In the last blog post, we discussed five (5) examples of creatives and companies that used NFTs to monetize Intellectual Property (IP). In this blog post, as the title suggests, we are going to be discussing 3 examples of how NFTs can be used as “representative documents”. Representative documents can be defined as a piece of written matter that provides information or evidence that can serve as an official record. We will discuss IDs as NFTs via Atala Prism, real estate deeds as tokens via Whimsy and “receipts” for real world assets like Diamonds Via NMRK/Finest Tokenize.

IDs as NFTs
Atala Prism is a self-sovereign identity solution built on Cardano that offers core infrastructure for issuing decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials. They are a company with recent business development success that will serve as a good use case to examine for this blog.
Atala Prism recently secured a deal with the Ethiopian government to issue blockchain based IDs to its teachers and students amidst discoveries that there were over 200,000 fake credentials. As discussed in prior blogs, given blockchains natural properties – transparency and immutability, it allows for low trust environments to benefit from issuer “proofs” that are uncorruptible, which is the perfect mechanism to address its fraud problem. Think of it like this – if you are now able to provably verify the origins of documentation, you can easily determine legitimacy – as the “markers”, unlike stamps, can’t be faked.

Real Estate Deeds as Tokens
Whimsy is a real estate company that fractionalizes ownership of properties via blockchain based tokenisation. They are a start up with a publicly viewable whitepaper that will in part serve as the example this blog uses to explore the topic.
Whimsy is intent on making real estate investment accessible for the average buyer by breaking up properties into several portions (fractionalisation) and selling these portions that represent ownership in homes for as little as $100 USD. Selling these portions as tokens allows investors to inherit properties of blockchain technology that their real-world counterparts do not have – markets that never close. Tokens are likely to carry the relevant meta data that mirrors the appropriate in-real-life legalities to allow for “ownership” – this replaces the need for a deed or a stock/reit.
It would also be worthy to note that some companies have even found ways to sell whole properties as NFTs – removing the traditional burdens affiliated with the buying process. Holders of the NFT get to stay at the property and can resell as they please – though ownership in the legal sense, remains with the original company to remain compliant with laws.

Receipts as NFTs
Finest Tokenize operates similarly to Whimsy but is asset agnostic – meaning, that they tokenise ownership of just about anything and not just real estate. They are a start up with a lot of business development success that will serve as a good use case to examine for the purposes of this blog.
Finest Tokenize in partnership with its sister company NMKR recently secured a deal to sell tokenised diamonds on the blockchain. The key difference between Whimsy and this particular use case from Finest Tokenize, is that the NFTs represent whole ownership of the diamond and acts more like a receipt or a voucher – in that at any time the owner of the NFT can redeem a physical diamond stored in the Swiss Alps that’s insured by Lloyds London. The use of blockchain technology here brings several benefits – but perhaps the most important, is that it can bring liquidity to otherwise illiquid concepts.

So you see, though blockchain technology is still young, there are presently many different companies who have found interesting ways to use the technology to represent or even replace documents. In the next blog, we will discuss examples of how companies use the technology to represent financial assets.