Democratizing the Platform Economy: The Quiet Revolution Through Blockchain

Blockchain – a bursting bubble or disruptive transformation? The Internet has created digital marketplaces that efficiently bring supply and demand together. The success of tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, but also Tencent and Alibaba, can be largely explained by their two-sided digital marketplaces and the resulting platform economy. The platform companies seem to be growing inexorably due to the increasing marginal utility of their marketplaces. However, the development of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain is now putting the tech giants themselves under pressure. DLTs connect the market participants directly and thus circumvent the platform company as an intermediary while also avoiding their excessive transaction fees. The winners are the directly value-creating parties.