# The NFT Detour

**Published by:** [Lista DAO](https://blog.lista.org/)
**Published on:** 2026-07-03
**Categories:** defi, nft, blockchain, bnb, lista, moolah, education
**URL:** https://blog.lista.org/the-nft-detour

## Content

The gallery was on a side street in Shibuya, between a vintage clothing store and a barber shop, and you would have walked past it ten times without noticing. It was Moolah's idea. I want you to see something, she had said over the phone - the phone, somehow, was a thing she did now, though I had never asked how - because the next thing we talk about is the most-misunderstood corner of all of this, and the reason it's misunderstood is that you've only ever seen the cartoons. So Dev and I, on a Thursday after work, met her on a corner I had passed a hundred times and followed her up two flights of stairs into a small, white-walled room where about a dozen screens were mounted on the walls. Each screen was showing a different piece of digital art. Some were animated. One was a slowly drifting field of pale shapes that seemed to respond to people walking past. One was a single, unmoving image of a hand. One showed a generative pattern that was different every second and would, the placard said, never repeat for ten thousand years. A woman behind a small desk nodded at Moolah. "You can buy any of these," Moolah said quietly to me. "Or, more precisely, you can buy the deed to any of these." "The deed." "That's what an NFT is. Walk with me." We walked along the wall. "Forget everything you've heard about NFTs in the news," Moolah said. "Forget the monkeys. Forget the celebrities and the Super Bowl ads. Those happened, but they are to NFTs what dot-com pet food companies were to the internet. They are the loudest and worst examples of a technology that is much quieter, and much more interesting, than the press has ever made it look." "What is it actually?" "An NFT - non-fungible token - is a token where each one is unique. Remember when we talked about tokens? Most tokens are fungible. One USDC is exchangeable for any other USDC. One ether is the same as another ether. They're all interchangeable, like dollar bills. Non-fungible tokens are the opposite. Each one has its own metadata. You can't swap one for another the way you can swap dollars." "Like a passport." "Excellent. Like a passport. Or a deed to a house. Or a numbered print from a limited edition. Or a concert ticket with a specific seat. All of these are tokens in the ordinary sense - pieces of paper or plastic that represent something. None of them are interchangeable with each other. My passport is not your passport. My deed is not your deed." She stopped in front of one of the screens. A slowly evolving abstract piece, blue and copper, that seemed to respond to the room's lighting. "This artwork," she said, "exists. The image is hosted somewhere - a server, a decentralized storage network, doesn't matter. The artist made it. What the NFT does is record, on the blockchain, that one specific person owns the primary version. The deed. The numbered print. If you buy this NFT, the blockchain says forever: this person owned this work, then this person, then this person, in this order. It's a chain of provenance. It's an art-world dream from the eighteenth century, finally implemented." Dev was looking at the placard. "It's eight hundred dollars." "And the blockchain will record that purchase, immutably, and the artist will receive a small royalty on every future resale because the contract is written that way. Which, by the way, is something traditional art markets famously do not do. Resales of physical paintings rarely give the original artist a penny." I looked at the next piece. "So if I bought this, I wouldn't own the file." "You could have the file. Anyone can right-click the image and save it to their desktop. But you would own the deed. The publicly verified ownership. The same way that anyone can take a photograph of the Mona Lisa, but only the Louvre owns the Mona Lisa. The original is the original, and the deed proves it. Whether that ownership is worth anything is, of course, a separate question. The ownership is what the technology gives you. The value is something humans negotiate among themselves." "And the cartoon monkeys?" "Were a particular kind of NFT - a collection, where ten thousand variations were generated by an algorithm and sold cheaply, and one of them became a status symbol, and the prices went briefly insane. The monkeys are not the technology. The monkeys are a use case for the technology that fits a specific moment of cultural mania. The technology is the same one that lets a painter sell a numbered print, or that lets a band sell a thousand limited concert tickets, or - and this is the part that interests me - that lets you prove ownership of anything that has a serial number." "Like what?" "Like the deed to a house. There is, in some jurisdictions, work being done to put real estate titles on blockchains. Like the title to a car. Like a domain name - ENS, the Ethereum Name Service, is just NFTs, and each one is a human-readable address you own. Like a concert ticket - some venues have started issuing them as NFTs, partly so that the secondary market can be tracked and partly so that artists get a cut of the resale. Like a membership in a club. The receipt for a deposit at a DeFi protocol I lent you in a previous lesson - that receipt is an NFT. Some of them. The deed to your dollar in the cloakroom is, technically, a non-fungible token." "So NFTs are receipts." "Sometimes. They're whatever serial-numbered ownership claim you can think of. They're a way to take the idea of an original - which has always been an important and slippery idea in human commerce - and make it portable, programmable, and transferable. The cartoon monkeys are one application. They are a very small one, even though they got most of the attention." We stood for a while in front of the abstract piece. The colors slowly shifted. Something about it was very calming and slightly sad. "Most NFTs are worthless," Moolah said matter-of-factly. "I want you to know that. The vast majority of NFT collections that have been minted in the last several years have lost most of their value. The supply was infinite and the demand was driven by hype. The math was never going to work for most of them. The same way most paintings sold by most artists are not worth what was paid for them. Most numbered prints fade in value. Most concert tickets are worthless once the concert ends. Most receipts get thrown away." "So what's worth anything?" "The same things that have always been worth something. Things that people genuinely want to own a piece of. Art by artists whose work people genuinely connect with. Memberships to communities people genuinely value. Credentials that genuinely prove something useful. The technology cannot create value. It can only record value. If the underlying thing is worthless, the receipt for it is also worthless. If the underlying thing is meaningful, the receipt extends what's possible - provenance, royalties, programmability, public verification." I wrote in the notebook. NFTs = unique tokens. Deeds, receipts, numbered prints, memberships, credentials. The technology records ownership; it does not create value. The woman behind the desk gave Moolah a small, knowing smile as we walked back toward the entrance. "Have you bought any?" Dev asked. "A few," Moolah said, sounding faintly defensive in a way I had not heard from her before. "I have a piece by a Brazilian artist that I'm very fond of. And a deed to a small plot of digital land that I admit I cannot fully justify, but which makes me happy when I look at it. And - well. Some receipts that are also NFTs. The mundane ones." "Where do you keep them?" "In my wallet. Same as the rest. The blockchain doesn't distinguish between the deed to an artwork and the receipt for a deposit. They're both tokens. They both move the same way. They're both, ultimately, just rows in the shared notebook that say this address owns this thing." We stepped back out onto the street. The air was bitterly cold but the snow had finally stopped, and a faint pink showed on the horizon where the sun was going down behind the buildings. "I want you to remember this room," Moolah said. "Because in three weeks, when you read the next ten articles about NFTs being dead, I want you to remember that for every cartoon monkey collection that lost ninety-nine percent, there are quiet artists selling their work on small platforms to a few collectors who genuinely love them, and that work is moving in ways that were not previously possible. The press always covers the spectacle. It rarely covers the slow, modest, useful version of any technology. Don't let the spectacle teach you what the technology is." "I won't." "You will," she said gently. "Everyone does. But you'll come back."

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