Blockchain Technologies and Remittances From Finan

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 17 October 2019

doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2019.00014
Blockchain Technologies and

Remittances: From Financial
Inclusion to Correspondent Banking
Ludovico Rella*
Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
Since their emergence, blockchain technologies have shown potential for financial
inclusion and the formalization of remittances. Recently, regulators and practitioners
have studied the capabilities of blockchain technologies to streamline and, potentially,
replace the infrastructure underpinning cross-border payments and remittances,
i.e., correspondent banking. Correspondent Banking Relationships, also called
“Nostro-Vostro accounts,” are continuous bilateral arrangements that enable banks to
provide services in countries where they do not directly operate. After the Global Financial
Crisis, this infrastructure has undergone “de-risking,” i.e., a reduction of correspondent
accounts and their concentration in fewer financial institutions, with especially detrimental
Edited by: effects on costs and speed of retail cross-border remittances. The existing literature has
Chris Elsden,
University of Edinburgh,
mostly focused on the point of sale of remittances, often overlooking correspondent
United Kingdom banking. This paper, in contrast, connects remittances, blockchain technologies, and
Reviewed by: correspondent banking with the growing interest of critical social science in the
Quinn DuPont, significance of payment infrastructures for the constitution and configuration of money,
University College Dublin, Ireland
Supriya Singh, finance, and markets. By unpacking the critical case of Ripple, this paper shows that
RMIT University, Australia blockchain applications to remittances focus on profits, risks, costs, interoperability,
Beth Kewell,
Business School, University of Exeter,
“trapped liquidity,” and “idle capital” in correspondent banking accounts, rather than
United Kingdom on financial inclusion per se. In so doing, this paper contributes to critical social
*Correspondence: studies literature on the formalization of remittances, understood as the transformation
Ludovico Rella of remittances into a market frontier. Blockchain applications are shown to foster,
[email protected]
rather than resist, remittances formalization, and they are presently being incorporated
Specialty section: into existing infrastructures, business models, and regulatory structures. Rather than
This article was submitted to representing radically alternative monetary systems, blockchain technologies are the
Blockchain for Good,
a section of the journal
latest iteration of technologies heralding frictionless capitalism. Lastly, this paper shows
Frontiers in Blockchain the tensions and ambiguities inherent to interoperability and formalization. Blockchain
Received: 28 March 2019 technologies are dynamic in a way that problematizes dichotomies such formal-informal
Accepted: 30 September 2019
and mainstream-alternative. Hence, rather than providing a quantitative assessment
Published: 17 October 2019
of the impact of blockchain technologies, this paper investigates the ambiguities and
Citation:
Rella L (2019) Blockchain tensions in the political economy and imaginaries inscribed in the materiality and design
Technologies and Remittances: From of blockchain-enabled payment systems.
Financial Inclusion to Correspondent
Banking. Front. Blockchain 2:14. Keywords: remittances, formalization, correspondent banking, de-risking, blockchain technologies, cross-border
doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2019.00014 payments, infrastructures, inclusion
Frontiers in Blockchain | www.frontiersin.org 1 October 2019 | Volume 2 | Article 14

Rella Blockchain Technologies and Remittances
INTRODUCTION science in the significance of payment infrastructures for the

constitution and configuration of money, finance, and markets.
Cross-border payments have been one of the earliest and In this literature, payment infrastructures are understood to
most promising applications of blockchain technologies (Mills be political-economic technologies that produce and shape
et al., 2016). This is hardly surprising since blockchain spatialities of inclusion, exclusion, and monetary circulation
technologies emerged to manage monetary transactions in (see Jeffs, 2008; Desan, 2014; Roy and Crane, 2015). This paper
Bitcoin’s distributed network (Nakamoto et al., 2019). Blockchain does therefore not provide an economic analysis of the impact,
and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) promise instant success, or failure of applications of blockchain technologies in
clearing and settlement, and immutable and transparent remittances, nor does it measure and assess the efficiencies they
recording of transactions (Ali et al., 2014; Mori, 2016; Godfrey- generate in the payment industry more broadly.
Welch et al., 2018). Emerging at the fringe of formal finance, Instead, this paper investigates the political economy
and often in opposition to it, blockchain technologies are inscribed in the materiality and design of applications of
presently caught in a dynamic of “co-opetition” (Leal, 2014), i.e., blockchain and DLTs in remittances and cross-border payments
of de-politicization of their design, and increased competition (see Bátiz-Lazo et al., 2014; Nelms et al., 2018; Swartz, 2018).
between business implementations. Corporate co-optation of Specifically, we will focus on how blockchain technologies
blockchain technologies leads to ambiguous dynamics in the formalize remittances by streamlining their underpinning
payment space, caught in between interoperability and enclosure, clearing and settlement infrastructure, i.e., correspondent
disintermediation and re-intermediation, disruption, and rent banking. Correspondent banking is “the provision of banking
extraction (O’Dwyer, 2012, 2015). services by one bank (the “correspondent bank”) to another
Regulators, established financial institutions, and non- bank (the “respondent bank”)” (FATF, 2016, p.7). These
governmental organizations (NGOs) are turning toward Correspondent Banking Relationships (CBRs), organized in
blockchain technologies as promising tools for financial “Nostro and Vostro” accounts, are the infrastructural backbone
inclusion of the “unbanked” and “underserved,” and for the of most cross-border payments, including remittances (CPMI,
“formalization” (Mitchell, 2007) of hitherto informal value 2014). Despite its importance, however, correspondent banking
transfers, such as remittances (Silverberg et al., 2015; IMF, 2017; barely figures at all in the literature on cross-border payments
World Bank, 2017). Several start-ups and established firms and remittances (CPMI, 2016a).
