Overcoming the Balkanization of Blockchain Research : Web3 is about Tokens AND Protocols AND Online Communities

Even though blockchain as a research topic incites broad academic interest, there is arguably a balkanization that occurred along the natural delineation between public-permissionless blockchains and private-permissioned blockchains. IS researchers, for instance, have been more inclined to investigate the latter as doing so entails building upon a research tradition in ERP, MIS, and organizational information systems. IS is not as inclined to investigate public-permissionless blockchains and their predominant application, cryptocurrencies, as their key underlying concepts of asset tokenization and protocol design are deemed within the domain of other academics, most notably economists and computer scientists. Web3 broadens applications of public-permissionless blockchains to encompass NFTs, DAOs, and metaverses and represents a shift beyond cryptocurrencies for both popular and academic discourse. In that spirit, we argue for broadening of IS research lens. There are four points to this argument. First, by the most authoritative definitions, web3 excludes private-permissioned blockchains. Second, developer and community interest in private-permissioned blockchains has flatlined relative to public-permissionless blockchains, which benefit from ever-new projects that provide vigor even if interest in older projects wanes. Third, there is a preponderance of open data of on-chain transactions, token price data from exchanges, Discord discussions, GitHub repositories and more for web3 that serves as fertile base for analyzing and theorizing, while adoption of enterprise blockchains is still speculated about in current papers. Fourth and most important, the established IS research tradition in online communities is a very relevant lens with which to study web3 even though IS has under-appreciated the relevance. We use the DeFi project Curve Finance to exemplify that web3 projects are data-rich and are as much about online communities as they are about tokens and computer protocols. We conclude by outlining some future work that will integrate quantitative and qualitative data from these three perspectives to theorize about web3