Non-fungible Token Innovation

From 2020 to late 2022, the market for blockchain-enabled non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has expanded rapidly. At the time, stories about the sale of digital or 'tokenised’ assets for millions of dollars drove a speculative boom and stirred interest in the technology from a broad range of audiences. Subsequently, NFT technology has been applied to a range of use cases and across industries – including entertainment, fashion, luxury goods and video gaming– to varying degrees of success.
However, the NFT hype went into a sudden and rapid decline in late 2022 – leading to sharp market corrections that caused many NFTs to lose most of their value. While this development could partly be attributed to market saturation, some of it was also caused by the dark, down, and destructive sides of NFT technology. Particularly concerns relating to high energy consumption and the persistent occurrence of fraud and other types of misuse. Nevertheless, the technological affordances associated with NFTs and their potential implications for business and society remain, thus warranting academic attention. In this article, we therefore take stock of the business and management literature on non-fungible token innovation. Through this encyclopedia entry, we attempt to provide an overview of what we have learnt about the novel, rapidly developing phenomenon, and to stimulate future research.
Specifically, we identified six core research themes. These are (i) digital property rights and ownership, (ii) digital entrepreneurial opportunity and its enablers, (iii) digital materialism and new marketing, (iv) price movement and diversification, (v) moral and ethical foundations, and (vi) technological architecture of NFT. We conclude that our field should continue to explore the NFT phenomenon and suggest an agenda for future research.