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On April 15, 2026, NCIS member and PhD Candidate Víctor Andrés Renza Avellaneda successfully held his predoctoral defense at BI Norwegian Business School.
His dissertation "What Remains After the NFT Hype? A dissertation on communities, institutions, collectors and value attribution in Web3 cryptoart ecosystems" starts with a striking paradox: the NFT market boomed, then crashed spectacularly in 2022. Trading volumes collapsed. Headlines declared NFTs dead. And yet, artists kept creating, communities kept organizing, museums kept experimenting with blockchain. Why would anyone stay invested in a market that seemed to have imploded?
That question is at the heart of Víctor's work. Rather than taking the "NFTs are dead" narrative at face value, he asks what kinds of value, not just financial, but also cultural, social, and symbolic, people actually get out of participating in the cryptoart world.
To find out, Víctor takes a four-level approach, zooming out step by step:
- Artists: how they reframe their work as speculative assets
- Communities: how crypto artists actively live out Web3 ideals even when markets shrink
- Institutions: how museums and cultural organizations navigate this new digital terrain
- Consumers: how and why NFT collectors actually attribute value to digital art
Across all four actors, the same core question runs: what kinds of value are really being created here, financial, cultural, social, symbolic, and for whom? For every actor, there is going to be one publication. The first article "Speculative Labour: The Financialized Imagination of Creative Work and the Assetization of Digital Art through Non-Fungible Tokens" has already been published in New Media & Society (2025). In terms of the theoretical approach, Víctor bridges narrative economics (Shiller) and cultural economics (Throsby) to explain how stories about decentralization, ownership, and digital empowerment shape real economic behavior.
Víctor is supervised by Eliane Bucher, Carlos Velasco, and Peter Booth. His committee consisted of Professor Allègre L. Hadida (Cambridge Judge Business School) as external member and Professor Christoph Lutz (BI Norwegian Business School, NCIS Co-Director) as internal member.
We look forward to following the next chapter of Víctor's research and to finding out what, in the end, really remains after the hype.