This abductive study investigates how management occurs without managerial authority as part of a previously unseen organizational form—the decentralized platform with an independent market value. Our mixed-methods study of the cryptocurrency industry draws on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) to analyze archival and interview data and offer new theory on how decentralized platforms coordinate activities to grow in an early stage, before network effects kick in. We find that, in the absence of a central authority, platforms coordinate activities with three mechanisms, namely decentralized (i) algorithmic coordination, (ii) social coordination, and (iii) goal coordination. Our QCA treat these mechanisms as explanatory conditions and, using a representative sample of 20 cryptocurrency platforms, reveal which configurations of decentralized coordination mechanisms nurture, or hinder, early-stage platform growth.