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.