Global Capital Markets and Cryptocurrency: Exploring the International Political Economy of Blockchain Ecosystems and Metaverse Development

Key contributions include 1) analytical dollar-denominated comparisons between blockchain/metaverse assets and fiat-denominated traditional markets, 2) comparative analysis of blockchain ecosystems both theoretically and empirically, and 3) demonstration of topic relevance to international relations, international political economy, and international development. The paper exploits public deep-order-book auction markets, allowing tick-to-tick observation of values of underlying assets (reminiscent of the early CRSP papers at Chicago), tethering the analysis to real prices paid in real markets.