Look at the modus operandi of today’s internet giants — such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, or Airbnb — and you’ll notice they have one thing in common: They rely on the contributions of users as a means to generate value within their own platforms. Over the past 20 years the economy has progressively moved away from the traditional model of centralized organizations, where large operators, often with a dominant position, were responsible for providing a service to a group of passive consumers. Today we are moving toward a new model of increasingly decentralized organizations, where large operators are responsible for aggregating the resources of multiple people to provide a service to a much more active group of consumers. This shift marks the advent of a new generation of “dematerialized” organizations that do not require physical offices, assets, or even employees.
What Blockchain Means for the Sharing Economy
Blockchain technology is facilitating the emergence a new kind of radically decentralized organization. These organizations — which have no director or CEO, or any sort of hierarchical structure — are administered, collectively, by individuals interacting on a blockchain. As such, it is important not to confuse them with the traditional model of “crowdsourcing,” where people contribute to a platform but do not benefit proportionately from the success of that platform. Blockchain technologies can support a much more cooperative form of crowdsourcing — sometimes referred to as “platform cooperativism”— where users qualify both as contributors and shareholders of the platforms to which they contribute. The value produced within these platforms can be more equally redistributed among those who have contributed to the value creation. With this new opportunity for increased “cooperativism,” we could be moving toward a true sharing economy.