Until recently, the appeal of cryptocurrencies and other crypto assets like NFTs was limited to a small niche of libertarians. However, there is growing evidence that working-class people and minority groups, entangled in the seducing promises of crypto evangelism, are becoming critical investors in the blockchain digital economy (Krugman). Unfortunately, far from overcoming the problems of the “traditional” monetary structure that they promise to replace, cryptoassets like Bitcoin have exacerbated “the self-same inequities of wealth and power that can be found in the existing financial system” (Dodd). Cryptoeconomies must thus be subjected to scrutiny that accounts for their growing role within the global capitalist economy. This critical task entails studying the cultural expressions that produce, naturalize, or challenge the new forms of sociality and subjectivity emerging in this context. As Zac Zimmer has underlined in his study of Bitcoin’s extractive metaphors, the tropes of cryptoeconomies have the keys to understanding the worlds they imagine, enable, or foreclose.

Sociologists of money have debated the technical and political singularity of cryptocurrencies from a historical perspective (Maurer, Dodd, Swartz). However, the narratology of crypto culture has been rarely explored. This session contributes to filling this void by using the tools of literary and cultural criticism to explore what Finn Brunton calls the techniques of futurity of crypto. Like all financial assets, cryptoassets require the permanent production of subsidiary narratives that anticipate their future value in the present. It is thus not surprising that an explosion of articles, books, documentaries, podcasts, and other cultural artifacts mediating the nature and logic of cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets has occurred in recent years. Recognizing the narratological conditions of possibility of finance, the papers in this session analyze the fantasies about the future, frequently utopian and/or apocalyptic, that are a central part of cryptoeconomies and that, as Brunton remarks, involve key questions about knowledge, value, time, materiality, and power.

The session focuses specifically on the futurities of crypto in Latin America and Spain, places that have become a key site of experimentation for entrepreneurs heralding a Blockchain Kingdom to come. It consists of three 15-minutes papers that address these developments, opening new avenues to research crypto futurities in the Spanish-speaking world, where critical literature is still scarce. Zac Zimmer, who has published on both cryptocurrencies and utopian fiction, will be the respondent. In the first paper, Natalia Castro-Picón proposes the concept of Cryptopia, which provides the title of this session, to approach the invention of the metaverse as a new neoliberal utopia. Studying the imaginaries produced by virtual reality companies, she shows how this industry encourages its users to perceive themselves as “pioneers” of a “new world” to be discovered and conquered. She argues that the metaverse inaugurates a chronotopos, a distinct spatiotemporal framework that promotes a total colonization of the imagination as a space for capital extraction. For her, due to the invested efforts of tech companies, influencers, and thousands of young enthusiasts interested in computing, design, and culture, the notion that the metaverse is the unavoidable future is becoming increasingly unquestionable.

In the second paper, Matthew Whitehouse-Gordillo investigates the utopian narratives surrounding the recent influx of crypto entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico. Rethinking Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities for the “Blockchain age,” Whitehouse-Gordillo argues that these entrepreneurs participate in the creation of the belief in a shared and simultaneous experience through what he calls a theology of crypto. Such a religious belief is premised on the supposed inevitability of a financial future when the pernicious intermediation of state and banks will be overcome. For Whitehouse-Gordillo, this utopian horizon works and must be analyzed as a powerful rhetorical tool to conceal the social, material, and historical problems the cryptocurrencies face in Puerto Rico.

Finally, Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez approaches the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador from a historical perspective. He argues that Bitcoin’s futurities, like those of the gold standard, are premised on a paradoxical effort to deny the political nature of money, while promoting new forms of monetary sovereignty. Bitcoin is currently a speculative commodity; its existence as money proper would require the emergence of entities willing to accept bitcoins as if they were debt issued by them. Interpreted this way, El Salvador’s move to accept bitcoins in the payment of taxes as if they were state-issued debt suggests that the future of cryptocurrencies will not be the freedom from the financial tyranny of the sovereign that they promise, but instead new monetary arrangements based on various alliances between decentralized algorithms, states, and corporations.