Stakeholders and Value in the NFT Ecosystem

Abstract

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been a defining trend for design, technology, and business in 2021. The value, legitimacy, and utility of NFTs is disputed: proponents highlight revolutionary economic and cultural potentials of an open, secure, and immutable ownership database, while opponents are displeased by the environmental issues and abundant wrongdoing in the ecosystem. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is relevant to HCI, and signifies important developments for future interactive products. To better understand the NFT phenomenon, and to inform future HCI research and design, we investigated the stakeholders in the NFT ecosystem and relations between them. Based on open data we mined from the social news website Hacker News, we contribute the first data-backed model of stakeholders in the NFT ecosystem. The model reveals a nuanced account of the outlooks of creators, owners, and technologists; identifies investment firms and auction houses as arbiters of knowledge and value; and presents implications for future research.