The potential opened by distributed ledger technologies for peer-to-peer exchange enabling users and developers to co-own their platforms, organize their own communities and share the value generated according to their own rules has led many to believe in the ‘sharing economy’ as a way to foster cooperation between individuals on large scale, leading to a new, socially pacified post-capitalism era. In spite of any such utopian expectation, however, this paper argues that capitalism has simply strengthened, not only through the growing centralization of peer-to-peer digital services on proprietary platforms, but also through highly speculative practices embedded in decentralized architectural protocols. We tackle the new challenges raised by the engineering of human interactions through algorithmic governance, stressing the necessity to carefully evaluate sharing economy and platform cooperativism as complex phenomena with risks, benefits and unintended consequences inevitably intertwined in the fabric of human existence.