Determinants of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance adoption - A configurational exploration

Over the past three decades, scholars have studied technology adoption and its determinants in many contexts. Nevertheless, this literature has remained silent in understanding the complex interdependency among these determinants and how such interdependency determines technology adoption. In this paper, we build on previous research to focus on the technological, social, economic, cultural, and political determinants of technology adoption. Using the Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA) with samples of 101 and 43 countries, we perform a configurational analysis to explore the interdependency among these five categories of factors and their causal effect on the adoption of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi). We obtain various causal combinations of the technological, social, economic, cultural, and political factors that are associated with a high level of cryptocurrency and DeFi adoption. In addition, our analysis highlights the key role of the social, economic, and cultural factors in influencing both crypto and DeFi adoption. Technological and political factors, nevertheless, play a less important role in driving blockchain adoption. We also find intriguing differences between cryptocurrency and DeFi adoption. Our results both support and challenge existing findings in the technology adoption literature and offer theoretical implications for future research.