Firms holding complementary knowledge and expertise increasingly engage in ecosystems to co-create and jointly deliver tailored-made solutions to industrial customers. Interdependencies inherent in ecosystems make partner alignment a unique challenge related to divergence in partners’ expectations about structure and roles. Such divergence in expectations gives rise to uncertainty in the interactions among the interdependent actors. Yet the level of interpartner uncertainty is heightened in ecosystems characterized by frequent coopetitive interactions and temporal alignment of a set of actors in multiple projects. To acknowledge this, we introduce the concept floating ecosystem. In floating ecosystems, besides uncertainty about how to align activities and actors within one project, there is also interpartner uncertainty about how partners will behave in other projects and relationships. Thus, the question about how to manage and navigate within these dynamic and complex ecosystems to manage the multifaceted nature of interpartner uncertainty is of critical importance. In light of uncertainty and interdependence, trust has been suggested as a unique organizing principle. Drawing on the idea that trust and distrust are distinct phenomena, we also argue that distrust is a distinct organizing principle that has been neglected. We conduct a case study of the Swedish robotics and automation ecosystem and explore the nature of interpartner uncertainty in this ecosystem and the mechanisms through which trust and distrust empower firms to deal with different facets of uncertainty. Our findings establish that trust and distrust work as complementary organizing principles, which operate based on distinct orienting and enabling mechanisms empowering firms to maintain fruitful interactions despite the presence of increased interpartner uncertainty.