Money’s infrastructures

Where and how we pay is changing dramatically.

This timely, innovative book navigates the so-called 'Cambrian explosion' of FinTech companies and more specifically to the emergence of Blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies through the lens of the case of Ripple, a company in the field of cryptoassets and cross-border payments. Combining STS with human geography and political economy, it navigates the maelstrom of proliferating new and old payment infrastructure, to develop a theoretical and empirical 'infrastructural inversion' of money. Money does not just flow through or behave like an infrastructure, but rather it is an infrastructure, because it is predicated upon the existence of accounting and payment infrastructures of memory for its very existence.

Using the concepts of active forms and dispositions from design and architecture, this nuanced book analyses how money's infrastructures act in the world materially, spatially, as objects and subjects of desire and as political and economic machines. If we want new forms of money for new forms of society, we need to think holistically and ecologically about the complex combinations of materiality, space, desire and political economies that money generates and propagates.

Tracing the trajectory of a cryptoasset project from an alternative credit system to an interbank, cross-border company, the book moves beyond a Bitcoin-centric view of money. It reveals how alternative and mainstream, networked and sovereign forms of money have long been intertwined.