Nobody was paid to build the record
Why isn’t there a better record layer for real-world assets?
Because nobody was paid to build one.
The money in these markets is in moving an asset from one owner to another, so that is what got built. Knowing what the asset actually is, who made it, what rights come with it, and where it is located generates no fee. So that work was left to whoever needed the information next.
I saw that from inside one of those markets.
I built a platform in the NFT market, and it did more than make NFTs. An artist could bring a body of work into it, organize it, and keep the things that belonged to each piece in one place: the images, the story of how it was made, the documents, whatever was worth keeping with the work. Minting was available at the end of that, if the artist wanted it. It was one option in a workflow rather than the reason the software existed.
Most other platforms in that market were built around the mint. That was the product.
Mine did not survive. The market it was built for thinned out and the platform went with it.
The market was built around trading, not art. What it needed was a digital asset that people would value, collect, and exchange, and art happened to fit that role. The technology and trading infrastructure came first; the art came afterward. That distinction helps explain much of what followed.
What did the record actually hold?
Very little. A title, a brief description, and the wallet address that minted the token.
It did not establish who created the work, who had owned it before, what rights came with it, or where the physical piece was, if one existed. Minting, the moment the token was written to the blockchain, was effectively permanent.
So the gaps filled with assumptions, which is what gaps do. Buyers regularly believed that owning the token meant owning the intellectual property in the artwork. It almost never did. Artists and buyers alike assumed the image was stored somewhere permanent. Often it was not. Plenty were pointed at a cloud account or a pinning service that somebody had to keep paying for, and when that lapsed or the company folded, the link resolved to nothing.
You could own the token and find the art was a 404.
Identity broke in a quieter way. The wallet that minted a work was widely read as the creator. Not the artist who made it, but whoever controlled that address. Sometimes those were the same person. Often they were not. Many collections were ten thousand items the named artist had very little to do with. And a great many artists who wanted to take part were not especially technical, so a gallery or a consultant minted on their behalf, from a different wallet again.
None of that is fraud. It is ordinary delegation, the same as a gallery handling a sale. But it lands on the one thing the format was loudest about.
Provenance comes down to two questions: Where did this come from, and where has it been?
The second question, the chain of custody after issuance, is something a ledger is genuinely good at, and it was handled well. The first was left largely unresolved, with no standard way to establish it. Yet that is the harder half, and the one that determines whether a work is actually what it claims to be.
Why hasn’t it been fixed?
None of this was technically difficult. Recording who made an object, what rights travel with it, and where the physical object is located is ordinary work. In the art business, each of those things is already someone’s responsibility.
The problem was economic. Money is made when an asset changes hands. A fee attaches to moving a thing. No fee attaches to knowing what it is.
Several people solved parts of the problem anyway, each in their own corner of the market. But a solution that stays in one corner is not a standard. For something to become a standard, enough of the market has to adopt it that it continues to work beyond the people who created it.
That never quite happened. The practices remained local, and anyone trying to follow a work’s history across platforms was often moving between different systems, assumptions, and conventions.
Then there was the experience of the ordinary participant, who had to navigate a system that offered very little of what people normally expect. There was no reliable way to know who they were dealing with, no standard practice to follow, no clear instructions, and often no one to turn to when something went wrong.
The wallet was difficult to use. The chains were confusing. Fraud was real, identity remained unresolved, and almost every step came with the expectation that users would figure it out themselves, with their own money at risk. For most people, the juice was not worth the squeeze.
Most of that is present tense. Wallets are still difficult. Identity in a decentralized setting is still unresolved. The tooling has improved and the underlying problem has not moved much.
What changes when the asset is real?
The same shape is now being applied to real-world assets. Wrap the asset in the instrument, settle the transfer, and assume the wrapper carries the rest.
But a building or a painting or a bar of metal has a location, a condition, a custody history, and rights that already sit with named people, most of it recorded before any of this existed, in systems that were never built to talk to each other.
A real-world asset requires even more of what’s missing from that list than a digital image, while the underlying incentive remains unchanged because the fee is still in the transfer.
What would a better record layer need?
I do not think the answer is a better instrument. The instrument mostly works.
The problem is that the system cannot be built around the payment rail, however elegant that rail may be. Nor can identity be reduced to a single fixed form when the reality it describes is more complicated than that.
Most of the pieces already exist. What is missing is the layer that connects them and keeps them anchored to a shared record of the thing they describe. Open where openness is useful. Closed where it needs to be. Permanent only where permanence serves a purpose, because permanence applied carelessly can create its own kind of damage.
That is slower to build than a mint button. It is also the part that decides whether any of this is worth anyone’s time, and it is the part I work on now.