In 2021, NFTs were everywhere. People were paying huge sums for profile pictures and digital art. Tascha Che, an economist and angel investor, decided to test something odd. She bought a 1.3 carat diamond for about $5,000, turned it into an NFT, and then destroyed the physical stone.
The idea was simple. If the physical object disappears, the digital token still exists. So value could live on. Many people laughed at the stunt. Others called it wasteful.
The broken diamond finds a buyer
Che first tried to smash the diamond with a hammer. That failed. She ended up at a mechanic who used a drill to break it into pieces. Then she minted the NFT and put it up for bidding. In September 2021, a buyer paid 5.5 ETH for it. At that time, that was around $17,000. Che had paid only $5,000 for the diamond.
One sale did not prove her theory. But the story did not end there.
A four-year hold and a surprising payoff
The buyer was Ivan Zhang, a decentralized finance investor. He held the shattered diamond NFT for four years. In October 2025, he sold it for 11 ETH, roughly $43,000. That was close to another triple in value.
Physical diamond prices did not behave the same way. A similar 1.3 carat diamond on the same website now costs about $3,500 to $4,000. That is down more than 20%. Meanwhile, the shattered diamond NFT rose about 760% since the original purchase.
What this actually proves
So was Che right? Not really. If NFTs preserved the value of physical goods, the token’s price should move with the diamond market. It did not. Instead, the NFT became something else: an internet artifact. It had history, controversy, and a viral story. People knew about it. That mattered more than the stone itself.
Zhang admitted diamond prices will keep falling as lab-grown diamonds become more common. Yet the NFT kept gaining value. That suggests the experiment did not prove value retention. It proved that attention can sometimes create value, but only if you get lucky.
Che’s experiment was not an NFT success story in the way she predicted. It was more like a collectible, a piece of internet history. Maybe that is worth something. But it is not the same as saying digital tokens protect the value of real world assets. The market still made that clear.
