I WANT A LAMBORGHINI: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF CRYPTOCURRENCY COMMUNITIES

Abstract

Understanding how digital technologies transform service businesses more generally, and financial services more specifically, is an ongoing research challenge for the Information Systems (IS) discipline. In an effort to gain insight to this problem, we undertook an in-depth ethnographic study of several hundred cryptocurrencies miners, traders and developers. We present a typology of those involved in this cryptocurrency ecosystem, identifying actors as one of 'Knowledge-Seeker', 'Visionary', 'Novice', or 'Fortune Hunter'. This typology exposes the roles individuals in cryptocurrency communities play in transforming financial services by delineating the actions of cryptocurrency service providers, blockchain educators and cryptocurrency communities. By exploring how the roles of actors changed over 8 months, we highlight that learning is a precondition for value cocreation and transformation in financial services, and offer a theoretical and contextual contribution by extending digital transformation insights from customer perspectives. Furthermore, our empirical results contribute to a better understanding of how new customer roles emerge and transform, which we presented as two distinct customer role trajectories in cryptocurrency-enabled service ecosystems.