Paper short abstract:

This paper explores liminalities crossed in ethnographic research about blockchain technology. It includes reflections on the methodological mixture of digital and live terrains, but also on the issues researched projects met while managing implementation in digital-material hybrid grounds.

Paper long abstract:

Doing anthropology about computation technologies and current, and increasingly pervasive, modes of socio-technical interaction brings about manifold analytic and methodological challenges.

In this paper, I intend to address some of such challenges stemming from research about (Fin)Tech imaginaries and the use of blockchain technology. Departing from ethnography carried out in online and live terrains in the Netherlands, I wish to draw attention to two, interconnected, liminal situations. On the one hand at a methodological level, and on the other hand at subject level. The first situation regards the hybrid ethnographic landscapes involved in anthropology about (blockchain) computation practices, where ethnography is not only carried out through live interactions and observations, but expanded into online dimensions - thus reconfiguring research terrains and demanding for further reflections about theory and practice. The second situation regards the liminalities of blockchain projects, whose imaginaries and plans reflect a forming, and increasingly intense, continuum between digital and 'real world' spheres of action, that seems to become accepted but not without its challenges.

Departing from reflections about my own fieldwork, and on case studies about blockchain-based FinTech solutions - namely banking experiments and a project for a non-volatile crypto token - I intend to debate the pragmatics of working in liminal grounds: regarding ethnographic research in hybrid terrains (digital and material), and regarding the realization of blockchain-based financial and entrepreneurial experiments in digital, but also real-world contexts with their regulations and materialities.