If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow, you know that an item’s history—its provenance—can dramatically increase its value.
A baseball bat, for example, becomes far more valuable if you can prove it once belonged to Babe Ruth.
Now, new research shows that this same idea holds true even in the digital world, where collectibles aren’t physical objects at all.
A study from the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business has found that provenance plays a major role in the value of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.
NFTs are digital-only assets, like artwork or gaming cards, that people buy, sell, and collect online.
Marketing professor Soogand Alavi led the study, which looked at NFTs used in a blockchain-based game called Gods Unchained.
In this game, players collect and trade digital cards representing gods, creatures, spells, and other magical elements. These cards are bought and sold using the cryptocurrency Ethereum.
Even though the cards exist only in digital form, Alavi found that their resale value goes up if they were once owned by a well-known or skilled player.
Just like a famous previous owner can boost the value of a real-world collectible, owning an NFT once held by a celebrity gamer can make it more desirable—and more expensive—for collectors and players.
Alavi’s paper, titled “On the Role of Provenance in NFT Trades,” was published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
She has been studying NFTs across different markets, from gaming to digital art, trying to understand what motivates people to spend money on these virtual items.
The research highlights that in some NFT marketplaces, like Opensea, higher sales can also benefit the platform itself, since they collect a percentage of each transaction. In some cases, NFT creators also get a cut when their works are resold, although that wasn’t true for Gods Unchained during the time of the study.
Why do people pay more for an NFT that used to belong to someone famous, even if it doesn’t make the card perform better in the game? Alavi believes it’s about prestige. Just like owning Babe Ruth’s bat brings a certain bragging right, owning a digital card once held by a top player reflects some of that fame onto the new owner.
In short, whether it’s a dusty antique or a flashy digital card, who owned it before can make all the difference.
