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

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.