Blockchain-based platforms: decentralized infrastructures and its boundary conditions

Blockchain technology has been receiving much public attention recently, promising to disintermediate transactions through a decentralized governance and a distributed data-infrastructure. However, the majority of the previous studies have focused on the technical aspects, and overlooked blockchain investigation from a managerial perspective. In this paper, based on platform-ecosystem, transaction cost economics, and open-source literature, we contrast and compare blockchain-based platforms and centralized platforms; in other words, decentralized versus centralized governance of the platform. We base our conceptual analysis on three dimensions—transaction cost, cost of technology, and community involvement—, exploring the conditions under which blockchain-based platforms are more advantageous than centralized platforms. We, first, compare gains from lower opportunism and uncertainty thanks to protocols and smart contracts in blockchain technology versus costs of higher coordination and complexity of (re)writing those contracts. Second, we compare gains from immutability and transparency in blockchain-based platforms versus the technological cost of verification and distributed ledger infrastructure. Finally, we compare intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of community around centralized and blockchain-based platforms to participate and different mechanism involved, i.e. pricing mechanism in the former and crypto-incentives in the latter.