Providing Customer Value through Non-Fungible Tokens: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital certificates of ownership that can be attached to any virtual or physical asset. Recently, they have become increasingly popular, especially with the advent of metaverses, virtual spaces shared and accessible online. Many organizations are launching NFT initiatives for a variety of reasons including retaining customers, developing new revenue streams, or demonstrating that they are keeping up with the latest technological advances. When organizations launch NFT initiatives, they attempt to provide value to NFT users in various ways, depending on the NFT and broader characteristics of the initiatives. This paper is a preliminary study to understand the value that organizations can attempt to provide through NFT initiatives. We examine 46 NFT initiatives from 42 companies by adopting an interpretive approach to provide a first overview. Based on our analysis, we discuss various elements on the design of NFT initiatives, and propose a research agenda.