are pursuing a similar agenda for more inclusive cross-border As a consequence of the Global Financial Crisis, CBRs
payments and remittance transfers. Four firms are frequently are presently undergoing “de-risking,” i.e., a reduction in the
mentioned: BitPesa, Abra, Stellar, and Ripple. This study focuses number of active bilateral arrangements (“corridors”) between
on Ripple, a start-up that promises to use blockchain technologies currency areas, and a concentration in the number of banks
and interoperability protocols to streamline the underpinning managing correspondent relationships (World Bank, 2015a, p.1).
infrastructure of remittances, that is, correspondent banking. De-risking is particularly detrimental for remittances, in that it
Remittances have long been part of a “financial inclusion disproportionately affects Money Transfer Operators (MTOs),
assemblage” (Schwittay, 2011) that comprises public agencies, NGOs, and local banks (FATF, 2016; Eckert et al., 2017).
NGOs, IGOs, private actors, and consortia, striving toward Furthermore, for many financial institutions, correspondent
inclusion, and, more recently, digitization. At the same time, the banking accounts are increasingly understood to represent costly
“migration-development nexus” discourse frames remittances and inefficient “idle capital.” The result of de-risking is that some
as an untapped market of informal value transfer (Durand banks and even entire countries might be completely cut off
et al., 1996; Bailey, 2005; Davies, 2007; Faist, 2008) that could from transnational remittance corridors. Hence, customers may
explode in magnitude if more people had access to formalized find themselves incapable of sending and receiving remittance
financial services and mobile and digital technologies (cf. payments, or they might incur in dramatically higher fees (World
Kleine and Unwin, 2009; Roy, 2010; Mader, 2018). An impetus Bank, 2015b, p. 31).
toward formalization drives both inclusion and digitization The core argument of this paper is that concerns about
(Mader, 2016; Datta, 2017). Formalization stands for the effort risks and efficiencies presently animating correspondent banking
toward making visible informal assets and internalizing them arrangements—rather than financial inclusion agendas per
into market dynamics (Mitchell, 2007). Formalization turns se—are driving the application of blockchain and DLTs in
remittances into assets that can be capitalized upon by extracting remittances. Previous critical social scientific research argues
transaction fees, monetizing users’ data, and leveraging these that digital technologies for financial inclusion are actually
payment streams into more sophisticated financial products motivated by the monetization of users’ data (Maurer, 2015a).
(Hudson, 2008; Gabor and Brooks, 2017). This paper argues that the application of DLTs within existing
The existing critical, inter-disciplinary social scientific correspondent banking arrangements aims to reduce costs and
literature in which this paper is situated tends to focus on the fees, and to mobilize the idle liquidity “locked up” in Nostro
point of sale and the everyday experiences and subjectivities and Vostro accounts (Maurer, 2016). This is achieved through
of remittance payers and payees, and thereby leaves payment interoperability, understood as the visibility and synchronization
infrastructures under-researched. This paper, in contrast, of payment systems to and with each other. Interoperability, in
will make a distinctive contribution by connecting the study turn, enables real-time clearing and settlement of transactions.
of remittances with the growing interest of critical social Ripple is almost the only case where blockchain, correspondent

banking, and remittances overlap. Hence, a study of this of design of a particular technology together with the cultures,
company is timely and relevant to apprehend the tensions imaginaries, and political economies associated with its use. In
and opportunities inherent to the application of blockchain this context, the very criteria of assessment of success and failure
technologies to cross-border payments. form part and parcel of the technology itself: the case “assumes
This article comprises four parts. Section Materials and the sociality of knowledge, the circulation of discourse as its
Methods will outline the methodology followed for this study. condition” (Berlant, 2007, p. 668). In so doing, one has to be
Section The Remittance industry from the Point of Sale to aware that “one result relies on multiple sources of evidence, with
Cross-Border Payment Infrastructures will provide an overview data needing to converge in a triangulating fashion” (Yin, 2003,
of the literature on remittances and its relative neglect of p. 18; cf. Leszczynski, 2018).
