A few months ago at a raucous tech conference in Toronto, I got chatting to some crypto evangelists who were keen to extol the joys of decentralised finance or, as they like to call it, “DeFi”.
With reverential fervour, they declared that they loved digital assets because there were no hierarchies: anyone could deal in bitcoin, for instance, without having to rely on centralised gatekeepers such as banks.
What about the exchanges, I asked, pointing out that much crypto activity was taking place on these centralised hubs. Economic sociologist Koray Çalışkan notes that more than 90 per cent of bitcoin traded in 2021 was kept in crypto exchanges.