Domain-specific progress in the industry has traditionally been achieved in isolation on discrete physical systems without considering the broader socioeconomic context within an increasingly intertwined global economy. Shifting towards a more resilient and sustainable industry to tackle today’s challenges, like climate change and the global food and water supply, cannot be solved through siloed systems. It requires a paradigm shift towards coopetition and knowledge sharing of larger systems. The Industrial Metaverse (IMV) integrates the physical and digital space into interconnected Virtual Environments (VEs) based on Digital Twin models to exchange data and knowledge, representing an accessible meta-ecosystem. While the IMV’s enabling technologies are well explored, the interdependencies between its ecosystems and network effects, including interoperability of identities and tokenized assets, of all participating systems to achieve a unified experience and decentralized digital economy in the application layer remain fuzzy. Following these issues, we discuss the IMV platform ecosystem architecture as a system of systems for exchanging and sharing resources. In particular, we investigate system interoperable, decentralized orchestration and governance mechanisms for regulation compliance, data privacy, and access control that, if unresolved, may discourage institutions from participating. Additionally, we outline the general capabilities of the IMV’s application layer and its relation to the ecosystem methodology as an asset-heavy industrial platform. Furthermore, we discuss the most promising use case categories for VEs in the IMV, such as interoperable assets, hyper customization, and cross-collaboration within industrial production processes embedded in a digital economy of enterprise creators and communicating systems.