Finance and Society. 12(2):127-145. (2026) (w/Amin Samman & Carola Westermeier)

Finance is becoming tech – and in the process, changing how the future enters the present. This claim goes beyond the familiar story of ‘fintech’, in which digital tools transform the delivery of otherwise recognizable financial services. It points instead to a deeper change in how finance coordinates action under uncertainty. We introduce the concept of technofinance to name an emerging regime in which engineered infrastructures generate, rank, circulate, and act upon financial signals automatically, recursively, and at scale. We develop the concept across three interrelated dimensions. Infrastructurally, technical systems increasingly determine the conditions of participation, visibility, and eligibility. Performatively, code and automated feedback loops assume coordinating work once performed through expert interpretation and institutional judgement. Communicatively, dashboards, feeds, rankings, and alerts reorganize financial attention around continuous response. Together, these developments shift finance from a representational mode, organized around the narration of uncertain futures, toward an operational mode that technologically produces actionable presents. The result is a compression of financial time and the rise of a new mode of architectural power: the capacity to govern coordination in advance through protocols, parameters, defaults, and thresholds. When finance becomes tech, the social moves upstream into the design, ownership, and governance of technical systems. At stake, therefore, is not simply the future of financial services, but who – or what – determines which futures become visible, investable, and possible.

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Anthropology Today 39(4): 4-8. (2023).

Drawing on Marx’s theory of history, this article argues that the competition and capital accumulation inherent in the production of Bitcoin (i.e. ‘mining’) are at odds with the narrative discourses that position Bitcoin as a revolutionary technology capable of subverting traditional power structures. Through an analysis of the evolution of Bitcoin mining, the article demonstrates how the material conditions of its production have shifted over time, leading to the concentration of mining power among a few large corporate entities and a concomitant erosion of the decentralized ethos that underpinned the early Bitcoin community. The article also argues that this shift is not simply a result of the ‘natural’ evolution of the technology, but also the outcome of specific social and economic forces that encourage the accumulation of capital over the democratic and decentralized potentialities of the technology. Overall, the article suggests that the narrative discourses surrounding Bitcoin need to be understood in relation to the material forces that shape its production and circulation, and that a more nuanced analysis of the interplay between material and discursive factors is necessary to fully grasp the dynamics of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

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Finance and Society, 7(2): 130-39.

This essay makes the case that current debates about the ‘moneyness’ of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are occurring at the incorrect scale. Rather than being some form of transnational digital money to be used alongside or compete with national fiat currencies, I argue that, instead, each cryptocurrency represents its own self-contained ‘money-world’. Put differently, a cryptocurrency is the uniquely specified unit of account and medium of exchange within the socio-technical bounds of its own blockchain. This new perspective can open new lines of intellectual dialogue and inform better policy choices for regulating cryptocurrencies.

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