Displacement and complementarity between cryptocurrencies and legacy money

Monetary systems are inhabited by multiple forms of ‘money’, hierarchically tiered according to specific logics. In the current credit-based monetary systems, these money-instruments all follow the logic of credit and perform specific roles of money according to their economic features. In other words, these money-instruments complement one another within the credit-monetary system but have also displaced one another in the specific roles each play. Though originally complementary, gold and other commodity monies have been largely displaced because capitalist expansion required a more flexible operating principle, namely credit. It is possible that capitalist economies are currently experiencing a similar moment of tension between complementarity and displacement not of instruments alone but of monetary systems altogether. The introduction of cryptocurrencies puts the structural features of the current monetary system into question by leading to the creation of qualitatively different instruments aspiring to moneyness. This paper explores the displacement and complementarities between legacy credit-form money-instruments and the multiple crypto-form money-instruments, highlighting the tension between monetary systems built on credit and noncredit logics. Three forms of money-instruments are identified for this analysis, giving rise to a ‘triad’: inside legacy credit money (i.e., standard bank deposits), outside DLT-based credit money (i.e., CBDCs issued as liabilities of the central bank, ‘account based’ rather than ‘token based’), and outside DLT-based noncredit money (i.e., Bitcoin). Ultimately, the DLT-based monetary system is a parallel monetary system built on the negation of credit-form.