14328: The Impact of Forking in Decentralized Platforms (session 26330)

Research on digital platforms emphasizes the role of hub firms in enforcing backward compatibility between complements and the core platform to ensure generativity, broadly defined as unprompted and unbounded growth in complement activity and user base. However, decentralized platforms, which lack the central authority of hub firms, often evolve through forking – backward-incompatible upgrades to the core platform – thus, challenging our understanding of generativity. In this paper, we investigate how generativity unfolds in the absence of backward compatibility by studying the effects of forking on decentralized platforms. We apply discontinuous growth modeling to analyze 18 different forking events on Ethereum since its formation in 2015 to 2022. Our findings help us theorize generativity in decentralized platforms as temporally broken and relationally bounded. We show how generativity unfolds through continuous alignment between the platform core developers, complementors, and users, both pre- and post-forking. We elaborate on how generativity becomes temporally broken at each fork, but relationally bounded to complementors’ and users' decisions to align with core developers. We contribute to platform research by theorizing these relationships and discussing implications for organizational design.

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