This paper establishes a theoretical and empirical rationale for metaverse political economy. Development of increasingly efficient blockchain markets has inspired a global cultural shift toward new modes of earning, working, and consumption operationalized by the metaverse. The metaverse economy is projected to exceed a trillion-dollar marketplace as blockchain ecosystems present vast economic opportunities for individuals, companies, and governments. This paper exploits public deep-order-book auction markets, tethering the analysis to prices paid in real markets, to conduct analytical dollar-denominated comparisons between metaverse assets and fiat-denominated “traditional” markets. The comparative analysis of blockchain ecosystems, which is both theoretical and empirical, demonstrates topic relevance to international political economy. The paper’s empirical analysis employs a LASSO regression to assess the significance of twenty-five global capital markets covariates to cryptocurrency prices for three of the largest blockchain ecosystems, chosen as response variables due to each representing a use case of the nascent metaverse economy. The analysis suggests that blockchain ecosystems are not shielded from global economic forces seeing as their valuations are not immune to traditional macroeconomic levers such as global capital markets. The significance of macroeconomic indicators to the metaverse economy impacts societal developments such as globalization, the future of work, and economic inequality.