Platformization of Technology dominance: the case study of developing cryptocurrencies on GitHub

Technology dominance is a phenomenon in which a group of similar technologies adopt the same design for their core element on which the other elements of the technology depend and any change in this element would adversely impact these elements and the technology’s chance of success. Although the ‘dominance battle’ was researched and theorized significantly in organizational ecosystems, platformization of the dominance battle on platforms such as Sourceforge, GitHub, GitLab, etc. makes revisiting this phenomenon of significance. By emergence of such platforms, a large number of organizations such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. have moved the development of their open-source software to them specially the most popular among them, GitHub. Sharing information between projects on coding platforms is one of the core affordances. Moreover, developers’ movements are facilitated which lead to transferring expertise between projects. Thus, loosely formed organisations and individual developers do not have to necessarily form an alliance in order to share information and fill their knowledge gap. In addition, loose boundaries between these projects on platforms help developers (i.e. actors) cross these boundaries much easier than traditional forms. Therefore, this study aims to find out how the development of software technologies on coding platforms would affect the technological dominance race. In this paper, in order to investigate the platformization of technology dominance, we studied the development of cryptocurrency technologies on GitHub. To investigate his phenomenon, this study adopts a data-driven approach by collecting publicly available meta data regarding the development of the targeted coin projects on GitHub. Our preliminary finding corroborates that the links created between two technological projects to which an individual developer contributes is a significant factor in this battle however, the number of links that a crypto project has is more important than their strengths. Our study offers a new perspective on technological dominance battles in which the role of individual developers is more highlighted due to network effects on platforms and the role of sponsoring firms diluted due to loose organizational boundaries on platforms