payment infrastructures. Combining Results and Discussion This paper focused on blockchain applications to interbank
section will unpack correspondent banking and its present payment infrastructures, rather than user-centered retail
transformation. Moreover, it will illustrate the application of remittances because this emerged as the central gap in the
blockchain technologies for payments and remittances through existing literature. A survey of the current literature evidenced
the case study of Ripple. Section Results and Discussion will BitPesa, Abra, Ripple, and Stellar as the most cited use cases of
also conclude by illustrating the limitations and ambiguities blockchain technologies for remittances and payments (Vigna
inherent to the promises that blockchain technologies purport. and Casey, 2015; Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016; World Bank,
Section Conclusions concludes by elaborating further on the 2017, 2018; Burniske and Tatar, 2018; DuPont, 2019). As it will
contribution of this paper to critical social literature on money, be expanded upon in section The Application of Blockchain
finance, and blockchain technologies. Technologies to Correspondent Banking, only Ripple and
Stellar provide applications of DLTs to correspondent banking
infrastructures. Stellar solutions for cross-border correspondent
MATERIALS AND METHODS banking are still in their infancy, while Ripple has a well-
documented record of partnerships with banks and MTOs. The
This paper draws on 18-month fieldwork constituted of difference in empirical material also made it hard to justify a
participant observation of industry meetings, conferences and comparative research design between Stellar and Ripple. Hence,
trade fairs (Høyer Leivestad and Nyqvist, 2017), online Ripple was chosen as the critical case of this research.
ethnography in online forums and group skype calls (Hjorth
et al., 2017), 15 in-depth interviews, and analysis of regulation,
policy papers, and other online multimedia material. This
research project has received ethical approval and clearance by THE REMITTANCE INDUSTRY FROM THE
the Departmental Research Ethics Geography Sub-Committee of POINT OF SALE TO CROSS-BORDER
the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK, on PAYMENT INFRASTRUCTURES
the 31st May 2017. All subjects gave written informed consent
following the Declaration of Helsinki. Remittances are “household income from foreign economies
This paper follows a case study research design that lies arising mainly from the temporary or permanent movement
between and takes insight from both gaps and holes (GAH), of people to those economies” (IMF (ed), 2009), p. 272).
and social construction of reality (SCR) research designs as These transfers happen through a variety of formal or
recently defined by Treiblmaier (2019) in this journal. First, informal channels. Informal arrangements comprise physical
following the GAH research design, correspondent banking transportation of cash and hawala, i.e., informal credit
and payment infrastructures were identified as the paramount networks of intermediaries called hawaladars (Thompson, 2008;
gap in the existing literature on remittances. Hence, potential Martin, 2009; Rusten Wang, 2011). At the formal end of
case studies were selected among companies that operated the spectrum, meanwhile, Remittance Service Providers (RSPs)
at the infrastructural level, rather than at the point of include banks, post offices, and credit unions and non-bank
sale of remittances. Subsequently, theory-building followed an financial intermediaries (NBFIs) of which Money Transfer
SCR design derived from the critical social science literature Organizations (MTOs) are the most important (Orozco, 2004;
on money, finance, and markets, especially drawing on UPU, 2013; Deloitte, 2017). Remittances grew from US$2 billion
poststructuralism and Science and Technology Studies (STS). in 1970 to US$31.2 billion in 1990, to more than US$400 billion
Rather than using case studies to test or disprove new and in 2016 (Datta, 2017, p. 539). In this period, remittances overtook
existing theories, Ripple here represents a critical case, one that overseas development assistance (ODA), coming second to
achieves “the greatest possible amount of information on a foreign direct investment (FDI) in many developing countries
given problem or phenomenon” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 77). Hence, (Ratha, 2003; IDB, 2006; Wills et al., 2010; Hudson, 2015). This
this study does not provide generalizability through replication. impressive growth caused remittances to attract attention from
Instead, it “builds theory from the rich descriptions gained researchers and practitioners.
during the analysis process” (Treiblmaier, 2019, p. 7). Rather than Development economics frames remittances as “aid that
assessing success and failure in deploying a specific technology, reaches its destination” (Bracking and Sachikonye, 2010, p. 218),
the research design of this study follows a radically interpretivist and assesses their economic impact in terms of net gains and
epistemology (Cavaye, 1996). This paper unpacks the politics losses, efficiencies, and market failures (Heilmann, 2006; Yang,

2011). This literature focused on measuring the “migration- Schwittay, 2014; Mader, 2018). Blockchain technologies are a
development nexus,” whereby remittances ostensibly transfer particular form of technologies of representation that allow
resources in a way that is beneficial for both the global South interoperability and seamlessness of transactions between the
and North (Datta, 2012, p. 141). Remittances are also praised as members of the network.
counter-cyclical, informal welfare systems that to lift families out In sum, the existing literature on remittances has productively
of poverty, and that benefit the originating countries’ balance of unpacked the “point of sale” of remittances (Maurer et al.,
payments (Barham and Boucher, 1998; De Haas, 2005; Brown, 2013), their affective economies (Hudson, 2015, p. 246), their
2006; Hudson, 2008; Mazzucato, 2009). cultural content (Carling, 2014; Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou,
However, critical scholarship has questioned the 2017), and the motives of senders and of recipients (Levitt,
emancipatory and transformative potential of remittances 1998; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011; Lacroix et al., 2016; Vari-
by highlighting its distributive asymmetries and hierarchies, Lavoisier, 2016). More broadly, it has also pointed toward the
illuminating how inclusion entails a dynamic of “adverse place of remittances and digital payments in the business of
incorporation” (Aitken, 2010). Remittances are traversed by a poverty capital, or what Maurer (2015a) aptly terms “poverty
“mission drift from poverty alleviation to profit maximization” payment.” However, comparatively less attention has been given
(Roy, 2010, p. 386). The constellation of actors that push for the to payment infrastructures, i.e., the technologies, devices, social
formalization of remittances is critically understood as “poverty and institutional arrangements, and accounting practices, that
capital” (Roy, 2010), or the “financial inclusion assemblage” allow and measure the value transfer from payer to payee
(Schwittay, 2011). According to the “migration-development (Lindley, 2009; Siegel and Fransen, 2013; Pollard et al., 2016;
nexus,” remittance formalization fosters development through Rea et al., 2017). Payment systems and their design have to be
financial inclusion, freeing the untapped markets and idle appreciated in their profound distributional and, indeed, political
assets that compose the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” implications (Desan, 2014; Maurer, 2015b). This is the focus of
(Prahalad, 2005; Collins et al., 2009). But, understood more the next section.
