IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v13y2020i2p236-249.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Ludovico Rella

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Ludovico Rella, 2020. "Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(2), pages 236-249, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:13:y:2020:i:2:p:236-249
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Koray Caliskan, 2022. "The Elephant in the Dark: A New Framework for Cryptocurrency Taxation and Exchange Platform Regulation in the US," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-18, March.
    2. Danai Likitratcharoen & Pan Chudasring & Chakrin Pinmanee & Karawan Wiwattanalamphong, 2023. "The Efficiency of Value-at-Risk Models during Extreme Market Stress in Cryptocurrencies," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(5), pages 1-21, March.
    3. Koki, Constandina & Leonardos, Stefanos & Piliouras, Georgios, 2022. "Exploring the predictability of cryptocurrencies via Bayesian hidden Markov models," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:13:y:2020:i:2:p:236-249. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.