Social cryptocurrencies: social finance organizations at the new era of digital community currencies

Abstract

We proposed an investigation on the emergent phenomenon of cryptocurrencies by studying those with explicit social or environmental goals, that we called social cryptocurrencies. To perform this study, we adopt a socialmaterial approach based on a combination of two elements identified with the social and the material aspects of a digital platform, respectively, governance and architecture. From the combination of these elements, we define a set of categories used to classify a selected sample of 18 social cryptocurrencies. Within each category, we then discussed topics that we considered critical for the management of social cryptocurrencies – scale, scope, stability and interoperability – since they seemed to be taken differently in each of the distinct universes that originated the concept of social cryptocurrencies: the community currencies and the cryptocurrencies. We found that the sociomaterial approach provides good foundations for explaining the characteristics of social cryptocurrencies and the entanglement between governance and architecture is clearly noticeable by the analysis of the studied cases. It seems to be natural that, for social cryptocurrencies, the more open the governance structure, the more probable to adopt a more open platform architecture. We also used the categories to explain the great deal of uniformity among the investigated currency projects, concerning the critical issues taken from the literature.