critically, the poor constitute a frontiers market (Mitchell, 2007;
Aitken, 2015): they are the “missing billions to be discovered, RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
accounted for, channeled and harnessed for development”
(Kunz, 2011, p. 49). In short, poor people “do not only possess Correspondent Banking and Remittances
assets but are assets” (Roy, 2010, p. 64). While banks themselves tend to take a back-seat position
Within the poverty capital business, the expansion of retail when it comes to providing direct remittance services, formal
payment technologies has fostered the emergence of “poverty remittance services often rely indirectly on a network of cross-
payment,” i.e., “the idea that the design of digital platforms border Correspondent Banking Relationships (CBRs) (Erbenová
for the transfer of value, agnostic as to what value is being et al., 2016, p. 17). Correspondent Banking is a continuous
transited or what it is being used for, has positive spillover arrangement between financial institutions that enable banks to
effects that ultimately benefit poor people” (Maurer, 2015a, p. provide services in countries where they do not directly operate.
128). This proliferation of mobile technologies and the political It covers cash management, international wire transfers, check
and industry-led effort toward cashless transactions lead to the clearing, payable-through accounts, and foreign exchange (FX)
emergence of a “fintech-philanthropy-development complex” services (The Wolfsberg Group, 2014). Correspondent Banking
(Donovan, 2012; Omwansa and Sullivan, 2012; Ojong, 2016). Relationships (CBRs) encompass so-called “Nostro and Vostro”
While payments are usually capitalized upon via transaction accounts. Nostro is the account of the respondent bank held by
fees (Cirasino and Ratha, 2009; Cross, 2015), poverty payment the correspondent bank. Vostro is the account on the books of
is inscribed in a tendency across the payment industry away the correspondent bank, conducted on behalf of the respondent
from fees and toward leveraging behavioral and transaction data bank (World Bank, 2015b, p. 13). Correspondent banking can
(Freund and Spatafora, 2008; Maurer, 2012a, 2016). be either limited to one respondent-correspondent relation,
As Datta (2017) has it, we can understand this move toward or “nested” or “downstream,” when one correspondent bank
inclusion and digitization as an effort toward the formalization serves several respondent financial institutions simultaneously
and mainstreaming of alternative and informal remittance flows. (BCBS, 2017, p. 24).
Mitchell (2007, p. 248) argues that markets have boundaries Correspondent banking is a distinctive feature of cross-
and limits, and there is a frontier region that lies between border payments, due to the lack of a worldwide infrastructure
“market” and “nonmarket” relations. This frontier separates of clearing and settlement. Clearing entails the exchange of
the formal economy, where assets’ ownership is recorded and relevant payment information between the payer’s and payee’s
fixed, and where everything can be traded for a price, from accounts, and the calculation of claims to settle. Settlement is
informal economic relations, where ownership regimes and the final discharge of a valid claim by moving funds from the
freedom of exchange are more flexible. Development economics payer’s account to the payee’s account (Rambure and Nacamuli,
helps to extend the rules of markets into informal economies 2008). In domestic payments, messaging, clearing, and settlement
by “technologies of representation” such as “property records, frequently happen in parallel to each other through Automated
prices, or other systems of reference.” These technologies allow Clearing Houses (ACH), and central bank Deferred Net
the mobilization, pricing, and trading, in short, the capitalization Settlement (DNS) retail payment systems (BIS, 2013). In cross-
on “dead capital” and idle assets (Soederberg, 2013, 2014; border payments, however, no such worldwide clearinghouse

exists, and transactions must pass through CBRs. Partial Another study by the World Bank (2015b) found that half of
exceptions are card payments, which are cleared by the card the respondents directly experienced a decline in correspondent
provider, e.g., Visa or MasterCard, and some large transnational banking relationships. Most of the large banks declared that
MTOs like Western Union, which might manage independent they actively reduced the number of their correspondent banking
end-to-end payment services depending on jurisdiction-specific relations in the 2012–15 period. The Financial Stability Board
conditions (CPSS, 2003; CPMI, 2014). estimated that, between 2011 and 2016, the number of active
While flows of funds happen in the books of respondent corridors decreased by 6.3% (from 13,072 to 12,242), and the
and correspondent banks, interbank messaging flows mainly number of active correspondents decreased by 6%. For the
through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial corridors to and from the Dollar and the Euro, that jointly
Telecommunications (SWIFT) (Scott and Zachariadis, 2013). represent more than 80% of the value of SWIFT payment
SWIFT is a member-owned, cooperative society comprising messages, the decrease was by 15% (FSB, 2017, p. 1).
