Cryptofinancial imaginaries: how neoliberal theories are materialized in the technical principles of cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are sociotechnical objects encoding the visions and interpretative frameworks of the communities of practice that ideated and designed them. This paper explores and presents the notion of cryptofinancial imaginaries, a co-productive process between technocratic and antidemocratic ideologies and cryptocurrency technologies that are presented as natural and liberatory, and whose agenda deepens in neoliberal free-market logics. To do so, we first investigate how neoliberal theories framed the imaginaries of cryptocurrencies’ elite. Second, we explain how these political and economic positions produced a series of technical developments that became the normative basis of contemporary cryptocurrencies. Third, we describe how these technologies reproduce these ideological positions today. To situate the political positions of cryptocurrencies’ original imaginaries we conduct a historical analysis of online discussions and technical documents of Cypherpunks, Crypto-anarchists and Extropians between the 1980s and 2000s. To explain how neoliberal principles are encoded and reproduced by particular technologies, we analyze Bitcoin and Ethereum documentation and we conduct a technical analysis of these two cryptocurrencies’ affordances. Finally, we argue that the popularization cryptofinancial imaginaries would magnify the already existing neoliberal dynamics that increase inequality and advance towards a de-democratizing cultural and material framework of economization of social relations.