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Insights / Digital Ownership

Do You Really Own Your NFT?

By Amir Soleymani • June 18, 2026 • 6 min read

When you buy an NFT, you are promised something that sounds absolute: permanent, verifiable, on-chain ownership of a digital artwork. The payment is real, the token is real, and the blockchain record is genuinely tamper-resistant. But underneath that promise sits an uncomfortable question the market rarely answers honestly — ownership of what, exactly?

The token and the artwork are two different things

A blockchain is extraordinarily good at one narrow job: keeping an immutable, public ledger of who holds which token. That job it does brilliantly. The problem is that the token lives on-chain while the artwork almost never does. What you actually receive is a record that points to an image — and the image itself usually sits on a private company server or a decentralised storage network that somebody has to keep paying to maintain.

So the blockchain's celebrated guarantees — immutability, verified scarcity, transparent provenance — apply to the pointer, not to the thing it points at. The token has those properties. The artwork attached to it often has none of them.

Four things that quietly undermine ownership

  1. The smart contract is controlled. Whoever deploys it can frequently change what the token points to — without the holder's consent.
  2. The asset is not stored with the owner. The artwork lives on corporate servers or decentralised storage that depends on a third party continuing to pay for it.
  3. Access to the blockchain is centralised. Nearly all consumers reach the chain through a handful of commercial gateway providers who can restrict access at any time.
  4. The asset cannot exist without infrastructure. A digital artwork needs electricity, a device, software, and the internet just to be seen — constraints a physical painting never has.

Why this matters for collectors

None of this means NFTs are worthless or that digital art is a scam. It means the language of the sale has run ahead of the facts. A collector who is told they are buying permanent, guaranteed ownership deserves to know that what they are really buying is a token whose linked artwork can move, change, or disappear if the people running the infrastructure stop showing up. That is not a hidden catch buyers should have to discover later — it is the headline fact of the transaction.

What honest digital ownership could look like

  1. Honest marketing — prohibit the unqualified use of "own," "permanent," and "sale" where the underlying facts do not support those words.
  2. Point-of-sale disclosure — a standardised label telling buyers, in plain language, where the artwork is stored, who controls it, and what happens if the platform closes.
  3. Service classification — treat dependency-bearing NFTs as service transactions for consumer protection, attracting the same disclosure and continuity duties as a subscription.

This piece summarises a longer position paper by Mondoir founder Amir Soleymani, "The Illusion of Ownership in Digital Art." You can read the full overview on our research page; the complete paper is forthcoming on SSRN.