Marketplaces present an ownership history for every NFT, but they do not own that history. It is assembled from events the chain recorded, which is why it survives the venue displaying it.
Transfers emit events by convention
Token standards require contracts to emit a transfer event whenever ownership changes, naming the sender, the recipient and the token identifier.
Events are written into transaction receipts and stored by nodes as part of the chain's history. They are cheaper than contract storage but permanent in the same way.
An indexer reads those events in order and reconstructs the full chain of custody for any token, which is exactly what a marketplace history panel shows.
Anyone can rebuild the same record
Because the underlying events are public, any party running or querying a node can produce the identical history without cooperation from the original venue.
This is what makes provenance resilient. A marketplace closing removes an interface, not the data, and a replacement interface can derive the same result.
The work is not trivial at scale, since it means processing years of events across many contracts, but it requires no permission from anybody.
Prices are a separate question
A transfer event records that a token moved. It does not record what was paid, because payment is a different action in a different contract.
Sale prices are inferred by matching transfers against the marketplace contracts that executed them and reading the value moved in the same transaction.
Transfers outside those contracts have no price. Gifts, wallet consolidations and private settlements appear in history without any figure attached.
The artwork does not inherit this durability
Provenance is on chain because transfers are on chain. Images and descriptions usually are not, and depend on storage that someone continues to pay for.
A collection can therefore retain a complete and verifiable ownership record while the item it refers to no longer resolves to anything viewable.
This asymmetry is often missed, because the same interface displays both, giving the impression they are equally permanent.
Identity remains outside the record
The history names addresses. Connecting an address to a person requires information the chain does not hold and cannot supply.
Attribution to a known collector normally comes from a naming service, an exchange record or a public statement by the holder, all of which sit off chain.
So provenance proves a sequence of custody rather than a sequence of owners, and the distinction matters most in exactly the disputes where provenance is invoked.