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

Ludovico Rella

doi:10.1080/17530350.2020.1711532

Abstract

ABSTRACTMoney’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.

Highlights

Cryptocurrencies are digital means of payment that operate on the infrastructure of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), or blockchains (Rella 2020)
This paper argues that payment infrastructures are the loci through which money’s materiality, abstraction, universality, and cultural specificity play out
The rails and pipelines of money are at the forefront of a battle that increasingly involves established players and legacy institutions

Summary

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies are digital means of payment that operate on the infrastructure of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), or blockchains (Rella 2020). The case study that will animate this paper is the fintech company Ripple, which applies blockchain technologies to cross-border payments through the XRP Ledger and the Interledger Protocol (ILP). The paper will develop insights from Susan Leigh Star (1999) and Keller Easterling (2014) to take steps towards a conceptualization of money infrastructures as ecologies of material active forms, cultures, and imaginaries that, together, shape money’s dispositions and co-evolve in response to both internal and external stimuli. The term ‘Ripple’, is used interchangeably to refer to a pre-blockchain payment system, a fintech company, and a distributed ledger This genealogy disentangles this ambiguity, and it provides the basis for the subsequent analysis of the active forms, dispositions, cultures, and their ecological co-evolution. The following subsections analyze, respectively, the materiality, cultures, and evolution of the XRP Ledger

Design and dispositions

Conclusions

Notes on contributor