Private Law Aspects of Metaverses: The Case of Marketplaces

Digitalization transforms public life as the Internet moves on to Web 3.0. This shift gives rise to the entirely new phenomenon of metaverse, which totally transforms the role and function of digital marketplaces. This digital environment has a fundamentally different structure from the objective reality. This fact poses a challenge for law enforcement agencies and legislators worldwide. This article examines the private law challenges related to metaverses, with particular attention to legal norms in digital environments, the legal status of digital avatars, and the circulation of digital assets on metaverse marketplaces. It describes the core elements of the metaverse, as well as the challenges that marketplaces have to face as part of metaverses, e.g., the limited legal remedies caused by blockchains, the transfer of intellectual property rights when purchasing NFT, etc. A review of the legal status of digital avatars revealed the problem of legal norms in the digital metaverse. The legal nature of digital avatars and the specifics of digital asset circulation and marketplace operations question the correlation of digital environment with existing legal institutions. The need to develop a metaverse law requires a distinct legal approach to this phenomenon.