Digital Property Rights and Platform Fairness in Contract-Constrained NFT Exchange Ecosystems
Main article
Abstract
Non-fungible token (NFT) exchange platforms increasingly operate in markets where digital assets are not simple transferable objects. Many NFTs include royalty obligations, revenue creator shares, staking conditions, vesting periods, game utility rights, community access rules, or other smart-contract restrictions that travel with the asset. These restrictions create a platform governance problem that is simultaneously technical, economic, and social: an exchange rule should preserve digital property rights, respect contractual obligations, and avoid unfairly allocating liquidity burdens to users who hold more restricted assets. This paper develops a rights-aware platform fairness framework for contract-constrained NFT exchange ecosystems. Building on market design, matching with contracts, blockchain governance, and algorithmic fairness research, the study reframes NFT exchange as a problem of term-consistent allocation rather than a mere asset-swap problem. The proposed framework distinguishes ownership rights, transfer rights, revenue rights, utility rights, and exit rights, and connects them to platform-level fairness metrics such as term consistency, individual rationality, exposure fairness, waiting-time equity, and creator-rights compliance. A scenario-based data analysis with 12,000 simulated exchange requests compares open swapping, compliance-only filtering, equal-term cycle clearing, and fairness-weighted equal-term clearing. The analysis shows that unrestricted swapping creates high liquidity but also high term-inconsistency risk; compliance-only filtering reduces violations but leaves substantial waiting-time inequality; equal-term cycle clearing sharply reduces property-rights violations; and fairness-weighted clearing further improves fairness with only a moderate liquidity cost. The paper contributes a governance-oriented analytics model for platforms that seek to balance digital property rights, market efficiency, and user fairness in tokenized asset ecosystems.
