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I agree, you have to pretend NFT really implies ownership. I’d put it in the terms of service :).

The legals took several years to get right. This is, indeed, the hard part.

I was being sarcastic; there is no legal basis for an NFT to be any different than, say, the URL in your browser. You can copy it all you want, but it doesn't convey ownership in any way.

This is not true. For example, ownership of an NFT (and burning it) can constitute payment for an intellectual property license to do something like put music into an advert or use it in a film.

My question remains, how do you ensure the physical item ownership is kept up to date with ownership of the NFT? Even if that is in the terms of service, someone could still steal an item, making the NFT ownership and physical item ownership out of sync.

The first generation of physical assets are vaulted: numbered gold bars, numbered collectibles, fine art.

The application is B2B trading of assets between dealers, so they don't have to mess around with devaulting every time the assets change ownership, introducing risk of fraud every time.

There is also a lot of insurance involved, to answer your probably next question: if the vault loses something or an employee accidentally drives a forklift over it, the NFT holder gets paid.

It works. Pilots right now, but it works.

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