PleasrDAO, a group of digital asset collectors, says it created an NFT that will stand as an ownership deed for Wu-Tang Clan's one-of-a-kind physical album
The government sold “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” to satisfy a judgment against its first owner, Martin Shkreli.
New York TimesBen Sisario
Context & Ripple Effects
NFTs were already being promoted as ownership certificates, from sports highlights to digital-art sales, in the earlier push to certify assets with tokens. PleasrDAO applies that framing to a singular physical music work rather than a natively digital collectible.
The distinction between a token and the rights attached to an underlying work is central: Roc-A-Fella's challenge to a proposed NFT sale tied to Jay-Z's debut turned on whether the seller had legal authority over the copyright.
First-order effects
PleasrDAO now has a token it says represents title to the physical album, giving the group a blockchain-facing way to document and transfer its claimed ownership interest.
Any prospective buyer must evaluate the NFT alongside the underlying ownership and rights documents; the token itself does not resolve the sort of authority dispute raised in the Roc-A-Fella case.
Second-order effects
Collectors and marketplaces handling NFTs linked to physical cultural assets face greater pressure to specify what the buyer receives—an ownership deed, copyright rights, or neither—rather than treating those claims as interchangeable.
If physical-asset NFTs become a recurring collector model, token markets will increasingly depend on conventional title, custody, and contract infrastructure rather than on blockchain provenance alone.
Unique cultural assets may be packaged for digital transfer without becoming digitally owned in a complete legal sense, separating collectible-token liquidity from the rights to reproduce or control the work.
The trend: NFTs are moving from certificates for digital collectibles toward wrappers for claims on real-world cultural assets, with enforceable underlying rights determining their value.
Who bought that one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album? NFT crew @PleasrDAO paid $4 million in a complex deal involving crypto (though Uncle Sam demands greenbacks). https://www.nytimes.com/...
The Wu-Tang album which only ever had on copy pressed to disc is a great example of the unmet need that NFTs fulfill. The music on the album can be eventually released on Spotify but there's only 1 owner of the golden disc (a DAO in this case). https://www.nytimes.com/...
I get why @PleasrDAO bought it, but the album is hot garbage musically, none of the core members knew about while it was being made, it was a Frankenstein cut-and-paste job from dozens of studio sessions. It's valuable as an artifact, but there will never be another buyer imo. 🤔 …
The @PleasrDAO purchase of Wu Tang's “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” from the US Gov't is one of the sickest moves of any crypto company/project/collective yet.
If you don't love absolutely everything about how that one-and-only copy of the WuTang album that was purchased by pharma bro Shkreli, then seized by US gov't, now being bought by a DAO and turned into an NFT, I don't want to be friends with you. https://www.rollingstone.com/ ...
Really wish Hip Hop Connection magazine was still around, just so I could read its take on a Wu-tang album sold for millions to a jailed pharmaceutical dude that's then re-sold to a crypto collective that calls themselves “the Willy Wonka factory of NFTs” https://www.rollingstone…