Author(s)

Zhanyi Qi

Corresponding Author

Zhanyi Qi

Abstract

What happens to the promise of decentralization of crypto if, as Latour insists, we have never lived in a world of purified “economy” or “technology,” but only in hybrids and networks? This article takes cryptocurrency as a privileged site for pursuing that question. Treating blockchains not as self-contained technical systems but as socio-technical assemblages, I follow how narratives of “crypto” are made and remade across U.S. regulatory hearings, policy reports, industry white papers, journalism, public debates, podcasts, and social-media campaigns around figures such as Donald Trump, Justin Sun, and Changpeng Zhao. Rather than a simple clash between “crypto-as-fraud” and “crypto-as-future,” these materials reveal continual translations between state projects, platform capital, and everyday speculation. Dollar-pegged stablecoins and governmental regulations emerge as key devices through which U.S. monetary and legal infrastructures are extended onto blockchains, while Bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative knots together the older paradigm of debt, scarcity, and institutional enclosure. The article argues that cryptocurrencies do not stand outside existing arrangements of power, but reassemble them, offering anthropology a way to rethink how financial futures are technically and politically composed.

Keywords

cryptocurrency, web3, decentralization, anthropology, socio-political economy, digital ethnography