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"Centralized or Decentralized?": Concerns and Value Judgments of Stakeholders in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Market

Published: 26 April 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are decentralized digital tokens to represent the unique ownership of items. Recently, NFTs have been gaining popularity and at the same time bringing up issues, such as scams, racism, and sexism. Decentralization, a key attribute of NFT, contributes to some of the issues that are easier to regulate under centralized schemes, which are intentionally left out of the NFT marketplace. In this work, we delved into this centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT space through mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. Centralization-decentralization dilemma is the dilemma caused by the conflict between the slogan of decentralization and the interests of stakeholders. We first analyzed over 30,000 NFT-related tweets to obtain a high-level understanding of stakeholders' concerns in the NFT space. We then interviewed 15 NFT stakeholders (both creators and collectors) to obtain their in-depth insights into these concerns and potential solutions. Our findings identify concerning issues among users: financial scams, counterfeit NFTs, hacking, and unethical NFTs. We further reflected on the centralization-decentralization dilemma drawing upon the perspectives of the stakeholders in the interviews. Finally, we gave some inferences to solve the centralization-decentralization dilemma in the NFT market and thought about the future of NFT and decentralization.

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 8, Issue CSCW1
    CSCW
    April 2024
    6294 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3661497
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Published: 26 April 2024
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 8, Issue CSCW1

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    Author Tags

    1. ai ethics
    2. blockchain
    3. decentralization
    4. interviews
    5. nft
    6. social computing

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