Minting an NFT for a physical asset is a weekend job. Making it survive a real deal is the part nobody warns you about.
I built NFT lifecycles on Ethereum for high-value physical assets — private aircraft, where a single transaction runs from listing to closing over weeks. The token isn't a picture. It's a container that has to accumulate signed documents, escrow state, compliance checks, and multi-party approvals, all while staying consistent with an off-chain reality that keeps moving.
The hard questions are never on-chain. What is canonical when a document is signed off-chain but the token hasn't caught up? Who can advance the deal state, and what stops a stale client from advancing it twice? Where does the escrow release actually gate?
My rule: the chain records agreement, not truth. Truth lives in a reconciled backend that treats every on-chain event as a claim to verify, not a fact to trust. The token references state; it doesn't own it.
If you've put real assets on-chain: where did your on-chain and off-chain state first drift apart, and how did you catch it?