Decentralized Platforms: Governance, Tokenomics, and ICO Design

Abstract

Traditional two-sided platforms (e.g., Amazon, Uber) rely primarily on commission contracts to generate revenues and fuel growth, whereas their decentralized counterparts (e.g., Uniswap, Filecoin) often forego these in favor of token retention. What economics underpin this choice? We show that with properly designed initial coin offerings (ICOs), both mechanisms can independently alleviate market failures at the initial fundraising stage and incentivize long-term platform building. However, they achieve this in different ways. Although commission contracts often lead to higher profits for founders, token retention leads to higher service levels, benefiting the users and service providers. In essence, token retention surrenders a fraction of earnings to better align with the tenets of decentralized governance. Combining both mechanisms can add value, but only in relatively limited cases. These findings offer guidance and a possible rationale for why platforms may want to favor one mechanism over the other or use both. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Issue of Management Science: Blockchains and crypto economics. Funding: This work is funded by the Mack Institute at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.02076 .