Paper short abstract

Bitcoin in Kenya operates as an infrastructure through which imaginaries of value, future and economies of affection are produced, sustained and contested. These imaginations are shaped by histories of debt, dependencies, austerity, unemployment, class, corruption, and possibilities of repair.

Paper long abstract

Infrastructures are often viewed as technical systems that enable circulation, inclusion, and connectivity (Larkin 2013). Within contemporary debates on digital financial infrastructure, Bitcoin is commonly approached through its technical architecture, decentralisation, cryptography, and trustlessness (Nakamoto 2008; Maurer et al. 2013). In anthropology, Bitcoin is framed through polarised ideological lenses, from libertarian-right-wing imaginaries of monetary autonomy to left-leaning communitarian visions of collective self-provisioning beyond state (Golumbia 2016; Swartz 2018; Shapiro 2025). While such polarisations are well documented in Euro-America, in the Global South they take more heterogeneous and context-specific forms.

Drawing on ethnographic research with Bitcoin communities in Kenya, this paper argues that digital financial infrastructures operate as temporary spaces in which imaginaries, risks, and regimes of value are produced, negotiated, and contested. Focusing on Bitcoin as a socio-technical infrastructure, the paper traces how it is entangled in struggles over economic sovereignty, class mobility, and economies of affection under conditions of austerity, inflation, and youth unemployment.

The paper follows the social life of Bitcoin across Kenya’s 2024 Gen Z protests, community-based savings groups, and the incorporation of Kenyan Bitcoin initiatives into transnational philanthropic networks. It shows how Bitcoin functions as a technology of imagination through which futures are anticipated and rendered thinkable. These imaginaries are sustained through technical narratives, symbolisms, rituals, and collective practices that give Bitcoin meaning amid persistent economic uncertainty. While Bitcoin enables imaginaries of autonomy and resistance to state authority and global financial institutions such as the IMF, it simultaneously reproduces colonialities, class, and donor dependencies.