Kilian Schmück

Business model literature, while insightful, primarily focuses on the Internet and Web 2.0 contexts. The emergence of pioneering digital technologies, especially the Web3 anchored by blockchain, necessitates reevaluating business model paradigms, particularly those of platform business models within related ecosystems. This study delves into blockchain's unique affordances, investigating how they mold novel Web3 business model patterns and integrate into specific platform ecosystems. We scrutinize the characteristics, trajectories, and synergies of value creation and capture. Using a mixed-methods approach involving 171 interviews and a subsequent sample of 126 Web3 ventures, we delineate a taxonomy of Web3 business model dimensions, clustering emergent decentralized platform ecosystems into pertinent archetypes. Our theoretical model delineates how blockchain affordances influence these configurations, emphasizing the dynamic between a platform's nucleus and its fringes. We highlight Web3 platform design choices leaning towards data sovereignty, emphasizing how the degree of blockchain integration within platform governance—leading to information symmetry and platform disintermediation—transitions digital trust to what we term as digital truth.

The internet and information technologies have accelerated platform business models associated with distinct economic advantages. By exploiting network effects and information asymmetries, winner-take-all marketplaces and monopolistic market structures developed. However, the advent of novel digital technologies, such as distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), carries broad implications for new ways of platform orchestration with the ability to challenge our understanding of platform ecosystems, particularly concerning disintermediation effects and a reconfiguration of governance and incentive alignments. I explore how the inherent and unique affordances of DLTs affect and allow for novel business model patterns in platform ecosystems. Along with incentive mechanisms and governance configurations, I investigate DLT business model characteristics, directions, and alignments of value creation and value capture. Through a mixed methods study design, I first develop a taxonomy of DLT business model dimensions and second cluster new kinds and DLT-exploiting configurations of platform ecosystems into associated business model archetypes. This allows me to construct a theoretical model of how restricting or loosening DLT affordances influence these ecosystem configurations and the interplay between the platform's core and periphery. I outline novel design choices for platform configurations that predominantly strive for data sovereignty. My findings reveal how the extent to which DLT affordances are integrated into the platform governance designand thus how the integrity of the technology generates information symmetry and platform disintermediationimpacts and even replaces digital trust with what I call digital truth. The integrity of governance inherent in technology and not a platform sponsor allows for new and decentralized platform ecosystem design choices, where decentralized governance becomes a fundamental element. As such, I examine DLT governance mechanisms, considering its integrity, network robustness, and the successful coordination of network intersubjectivity when enforcing consensus. Finally, I explore the orchestrated initiation of decentralized platform ecosystems through coopetition models, in which decentralized governance is exploited to solve game-theoretic challenges when seeking the macro-economically efficient state of competitivity among the coopetition partners. This thesis seeks to shed light on managing platform externalities, thereby enabling platform configurations in which negative externalities are effectively internalized while preserving or even promoting positive externalities where the novel value in multi-party models is created through optimized and fostered data-sharing. Thus, DLT affordances allow for digital truth and information symmetry in platform ecosystems, progressing towards autonomous and dynamic networks of networks.

Kilian Schmück

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