more than 11,000 financial institutions across more than 200 These trends are uneven geographically, bearing
countries and territories (SWIFT, 2019). SWIFT, however, disproportionately on the Global South. While Europe and
does not provide clearing and settlement, but only transaction South and Central Asia have seen a somewhat consistent
messages. Once received, correspondent banks process these reduction in transaction costs between 2011, East Asia, Pacific,
messages to calculate the amounts to clear. Settlement, finally, Middle East, and both North and Sub-Saharan Africa have seen
happens through Foreign Exchange (FX) markets. Due to this an increase in transaction fees after 2014 (IMF, 2017, p. 20). In
high number of intermediaries, clearing and settlement are the Middle East and North Africa, 40% of banks reported higher
typically slower and more expensive in cross-border payments costs related to compliance and fees associated with remittances.
than in domestic payments. Partial fixes to these risks and costs Palestinian banks are under increased pressure and fears of CBR
are the introduction of the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) terminations that would impact on a financial system already in
bank in 2002 (CLS Group, 2019), and some voluntary schemes dire straits due to the relevance of the shekel in the Palestinian
in place in specific corridors, such as the one between US and economy (IMF, 2017, p. 17). In Sub-Saharian Africa, Liberia saw
Mexico (Orozco, 2004, p. 24). the termination of almost 50% of its CBRs (36 out of 75) between
In the past 10 years, the number of CBRs has decreased, and 2013 and 2016 (Erbenová et al., 2016, p. 15).
it was concentrated in the hands of fewer financial institutions. Sub-Saharian Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific are
First, CBR reduction and concentration is a consequence of especially affected geographies. Angola has been highlighted as
de-risking, i.e., risk and cost reduction strategies, based on particularly severely hit by Correspondent Banking reduction
regulatory compliance costs—e.g., Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and concentration. Just one correspondent bank was serving
Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating of the Financing six Angolan banks for foreign exchange services, and it was
of Terrorism (CFT)—and real or perceived risk profiles of providing US Dollar notes to 10 financial institutions in total.
partnering financial institutions (FSB, 2015). Second, revenues In 2015, all those relations ceased. Hence Angolan banks had
typically associated with cross-border payments have been to resort to downstream and nested correspondent banking
shrinking, such as transaction fees, FX margins, interest on relationships with subsidiaries of Angolan banks in EU, Africa,
Nostro-Vostro accounts, and float. Float is money “in flight” and Asia (World Bank, 2018, p. 15). The case of Angola is
between sender and receiver of a payment, and it is hence briefly emblematic of some commonalities across Africa, such as the
counted on both accounting books (Federal Reserve Bank of New heavy reliance on correspondent banking and foreign currency
York, 2007). In 2015, cross-border payments accounted for 20% (mainly US dollar) to fund international trade, such as the Sino-
of the volume, but 40% of the revenues associated with payments, Africa trade (Sy and Wang, 2016; IMF, 2017, p. 18). In the
for a total of US$ 300 billion, and remittances accounted for Caribbean, the Bahamas-Haiti corridor is another critical case:
US$ 25 billion (McKinsey, 2016, p. 14). The growth in revenues 75% of remittances are same-day settlement payments, which
from cross border payments decreased from 4% in 2011 to 2% in means that de-risking could have close-to-immediate effects on
2015, and revenue margins declined 2% on average between 2011 Haitian economy through remittance reduction (CPMI, 2015,
and 2015 (Ibid). Furthermore, the drop in interest rates made p. 10). The Pacific is considered problematic geography for the
the liquidity stored in Nostro and Vostro account less profitable relationship between correspondent banking and remittances:
(Bansal et al., 2016). the decrease of CBRs and the closure of remittance providers
In 2015, the World Bank (2015a) found that 80% of brought to a halt. In the case of Samoa, furthermore, remittances
responding financial institutions reported CBR reduction and compose 18% of the GDP, with 80% flowing through Money
consolidation, and 55% of local and regional banks reported spill- Transfer Operators that rely on the correspondent banking
over effects onto remittance-related companies. The Association infrastructure (IMF, 2017, p. 17).
of Supervisors of Banks in the Americas (ASBA) confirmed These trends also affect MTOs and charities
that, in 60% of responses, remittances were affected by CBR disproportionately, due to their real or perceived higher
reduction (Erbenová et al., 2016, p. 12). While this reduction risk profile and lower profitability as clients of correspondent
does not seem to impact on the volume and value of remittances, banks. Between 2010 the number of MTOs that had at least one
it shows to have a severe impact on their costs (IMF, 2017, p. bank account closed, resulting in an impediment to conduct
19). The number of active correspondent accounts worldwide cross-border business grew from 26 to 54%, while the amount of
fell from more than 520.000 to 480.000 (CPMI, 2016a, p. 15). MTOs that did not have any account closed each year decreased

from 67 to 42% (World Bank, 2015a, p. 7). As the World Bank (Leal, 2014). Corporate co-optation of blockchain technologies
(2018, p. 13) has it, “remittances are a volume business, and leads to ambiguous dynamics in the payment space, caught in
for small states, in particular, volumes are by definition small.” between interoperability and enclosure, disintermediation and
Hence, a price increase and a reduction of channels through re-intermediation, disruption, and rent extraction (O’Dwyer,
which to send payments affect smaller countries more than 2012, 2015). Some examples are the UBS-led Utility Settlement
bigger ones, local banks more than transnational ones, and Coin (Kaminska, 2017), R3 Corda (2018), the experiments
Money Transfer Operators more than banks. by SWIFT (2018), and CLS (Allison, 2018) for distributed
De-risking is particularly detrimental for remittances, because messaging, clearing, and settlement, and the newly launched coin
it affects the Global South and MTOs more acutely. Furthermore, by Morgan (2019). Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are striving
CBR reduction and concentration could push back a sizeable to achieve the status of a new asset class (Burniske and Tatar,
amount of remittance forms back into informality (IFC, 2017, 2018) to enable different ways of capitalizing on payments, in
p. 49) potentially also making AML and CFT screenings addition to transaction fees and data monetization. In June 2019,
less effective (cf. de Goede, 2003; Vlcek, 2010). To offset Facebook, together with a consortium of partners, announced its
these consequences, the IMF and the World Bank investigated cryptocurrency Libra, to be launched in 2020, which focuses on
blockchain technologies as potential alternatives to Nostro financial inclusion and remittances (Libra, 2019).
