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.

In this episode, our co-hosts take a deep dive into each other’s research on a broad range of contemporary political and economic changes in Mongolian pastoral lifeways. In particular, they explore:

1. the changing nature of work, gender, and household organization;
2. the impact of social and economic policy on herd management;
3. the connections between the Covid 19 pandemic and the rise of social media;
4. the changing value and meaning of livestock; and
5. the rise of a rights-based discourse in global conversations about pastoralism.

About this series: Taking the Pulse of Pastoralism in the 21st Century

Pastoralists face the dual challenge of a rapidly changing climate and the transformative potential of global capitalism. In this series, we check in with interdisciplinary scholars who are working with pastoralists from around the world in diverse political, economic, and cultural settings to assess current challenges and the future viability of these complex livelihoods.

About our hosts

Dan Murphy

Ariell Ahearn

Dr. Ariell Ahearn is a Departmental Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford.

Brie Berry

Host: Dr. Brie Berry is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Sustainability at Ursinus College. Her teaching, research, and engaged work focus on building just and equitable circular economies.

Episode 3: Enclosure & Dispossession in Secondhand Markets: A Conversation with Dr. Nicky Gregson

In this final episode of the series, Brie and Nicky discuss the long history of secondhand economies, and how enclosure and dispossession in reuse markets threaten the potential for more just and equitable circular futures.

Guest:
Dr. Nicky Gregson, Emerita Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University.

Dr. Nicky Gregson is an Emerita Professor of Geography at Durham University. Her main research interests are in the fields of “recycling” and waste economies and consumption as devaluation.

Brie Berry

Host: Dr. Brie Berry is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Sustainability at Ursinus College. Her teaching, research, and engaged work focus on building just and equitable circular economies.

Episode 2: Everyone wants a piece of the secondhand pie

In this episode, Dr. Brie Berry has a conversation with Suzanne Butler, a full-time reseller, about what it takes to be a reseller, why prices are rising in thrift stores, and how gentrification in reuse markets is more complex than we might think.

Guests:

Suzanne Butler

Series Title: The Rise of Resale

Brie Berry

Series Host: Dr. Brie Berry is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Sustainability at Ursinus College. Her teaching, research, and engaged work focus on building just and equitable circular economies.

Episode 1: Have they gentrified the poor folks’ store?

In this episode, Dr. Brie Berry, Dr. Cindy Isenhour, and Dr. Mora Reinka discuss the rise of resale economies in recent years and their collaborative research on stigma and gentrification in reuse markets. How is gentrification shaping secondhand economies, and is the growth of more sustainable consumption practices always a good thing?

Guests

Cindy Isenhour

Mora Reinka

Dr. Cindy Isenhour is a Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change at the University of Maine where her research explores the cultural construction and contemporary reproduction of linear production-consumption-disposal systems and their associated effects on the environment and climate.

Dr. Mora Reinka is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ursinus College where she teaches and researches about the effects of stigma on our health and wellbeing.

In the final episode of “Currency Experiments & Value Conversions” Ferda Nur Demirci and Daromir Rudnyckyj discuss the 2023 article “’Every dollar has its own problem’: Discrepant dollars and the social topography of fungibility in multicurrency era Zimbabwe” with its author, Chris Vasantkumar, an anthropologist based at Macquarie University. The discussion addresses Zimbabwe’s complex monetary landscape, particularly during the “multi-currency era” (2009–2019). Vasantkumar explains how people navigated the overlapping currency forms that circulated in the country, including U.S. dollars, bond notes, RTGS balances, and EcoCash, in the context of chronic economic instability and hyperinflation. Vasantkumar challenges assumptions about the fungibility of money, drawing on Zimbabwean experiences to critique dominant theories such as Viviana Zelizer’s notion of “earmarking.” The discussion highlights how different forms of money were materially and symbolically non-interchangeable, creating arbitrage opportunities and shaping social relationships. The wide-ranging conversation also addresses the politics of cashlessness, the affective dimensions of monetary trust, and how divergent conceptions of value can inform a decolonial reorientation of economic anthropology.

Chris Vasantkumar is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Communication, Society, & Culture at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is also the co-convenor of the Future of Money Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His work has two primary foci. First, since 2018, he has ethnographically investigated the crisis economy in contemporary Zimbabwe, with a focus on the collapse of trust in state currency and its effects on middle-class attitudes toward money, planning, and the future. Vasantkumar’s research interests include broader theoretical approaches to money and exchange. His in-progress book manuscript, Trinkets: Discordances of Value in More-Than-Human Economies, advocates the decolonizing of received settler-mercantile exchange theories, as developed out of his analysis of early encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of Africa and North America.

Podcast Co-Hosts

Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria.

Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. Dr. Rudnyckyj’s current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary monetary forms. His most recent journal articles include “Econography: Approaches to Expert Capitalism,” in Current Anthropology and “The Protestantism of Neoliberalism” in Culture, Theory, & Critique. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago 2019) and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell 2010), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.