Finance

Human–computer interaction

Disintermediation

Sociology

Business

Artificial intelligence

Economics

Common value auction

Microeconomics

Political science

Cryptocurrency

Law and economics

Virtual reality

Affordance

Programming language

Consumption (sociology)

Intellectual property

Social science

Computer security

Computer science

Metaverse

Database transaction

Property rights

Collectable

Journal of Business Research

Our understandings of money, possessions, and ownership are all changing dramatically as consumption becomes digital and virtual. The Metaverse is an imagined future space where these building blocks of neoliberal production and consumption are delinked. We examine these changes through the affordances of cryptocurrencies, algorithmic collectibles, and NFTs. We seek to disambiguate these efforts at disintermediation through online auctions and speculation. We present practical implications for artists, art institutions, buyers, and investors. We theorize new forms of ownership with fractional ownership and fractionalized property rights. And we seek to understand why some consumers pay astronomical prices for digital art that includes simple and often silly artwork with limited property rights. To do so we distinguish alternate, but sometimes overlapping, buyer motivations in the wild world of crypto art as we purportedly move toward the Metaverse.

Money, possessions, and ownership in the Metaverse: NFTs, cryptocurrencies, Web3 and Wild Markets