Next Generation Home Sharing: Disrupting Platform Organizations with Blockchain Technology and the Internet of Things?

During the last decade, the sharing economy has given birth to a number of market mediators, which have grown to become the world’s most valuable companies. Centralized sharing platforms like Uber, Didi Chuxing, and Airbnb have transformed several traditional industries. However, with the rise of the blockchain technology, some voices predict that these platform companies will soon be at risk of being disrupted themselves. In this chapter, we address the question of whether blockchain technology has given birth to a new breed of sharing economy platforms that can challenge the incumbents’ business models. We identify five different stages of the application of blockchain technology in emerging home sharing startups. We use a stage model to explain the differences among various types of platforms, from which we derive the impact of their differences on potential market success. However, in the home sharing sector, simply copying Airbnb’s business model and rebuilding it with blockchain technology is not sufficient for any of the emerging startups to overcome the prevalent barriers to entry. Hence, we use our results to illustrate whether and under what conditions blockchain-based startups might be able to “change the game” in the home sharing economy. Our results indicate that most blockchain-based home sharing startups will likely not be able to truly challenge the incumbent platforms. Nevertheless, by analyzing the different ways of blockchain implementation in the home sharing sectors, we identify several critical factors that may increase the chance to prosper for emerging blockchain home sharing networks.