Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

Abstract

Money's materiality produces an ontological conundrum for social theory: should the analysis of money foreground the objects used as money, or the abstract relations that underpin it? Provoked by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, this paper develops a conceptualization of money as a technological and social infrastructure which directly addresses this theoretical impasse. Cryptocurrencies' sole form of material existence coincides with their underpinning infrastructure of records, accounting and payments. In the past decade, cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in number, and they have been applied to a host of use cases. This paper focuses on cross-border payments through the example of the fintech company Ripple, the cryptocurrency XRP, and the design of the XRP Ledger. Combining literatures from the social theory of money, science and technology studies and new materialisms, this article develops steps towards an ecological conceptualization of money infrastructures. Infrastructures, understood ecologically, include devices, active forms, and imaginaries in seamless webs of mutual relations of co-evolution. These ecologies are always potentially prone to slippage, dissolution, disassembling, reassembling and reappropriation, dependence, and competition.

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

“…The trading of new instruments (e.g. cryptocurrencies) has depended on the construction of new infrastructures for recording and accounting for blockchain transactions (Hayes 2019, Rella 2020. Global financial integration is engaging states and private actors in challenging negotiations over cross-border infrastructures (Krarup 2019).…”

“…First, while a 'feedback' dynamic occurs over time within a single infrastructure, 'sacrifice' happens across the boundaries of multiple infrastructures Such dynamics across multiple infrastructures within an organization remain largely unstudied. Market infrastructures have generally been analysed in the singular: a grading infrastructure (Cronon 1992), a settlement infrastructure (Krarup 2019, Rella 2020, an execution infrastructure (MacKenzie 2017, Pardo-Guerra 2019. This article demonstrates that market infrastructures, particularly information infrastructures, can usefully be studied in the plural.…”

The Elephant in the Dark: A New Framework for Cryptocurrency Taxation and Exchange Platform Regulation in the US

“…For social scientists, a cryptocurrency is digital cash, an electronic currency, a crypto asset, or virtual money (Dodd 2018;DuPont 2019;Swartz 2018;Rella 2020;Brunton 2019). For the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it represents a digital asset that behaves similar to a security.…”

Data money makers: An ethnographic analysis of a global cryptocurrency community

“…Within this burgeoning literature, a thread of research has begun to look at new economic communities that come together around a cryptocurrency in order to realize it. Scholars have argued that these communities have been producing a new money form in legal terms, "the non-sovereign fiat currency" (Nelson, 2020), built on/by an assortment of social institutions, infrastructures, and networks that make data monies possible in the first place (Crandall, 2019;Rella, 2020;Thieser, 2019). Approaching crypto monies as community experiments, scholars have focused on the primary role that collective actors play in realizing data monies and have analyzed the nature of forum interaction (Tarasiewicz & Newman, 2015), ideological tensions (Megan et al, 2019), economic imaginaries (Arjaliès, 2021;Swartz, 2018), patterns of organization (Andersen & Bogusz, 2017), failed projects (Caliskan, in press), crypto entrepreneurship (Bogusz & Morisse, 2018), community impact on price movements (Breidbach & Tana, 2021;Walton & Johnston, 2018), governance (Spithoven, 2019), relations of solidarity (Diniz et al, 2020), and mining collectives (Xu et al, 2020).…”