An Ethnography of Cryptocurrency Trading

This research will critically examine cryptocurrency trading in the United Kingdom, using the emergent
crypto market as a lens to unpack contemporary understandings of money, value and speculation in the
context of profound financial and economic uncertainty.
The crypto market has witnessed exponential growth in the past 12 months, building upon its steadily
rising trajectory since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008. Statistics indicate that its total market
capitalisation exceeded $613bn in December 2017 (Cryptolization 2017), representing a 40-fold rise from
its 2016 high and surpassing that of the world's largest financial institution, JP Morgan (Browne 2017),
whilst the user base of the largest online platform for cryptocurrency trading, Coinbase, rose by 120% in
the same timespan, equating to a total of 13.3 million users (Popper 2017). This recent surge in market
activity thus invites enquiry into the new practices, ideologies and social formations that are emerging in
the process, which may have profound implications for the future of monetary exchange and existing
institutional arrangements.
The project seeks to move beyond existing academic and industry debates which have sought to classify
or examine cryptocurrencies in terms of current financial norms and instruments. Building upon Dodd's
conception of money as a process (2017b: 231 - see also Zelizer 1997), I intend to study the practices of
cryptocurrency traders, the roles they play in meaning and value creation, and the new institutions,
socialities and solidarities that are being formed through cryptocurrency trading. In so doing, this
research will contribute to urgent theoretical debates regarding the nature of money, value and
speculation, whilst also providing timely and critical research into the formation of new institutions and
socio-technological arrangements, as investment, speculation and trading in cryptocurrencies
proliferates under political and economic uncertainty to seemingly challenge the authority of
conventional financial institutions.
This project will fuse anthropological enquiry with aspects of political economy, material cultures and
philosophy, building upon my anthropological training and previous academic research into notions of
performativity and belief in value creation and monetary exchange, in addition to my personal
experiences of trading within both the cryptocurrency and foreign exchange markets.
The University of Sussex is a strong fit for this project, owing to the expertise of my proposed
supervisors. Dr Luetchford's ethnographic research interrogates ethical issues in economic practices
ranging from fair trade coffee to the history of the 'just price' (Luetchford 2016, Carrier & Luetchford
2012), and Dr Gilbert's anthropological scholarship focuses on speculative accumulation at extractive
industry frontiers (Gilbert 2018 & 2016) and emerging cryptocurrency regulation (POST 2014). Such
expertise is complemented by research conducted by Sussex anthropologists into notions of finance
across diverse social and geographical spaces (Chong 2018, Schwittay 2014 & 2011) and the empirical
realities of traders (Marsden 2016), in addition to the university's highly ranked anthropology
department, which holds an impressive track record for producing truly innovative and interdisciplinary
research.