Digital geographies of power: The scale of digital money infrastructures

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the scale, socio-political goals, and the technological design of digital money infrastructures. The backdrop is the digital currency industry that threatens to undermine institutions’ monetary powers. Institutions are developing digital money infrastructures conceived as public utilities. Scattered geographically and scaled differently, the coexistence of digital currency within the EU raises the question about the role of money in a digitized society. Eleven in-depth interviews with key actors and three publicly funded projects that organize digital money infrastructures were compared in this study. Smaller scale and bottom-up governance implies higher attention to local problems and social dynamics. Links with institutions and top-down decision-making remain necessary to ensure long-lasting and scalable digital money infrastructures. The geographies of power are co-shaped for each project. This demonstrates a very complex interplay of sociopolitical goals, data as part of the digital monetary design, and its scale that varies across time and space.