and Vostro accounts. Blockchain technologies promise to Payments and remittances have been a crucial use case of
introduce shared ledgers without the need to establish centralized blockchain technologies since their inception. Bitcoin, the first-
clearinghouses, making Nostro and Vostro accounts redundant ever blockchain promised to manage a distributed payment
(IMF, 2017; World Bank, 2018). The next section, hence, will network without a centralized institution for accounting,
focus on the relationship between Correspondent Banking, clearing, and settlement institution (Nakamoto et al., 2019).
blockchain technologies, and formalization. The first use case of blockchain technologies has been BitPesa.
Born in 2013, and inspired by the success of the Kenyan
The Application of Blockchain payment system M-Pesa (Omwansa and Sullivan, 2012), BitPesa
Technologies to Correspondent Banking manages payments between two fiat currencies by matching
The application of blockchain technologies in correspondent them with payments from the originating currency to Bitcoin,
banking centers on interoperability, i.e., with the mutual visibility and from Bitcoin to the currency of the country of destination
of ledgers, standards, payment infrastructures, and of individual (McKay, 2014; Scott, 2016). BitPesa has since expanded in
customers and transactions for spotting illicit behavior. As the geographical reach by serving eight countries across Africa, and
CPMI has it: it changed focus, from person-to-person (P2P) remittances to
business-to-business (B2B) operations, hence losing the original
emphasis on remittances per se (DuPont, 2019, p. 19). Hence,
“Interoperable payment systems enable the seamless interaction
BitPesa would not make a suitable case to study correspondent
of two or more proprietary acceptance and processing platforms,
and possibly even of different payment products, thereby banking, remittances and DLTs. The second example, Abra, was
promoting competition, reducing fixed costs, enabling economies mentioned by The World Bank as a system to manage “instant
of scale that help in ensuring the financial viability of the peer-to-peer money transfers with no transaction fees [. . . ]
service, and at the same time enhancing convenience for users of combining cryptocurrency with physical bank tellers” (World
payment services. The consequences of low interoperability are Bank, 2018, p. 29). Currently, however, Abra seems to have
overlapping or limited coverage, sunken investment costs, and focused on providing cryptocurrency wallets, as well as investing
inefficiency” (CPMI, 2016b, p. 34). and trading services, rather than cross-border payments (cf.
Cotton, 2018, p. 116). Ripple, on the other side, remained
Blockchain technologies promise interoperability through shared focused on cross-border payments, but it shifted focus from
ledgers held by all banks operating cross-border remittances. P2P to interbank payments, with the specific aim of replacing
In 2017, the IMF outlined some of the potential use cases of correspondent banking (Rosner and Kang, 2015). Stellar, which
blockchain technologies in correspondent banking, focusing on was born by branching out from Ripple’s source code in 2015
risk management, cost reduction, and real-time settlement (IMF, (Mazières, 2016), is undergoing a similar path through the
2017, p. 35–36). The World Bank further summarized distributed implementation, with IBM, of World Wire, that aims to compete
ledgers’ potential as that of “creating a distributed network for with both Ripple and SWIFT (IBM, 2019a). The next section will
cross-currency funds settlement that replaces the correspondent delve in more detail into the Ripple case.
banking network [. . . ] lowering settlement costs and increasing
efficiency [. . . ]. DLT can also allow for new approaches to Ripple: Formalization of Remittances and
correspondent banking, which can potentially be part of a Correspondent Banking
solution for addressing de-risking” (World Bank, 2017, p. 23). Older than Bitcoin itself, Ripple emerged in 2004 as a mutual
Blockchain technologies emerged at the fringe of formalized credit network like a hawala, a time bank, or a Local Exchange
capitalism, and often in opposition to it. However, blockchain Trading System (LETS). The primary use case for Ripple was
technologies are undergoing co-optation by market actors, de- to provide an infrastructure for scaling up LETS and other
politicization of their design, and increased competition between alternative currencies (Fugger, 2004). Between 2012 and 2013,
business implementation, a dynamic labeled as “co-opetition” Ripple morphed into a distributed ledger technology—the XRP

Ledger—that combines the mutual credit network with the “In addition to allowing poor customers to become a
cryptoasset XRP and a distributed currency exchange (XRP profitable market segment, open protocols and distributed
Ledger Project, 2019). Ripple is also the name of the company architectures can enable entirely new and novel offerings.”
