Series Summary
The series brings together anthropologists, researchers, and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles, from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously reworked across communities, geographies, and cycles.

Final Episode
At a moment of industry soul-searching, host Al Lim sits down with venture investors Wei Shi Khai and Qing Ze (QZ) to take stock of crypto from Singapore and Asia. The conversation traces a long arc: from early idealism through hyper-speculation to today’s pragmatism, asking how practitioners make sense of crypto’s shifting meanings and futures. Topics range from privacy and censorship resistance to regulation, infrastructure, AI, and Singaporean governing logics, through to the role of anthropologists from an industry perspective. What does it mean to build in an industry that prides itself on being “the biggest collection of misfits,” and what might the future hold?

Guests

Wei Shi Khai is Co-founder and General Partner of LongHash Ventures, with aggregate assets under management of approximately US$100 million since 2021. Shi Khai also co-founded and launched LongHashX, Asia’s first globally focused blockchain accelerator backed by a Singapore sovereign wealth fund. Through LongHashX, he has overseen the acceleration of more than 70 early-stage companies and supported them in raising over US$250 million to date. Prior to LongHash Ventures, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Malaysia, advising C-suite clients across the banking, telecommunications, and energy sectors on strategy, organisational design, and digital transformation. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Imperial College London.

Qing Ze (QZ) is a community builder and investor in the Ethereum ecosystem. Over the past several years, he has been deeply embedded in the space — organizing ETHSingapore, one of Southeast Asia’s flagship Ethereum events, and contributing to ecosystem development at Gitcoin. Building on this foundation, QZ co-founded the Ethereum Ecosystem Fund, a $30M seed-stage venture fund backed by Ethereum pioneers. This fund invests in early-stage projects that advance decentralized infrastructure and programmable financial systems.

Series Host

Al Lim is an incoming Presidential Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Singapore Management University and a PhD candidate at Yale University, where his doctoral research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Urban Geography, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.

Why do everyday people buy or trade crypto? And how do states regulate or even use it themselves? Host Al Lim speaks with Wesam Hassan and Antulio Rosales about the practices and politics of crypto in Turkey and Latin America. In places facing acute and overlapping crises, such as Argentina and Turkey, high inflation and currency instability have driven widespread crypto adoption as people seek ways to hedge against inflation, speculate, preserve savings, or move money outside traditional financial systems. States also experiment with crypto in their own ways, including using it in transactions involving commodities, such as Venezuelan oil, or in projects like El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach. From geopolitical dynamics in the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s extraction to questions of religious permissibility amid everyday practices of luck, this episode explores the diverse ways and contradictions through which states and people engage crypto.

Episode 2 Guests:

Antulio Rosales is a political economy scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research centers around the political economy of development, natural resource extraction, and democracy in Latin America, with special interest in the expansion of cryptocurrencies and their impact on energy infrastructures, the environment and development. Antulio’s current project is concerned with the political and social conditions that lead to expansions and restrictions of cryptocurrency markets in both the Global North and the Global South. His research has appeared in the Review of International Political Economy, Current History, Development and Change, New Political Economy, Energy Research and Social Science, Political Geography, among other journals.

Wesam Hassan is an anthropologist and trained medical doctor whose research lies at the intersection of medical and economic anthropology. Currently, she is a Fellow in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a postdoctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford. She researches uncertainty, temporality, speculation, and risk in contexts of economic and health crises and technological affordances. Wesam completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford, with long-term ethnographic work on gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and moral economies in Turkey’s urban centers amid economic collapse. Her earlier research at the American University in Cairo examined biomedical uncertainty and the governance of HIV-positive subjectivities in Egypt. Her scholarship, published in peer-reviewed journals, investigates how speculative infrastructures mediate survival strategies in precarious futures shaped by ecological, political, and economic crises. Her work has critically examined the moral and material economies of gambling, cryptocurrency and gambling, digital speculation, and healthcare infrastructures, tracing how risk, uncertainty, and future imaginaries are negotiated in contexts of socio-economic crisis. Before returning to academia, she worked for over a decade in public health and humanitarian aid with UN agencies and the third sector.

Series Host:
Al Lim is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University, where his research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Urban Geography, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.

Series Summary

The series brings together anthropologists, researchers, and practitioners to examine crypto as it unfolds across time and place. We follow crypto through its successive cycles, from early experimentation and speculative booms to moments of crash. These episodes highlight the value of an ethnographic lens to research the volatile landscape of crypto, showing how ideas of value, risk and trust are continuously reworked across communities, geographies, and cycles.

Episode 1
In the first episode of “Crypto Through the Years,” host Al Lim speaks with Koray Çalışkan and Anneliese Merfield about crypto as more than just another form of money, framing it instead as “data money” (Çalışkan 2023) or a dynamic set of experiments embedded in infrastructures and communities. The episode traces crypto’s trajectory from Bitcoin and Ethereum’s origins to its applications in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), situating crypto as a store of value and tool for political critique. The episode also looks ahead to the future with crypto’s growing institutional adoption and bold predictions about its convergence with AI.

Guests:

Koray Çalışkan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer, currently working as a tenured professor at Parsons School of Design, The New School. His work examines how markets, platforms, and economies are made, governed, and redesigned, with a particular focus on digital advertising and AI. He is the author of Market Threads: How Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton UP) and Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Markets, Communities and Blockchains (Columbia UP), and co-author of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (Polity, with Donald MacKenzie) and Economization: Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies (Columbia UP, forthcoming with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie). In 2021, he received the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year Award from the Falling Walls Foundation for his contributions to social science research on cryptocurrencies, blockchains and their communities. His current research focuses on AI integration in digital economies, examining how agentic systems, platform infrastructures, and strategic design are reshaping value creation, production, and exchange across contemporary economies.

Annaliese Merfield is an anthropologist and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Her research concerns two of the largest cryptocurrency communities—Bitcoin and Ethereum—and the blockchain technologies they have developed.

Series Host:

Al Lim is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale University, where his research examines the social ecology of crypto in Thailand. He has published in Environment and Planning E, Urban Geography, and The Journal of the Siam Society, and holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (summa cum laude) from Yale-NUS College. He also brings several years of professional experience in the crypto and AI sectors, including venture capital and ecosystem development.