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Steps towards an Ecology of Money Infrastructures: Materiality and Cultures of Ripple

Rella, Ludovico

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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.

Citation

Rella, L. (2020). Steps towards an Ecology of Money Infrastructures: Materiality and Cultures of Ripple. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(2), 236-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 11, 2019
Online Publication Date Jan 8, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Jan 2, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Cultural Economy
Print ISSN 1753-0350
Electronic ISSN 1753-0369
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 13
Issue 2
Pages 236-249
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532

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Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (1.4 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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