The digital transformation of economies and society is having a profound impact on the way in which the concept of asset ownership should be intended, together with its conceptual relationships with the concepts of possession, control and use. This revolution (mainly driven by the digital transition) is challenging the standard approach towards institutions provided by contemporary “contractarian” theories of the firm such as transaction-cost economics (TCE) and new Property-right theory (nPRT). The paper shows how the normative roots of modern contractarian theories of the firm relied on the univocal mapping between the different concepts of: ownership, possession, control and use. The impossibility to distinguish between physical possession and the rights to ownership implies a conflation of physical means (assets) with immaterial ends (services). For this reason, in all contractarian approaches a firm can be indifferently defined as a collection of assets (intended as means in input), or as a collection of services or activities (as ends in output) with the certainty that the two will necessarily correspond as the former will be the dual of the latter. The paper subsequently shows how different stages of the digital revolution since 1980s have gradually disentangled the physical dimension of material assets from the institutional dimension of immaterial services or activities, the latter becoming much more prominent. In so doing, the process of digitalization has also disintegrated the univocal relationship between asset ownership, possession, use and control originally assumed by contractarian theories of the firm and the implied duality between the physical dimension of possession and the institutional dimension of ownership.  This phenomenon inexorably challenges and undermines the legitimacy of the original approach adopted by contractarian theories such as TCE and nPRT, and the validity of their normative conclusions concerning the nature of the firm and the definition of its boundaries. The ultimate goal of the paper is therefore to provide a first insight on how a greater attention to key concepts in property law can provide much better understanding not only of the nature and the origin, but also of the destiny of the “economic institutions of capitalism” in a digital and interconnected economy.