that offers payment solutions built on top of the XRP Ledger, as (Aranda and Zagone, 2015).
well as on other technologies. While Ripple still owns a significant
amount of the cryptoasset XRP, the XRP Ledger remains an To allow the poor to become a profitable market segment,
open distributed ledger, that is not under the direct control of hence advancing the frontier, Ripple’s interoperability protocols
the company Ripple. Since 2015, the company Ripple focused promise to unlock the pools of liquidity “trapped” in Nostro and
primarily on interbank payments, aiming to become a competitor Vostro accounts, that Ripple estimated between US$ 1.6 to 5
to SWIFT, and it currently counts 200 customers in 40 countries. trillion (Zagone, 2016; Ripple, 2018a). Here is a statement of one
The XRP Ledger represents money in two ways: trust lines of Ripple’s software developers:
and XRP. Trust lines are IOUs representing promises to pay
denominated in any unit of account they want. The system, “We found in our research that the biggest cost was the cost of
in fact, allows users to create entirely new currencies and to capital. So, banks had a huge amount of money sitting in Nostro
program their behavior. If a direct trust line connects them, and Vostro accounts all over the world to be able to facilitate
people can pay each other by changing the balances on that payments. So, you have two options: I can either offer you, my
customer, an immediate payment, or I can make you wait. If
trust line. Otherwise, they can send payments across mutual
I want to provide you with instant payments, I need to have
acquaintances. Payments “ripple” through trust lines between liquidity sitting in the destination country where you want to send
payer and payee if there is an uninterrupted chain of trust to, all the time1 .”
lines. Alternatively, they can send each other XRP, which can
be sent from any user to any other without the need for trust
As said before, this liquidity pressure is particularly hard,
lines. If the payment requires a currency exchange, the amount
especially in low-value payments, for MTOs rather than banks.
flows through offers on the distributed exchange, which works
Here is a comment from a Brazilian remittance company, part
like a digital FX marketplace. People post offers on the Ledger,
of RippleNet:
and the system matches outgoing payments with open offers to
exchange one currency with another and finds the most suitable
“So, the client would pay in our account, and we would have to
option. The offers included in the calculation do not only include send these transactions to a partner bank’s account for them to be
direct exchanges between one currency and another, but also able to send it abroad. If we had, let’s say, 100 transactions a day,
offers to exchange the outgoing currency with XRP, and XRP we would send 100 SWIFT messages. And that, of course, brings
to the destination currency. This feature is called autobridging, up the cost of the transactions, because it depends on the corridor,
and it uses XRP as a bridge asset in exotic or illiquid currency but it’s 20 reais to send a SWIFT [. . . ]. The euro is worth more than
pairs (Birla, 2018). Furthermore, XRP promises to provide “on- four times more than reais, so when I am increasing the volumes
demand liquidity” (Ripple, 2019a): rather than relying on batched that I settle in euros, I actually send a lot of reais abroad. That
payments as in the case of foreign exchange payments routed means that I have less liquidity in Brazil, and at the end of the day
through major international currencies, the XRP ledger sources it’s really hard for a small company to operate at high volumes if
you actually have to pre-fund an account2 .”
liquidity on a payment-by-payment basis.
From the beginning, Ripple marketed itself as a “new and
better Bitcoin” for the unbanked and underbanked (Bullington, MTOs are more vulnerable to de-risking because of the
2014; Detmering, 2014; Long, 2014). Bitcoin promised a cheap inherently hierarchical design of payment systems: payment
and fast means for value transfer, but its high transaction fees and systems are layered, resembling a pyramid, with central banks at
slow transaction processing prevented Bitcoin from delivering the top, hosting commercial banks’ accounts, which in turn host
on that promise (Schwartz et al., 2014). Ripple, conversely, MTOs’ and individuals’ accounts (CPSS, 2003, p. 3). On the XRP
promised higher speed, and lower fees and by providing an Ledger, conversely, any account can issue liabilities in the form
interoperability layer between payment systems. Ripple promises of a trust line, and all issuers are treated equally by the Ledger.
to be the Internet Protocol for a new Internet of Value in the This quote from an interview with a former software engineer at
making (Leonard, 2017). A 2014 post perfectly encapsulates Ripple explains this principle quite clearly:
this turn of blockchain technologies into a new frontier of
capital expansion: “Now if you’re a lower level business like a remittance company,
you have a bank account. You keep your money in a bank, and
you are a lower tier organization. If [an MTO] tried to help
“Far from its misunderstood characterization as an ideological
move money for banks and said, “Oh good, you deposit money
revolution to usurp institutions or a subversive vehicle for the
here,” banks would go “No, no, no. That’s the wrong way around.
dark arts, the cryptocurrency movement is about advancing the
You’re below us.” In the financial ecosystem, if you are a bank
frontier” (Liu, 2014).
and you want to use XRP to send money, you need to buy it from
someone, and where do you buy it from? You can’t go “Oh bank,
Ripple’s proposition for the poor focuses primarily on
new opportunities for profits and market expansion for 1 Confidential interview, 25th May 2018, minutes 10:10 – 10:35.
financial institutions: 2 Confidential interview, 5th December 2018, minutes 51:00 – 52:00.

