Baytaş, M. A., Cappellaro, A., & Fernaeus, Y. (2022). Stakeholders and Value in the NFT Ecosystem: Towards a Multi-disciplinary Understanding of the NFT Phenomenon. In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘22).

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been a defining trend for design, technology, and business in 2021. Vis-à-vis significant market movements, the value, legitimacy, and utility of NFTs are 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. In either case, NFTs are an important technological, cultural, and economic phenomenon that signifies important developments in our social systems.

Based on open data mined from the social new website Hacker News, Baytaş et al. present a first-of-its-kind data-backed model of stakeholders, relations, and value flows in the NFT ecosystem, documenting technological, cultural, and economic aspects of the NFT phenomenon in the recording system of computer science literature.

In a break from the ethos of the Citations Collection, this piece represents a contemporary and unproven work of scholarship while attempting to advance innovative "crypto-native" research funding. Proceeds from initial and future sales of this NFT will be used to cover costs of publishing the associated research paper at the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, as well as future research and design experiments by the first author and associates.

Graphic design elements on this unique NFT are crafted as a tribute to the prolific multi-disciplinary designer Virgil Abloh, who passed away in 2021 during the height of the NFT boom. Color, typography, and layout emulate Abloh's social media posts announcing his academic lectures on contemporary design theory.

Typeset in Helvetica.