What Are Meta-Rights?
Introducing The Next Application of NFTs
It’s the end of 2021, the year when the word “metaverse” was introduced into our vocabulary.
Interest in the “metaverse” has skyrocketed as NFT applications explode for digital asset ownership. Large corporations like Facebook and Twitter all but dub the metaverse the next big thing in technology.
However, the term “meta-rights” will be as important to real-world assets as “metaverse” will be to digital assets.
Interestingly, there’s almost zero interest in meta-rights. Here’s the extensive Wikipedia definition of meta-rights:
In philosophy, meta-rights are the entitlements of individuals to their rights, including the possibility to waive, transfer or sell their rights. When we talk of the rights of individuals, we do not always distinguish between rights which can be waived or sold and rights which are non-negotiable. Yet that distinction and often the distinction is made implicitly. When we say a person has a right to her house, we usually mean that she also has the meta right to sell the right. On the other hand, when we say a person has the right to his body parts, we usually assume this comes without the accompanying meta right to sell these rights. Economic efficiency usually comes with having rights which come together with the meta right to sell the right. It is arguable that we should be much more explicit about when rights come together with meta rights and when without, and the moral basis that accompany these decisions.
To date, NFTs have stayed in the purely digital realm, but they’re making their way into real assets like concert tickets and real estate. If you think about it, the value of any asset boils down to the individual rights you have to the individual meta-rights.
A buyer of a concert ticket buys a right to admission, but what about the meta-rights of re-selling that ticket? The buyer of real estate owns the property, but what about the meta-rights to rent it out on Airbnb or the right to hunt or camp on the property grounds?
Just like how NFTs for digital assets are reinventing the concept of ownership for digital assets, they will massively expand how we think about the meta-rights to real assets, especially if you could sell those rights individually. Imagine if you purchased a property and were able to resell the rights of usage, rental income & appreciation separately.
What are those rights worth? And how could they be separate? Would the sum of parts be worth more than the whole?
At Fractal, we’re working on exactly these questions and working on solutions to use modern technology to modernize asset ownership. Check us out at fractalprop.com.