CEO of Brickken.
Mata says the idea highlights an important principle:
“Almost any cash flow can support a tokenized financial instrument, provided that the underlying rights and data can be independently verified.”
In the end, the fish never made it onto the blockchain. The underlying fish sales still depended on audits, commercial reporting, and legal agreements that could not yet be automated, proving that sometimes the biggest obstacle to tokenization is not blockchain technology, but the real world.
Music royalties have also made their way onto the blockchain. One of the earliest high-profile examples came 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 rights to streaming royalties from two of his songs, Ultra Black and Rare.
Although the idea of on-chain royalties gained momentum during the NFT boom, tokenized music royalties have yet to become a mainstream asset class. Perhaps because streaming platforms pay pennies.
Even so, the model opens new ways for musicians to monetize their catalogs and for fans to invest in the success of their favorite artists.
If tokenized farts and livestock were not strange enough, how about parts of your own body? That is exactly what Croatian tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova did in 2021 when she auctioned 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 what tattoo she would wear during tournaments for one year.
Athletes have long sold sponsorship space on shirts, helmets, and racing cars. Oliynykova simply took the idea to another level, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “skin in the game.”
This case showed that blockchain can even tokenize rights to use the human body, opening up new forms of monetization for athletes and celebrities.
Most art collectors try to preserve masterpieces; crypto collectors set them on fire to make a statement about “digital ownership.” In 2021, a group calling itself Burnt Banksy purchased a Banksy print titled Morons (White) for around $95,000. They livestreamed themselves burning it and then minted the destruction.
If that makes you scratch your head, there was a method to the madness: the idea was that although the physical artwork no longer existed, ownership would live forever on the blockchain.
The NFT sold for around $382,000, sparking fierce debate over whether the group had destroyed a valuable artwork or simply transformed it into a new one. It was probably the first time in history someone made a 300% return from a literal “fire sale.”
Also in 2021, the year of NFT mania, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tokenized his very first tweet — “just setting up my twttr” — and sold it as an NFT to crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi for $2.9 million, quickly turning it into a symbol of the NFT boom.
A year later, Estavi tried to resell it for $48 million, but received bids worth only a tiny fraction of the asking price, with the highest reported offer reaching just $6,800.
Although anyone can still read the tweet on X, only one person owns the blockchain certificate associated with it. Whether that is actually valuable remains an open question.
As Mata puts it: “Tokenization can improve access, administration, settlement, and transferability, but it cannot turn a bad investment into a good one.”
Despite the apparent absurdity of some of these examples, they all demonstrate important principles of tokenization:
Tokenization still faces serious obstacles:
Many jurisdictions have not yet developed clear rules for tokenized assets. Questions surrounding ownership, taxation, and regulation remain unresolved.
As the fish example demonstrated, blockchain cannot automate processes that still depend on human intervention, audits, and legal agreements.
Many unusual assets are difficult to value objectively, which can lead to high volatility and speculation.
Smart contract vulnerabilities, lost private keys, and other technical failures can still result in the loss of assets.
Despite the strange nature of some early experiments, tokenization continues to develop in more conventional and serious directions:
Experts forecast that the tokenized asset market could reach $16 trillion by 2030, with institutional investors increasingly adopting the technology.
These unusual tokenization examples contain several important lessons:
From a year’s supply of farts to a burned Banksy, these 10 strange assets demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of blockchain technology. But behind the apparent absurdity are important principles that also apply to much more traditional assets.
Tokenization is not magic that turns any asset into gold. It is a tool that can improve liquidity, transparency, and accessibility, but it cannot create value where none exists.
As the industry matures, we will probably see fewer burned works of art and more tokenized Treasury bonds. But these early experiments played an important role by demonstrating the capabilities of the technology and testing its boundaries.
The future of tokenization lies not in how strange the assets are, but in the maturity of the infrastructure, regulatory clarity, and the ability to connect the digital world with the physical one. In that sense, these strange early examples were necessary steps toward serious adoption of the technology.
“Blockchain is not about creating new value out of thin air, but about managing existing value more efficiently. Technology does not change the nature of assets; it changes the way we interact with them.”
— Andreas Antonopoulos, renowned expert on blockchain technology
