Trustable Systems in a Distrustful World: Singapore’s Blockchain Survival Strategy

Anthropologist Emily Chua (NUS) asks how blockchain’s political-economic impacts are shaped by histories of power and governance While blockchain is often framed as a technology for bypassing government institutions, Singapore’s central bank sees it differently: as a tool that regulated financial companies should use to make their operations more efficient. This talk examines Singapore’s blockchain-based fintech sector as the product of a concerted government strategy to strengthen the island-nation’s position as a global financial centre. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with industry actors, Emily Chua shows how efforts to institutionalize blockchain’s “trustless” technology circle back to older questions about trust in money, and argues for a broader engagement with money’s cultural, political, and economic dimensions. Emily Chua is Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, Department of Sociology & Anthropology. She researches competing constructions of society, value, money, and truth in an age of fast, ubiquitous digital devices.