The emergent ecosystem of the metaverse as an environment for the contradictory realization of property rights and relations

Abstract

This article is devoted to clarifying the current aspects of the formation and specific features of the realization of property rights and relations within the virtual economic space of the metaverse as a novel civilizational environment for social life. It reveals that the metaverse operates on the foundation of an emergent (synthetic) ecosystem—a hybrid space of social activity and interaction. In terms of form, it combines elements of virtual/augmented reality and traditional market reality; in terms of content, it represents a conglomerate of digital and mechanical-technological systems functioning according to physical and biological laws. The study establishes that the socio-economic nature of the metaverse’s hybrid ecosystem–representing a transitional state of social existence and economic activity with uncertain life prospects–remains theoretically under-researched. This gives rise to contradictory trends in the realization of fundamental economic institutions, namely the transforms of value and property. It is demonstrated that digital transactions alter modes of production and forms of resource and wealth consumption, thereby creating unique conditions for the realization of property rights. The digital ecosystem emerges as a technological model for the co-creation of market value, which, through the appropriate allocation of economic resources, reshapes the nature of the distribution of property rights toward their reconstructive transformation in the context of establishing a harmonious institutional economy. However, due to the indifference of contemporary economic science toward the creative exploration of social transformations, the politicization of economic relations has become an attribute of this hybrid environment of social life. It disrupts the principles of balanced functioning and sustainable development of the economic system and significantly modifies the mechanisms for the distribution of property rights. Consequently, this transformation takes on the quality of a non-constructive transformation. It is argued that the development of a harmonious institutional architecture for the hybrid space-time of the metaverse is feasible through a fundamental scientific rethinking of the socio-economic worldview and the formation of a new scientific system of social values.