The Onchain Self: a new lens for understanding DeFi adoption

Traditional technology adoption models treat user acceptance as a singular decision, which fundamentally limits their ability to explain contexts where identity management constitutes the adoption process. Decentralised Finance (DeFi) challenges these models by enabling users to create and discard multiple wallet-based onchain selves in a code-mediated environment. This paper introduces a theoretical framework, the Onchain Multiple Self-Aspects Framework (OMSF), which extends McConnell's Multiple Self-Aspects Framework to reconceptualise DeFi adoption as identity orchestration instead of binary technology acceptance. The OMSF demonstrates how three distinctive DeFi features, cryptographic verifiability, wallet-based modularity, and smart contract programmability, transform adoption into an iterative process where users strategically manage multiple onchain identities. This theoretical advancement explains why users selectively form, develop, or discard onchain selves to compartmentalise risk, build reputations, and respond to algorithmic identity evolution, which are dynamics conventional acceptance models cannot address. The OMSF presents a necessary advancement in adoption theory in a decentralised context where the identity management process is inseparable from adoption behaviour. The paper concludes by proposing future research directions to further refine the framework.