For many metaverse projects, the trading of digital products is an initial extension of the marketplace model [[[A marketplace is a unique online sales model. It is a market operated by a technological infrastructure, that offers a varied range of products and services, and is made up of third-party sellers (Amazon, Leboncoin (A well-known French digital platform for classified adverts, akin to Craigslist or Gumtree), BlaBlaCar, Meetic, Tinder, etc.).]]]. that is easy to imagine insofar as such practices are already widely prevalent in the world of video games and virtual worlds (The Sims, Second Life, Roblox, etc.). These digital environments offer brands and designers an unlimited digital extension of marketplaces, be it in terms of appearance (the shape), clothing (the skin), or all the objects that make up three-dimensional environments, whether these have been created specifically in and for virtual worlds, or whether they are digital replicas of physical objects.

On the Steam platform, for example, players can trade items, resources, rewards, or even a “Steam gift” (an extra copy of a video game). The Unreal Engine Marketplace embodies an equivalent model, probably even closer to that of metaverses, since it doesn't relate to a virtual world in particular (as the Second Life Marketplace does for Second Life, for example), but is specific to a graphics engine.

In addition, marketplaces for digital assets that enhance the user experience, world extensions, or additional content (commonly known as "plug-ins" or "downloadable content" –DLC) that add functions to the initial experience, are models that could be easily adapted to these immersive universes.

Online marketplaces have become a central and dominant model for online commerce, even as their physical versions are in decline, as in the United States [[[“The Great American Shopping Mall: Past, Present, and Future”, The Issue Spotter, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 12 octobre 2021 : http://jlpp.org/blogzine/the-great-american-shopping-mall-past-present-and-future/]]] and Western Europe.

Due to the perceived potential of metaverses, numerous brands are venturing into 3D realms by opening spaces or shops, starting with retailers who sell body-related products (clothes, shoes, cosmetics, etc.). On the one hand, as was the case in Second Life for example, entire zones in simulated universes can be assimilated to 3D commercial zones. On the other hand, the hybridisation of digital and physical goods has been growing steadily for several years, raising the question of new business models at the interface of these two practical aspects of our societies.

So while the promise of interoperability in the Metaverse questions the feasibility of transposing a virtual object from one technical solution to another, or from one world to another, hybridisation between the digital and the physical worlds raises the issue of replicating a good or service in the world from which it does not originate; in other words, in the digital world if it originates in the physical world, and vice versa. Playing on this hybridity, rarity, and community effect, the worlds of art and luxury have swiftly embraced this opportunity. The hybridisation of business models around goods exchanged or transposed between the physical world and the simulated world thus lays out the contours of a “corporeity” model, a model in which objects, attributes, and physical and digital characteristics, as well as property regimes and rights, hybridise and reconfigure within various aspects and embodiments of the same body.