we want you to deposit a bunch of Euros into [a cryptocurrency the promise of the seamlessness of exchanges and frictionlessness
exchange],” that’s upside down for them. But for a payment service of flows typical of logistics (Maurer, 2012b; Plantin and
provider like a remittance company, that’s fine: they have lots of Punathambekar, 2019). Much as just-in-time logistics promised
bank accounts with people. If you say, “We’ll open a bank account to make the warehouse obsolete, so instant payments promise to
at [this exchange]” They’d go “Awesome, I’ve got to keep my make Nostro and Vostro accounts outdated, or so the belief goes
money somewhere, might as well use XRP3 .”
(Gregson et al., 2017). Standardization of messaging, clearing,
and settlement work like the size of the railway gauge, the
The promise of leveling the payment system hierarchy is standardized dimensions of the shipping container, and the open
mirrored by another interviewee, this time about the relationship telecommunication protocols of Ethernet, SMTP, and TCP-IP in
between banks and countries in the Global South: making flows seamless and reserves and warehouses redundant
(Liu, 2015; Rossiter, 2016).
“In Thailand, they are quite keen [to use crypto], because
On top of cutting transaction costs, Ripple also promises
their credit score is already comparatively lower than advanced
to tackle another source of correspondent banking de-risking,
economies [. . . ]. In Mexico, again, because the country’s score is
quite low, they are quite happy to use cryptocurrencies. You sell namely KYC-AML compliance costs. In multiple hearings and
USD, buy XRP, you sell XRP and buy Mexican peso. The thing is public consultations, Ripple pledged to provide stronger visibility
that those two separate transactions happen precisely at the same of funds transfers than what SWIFT can deliver. As a response to
time, so a bank would never have to hold XRP, would never have a the UK Payment System regulator, Ripple articulated the visibility
position, being exposed if the value might go down. Because that’s of transactions on the XRP Ledger in this way: “Unlike payments
a significant risk, right?4 ” sent through correspondent banking today, which are opaque
at best, Ripple Ledger provides complete end-to-end transaction
Originally, Ripple’s business proposition was to substitute CBRs traceability” (Gifford, 2015, p. 13). This is a sharp change from
and SWIFT with the XRP Ledger. Financial institutions and the concern with anonymity and privacy that heralded the
MTOs would have been gateways, i.e., accounts on the XRP very emergence of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies
Ledgers that accept deposits off-ledger and issue trust lines (Swartz, 2018, p. 632).
on the ledger to represent those deposits. Messaging, clearing, In at least one case an MTO reported that the integration in
and settlement of cross-border payments would have happened Ripple was a success, saying:
by rippling on trust lines from payers to payees through the
gateways. FX market makers and liquidity providers would have “We have since seen very good results: we were able to bring
issued exchange offers and provided the liquidity necessary down the prices of the operations, we don’t charge a SWIFT fee
to fund cross-currency payments. Regulatory uncertainties and to our clients anymore. Previously we were charging a cost of 20
reluctance from financial institutions—especially banks—made Brazilian reais, which is about 7 dollars5 .”
Ripple develop the Interledger Protocol or ILP (Thomas and
Schwartz, 2015). ILP does not send payments over a blockchain:
However, Ripple’s website only rarely provides assessments of the
instead, it synchronizes the ledgers of all financial institutions
direct savings for intermediaries and end-users. Furthermore, it is
in the Ripple network (RippleNet). This ensures that both legs
too early to tell whether there is uniformity in the benefits across
of cross-border transactions happen simultaneously, and they
the Ripple network. Rather than assessing Ripple’s successes and
either both succeed or they both fail. In transaction-processing
failures, this paper illustrates the changing landscape of actors,
software jargon, this property is called atomicity and, together
interests, and promises surrounding new payment technologies.
with consistency, isolation, and durability, constitutes the so
While payments powered by the Interledger Protocol are now
called ACID test of transaction processing. As Amsterdam (2001;
live in many corridors, payments using the cryptocurrency XRP
cf. IBM, 2019b) succinctly puts it,
are being rolled out only recently. Ripple announced that xRapid,
their corporate product that uses XRP as a bridge asset, was being
“An activity is atomic if it either happens in its entirety, or
does not happen at all. Atomicity is crucial for writing correct used in the US-Mexico corridor on the 1st of October 2018.
software in many applications; for example, a bank’s software may On the 17th of June 2019, Ripple entered an agreement with
implement a transfer from account A to account B as a withdrawal MoneyGram. This company is the world’s second-largest MTO
from A followed by a deposit to B. If the first action happens, then after Western Union (Meola, 2016), with a market capitalization
the second had better happen as well.” of US$ 148 million (Nasdaq, 2019) and an average revenue per
quarter of US$ 300 million (MoneyGram, 2019). According to
The promise of mobilizing idle assets by synchronizing this agreement, Ripple will provide up to US$ 50 million in
circulation performs an imaginary of money as liquidity and exchange for equity in MoneyGram over 2 years, and the two
lubricant of the engine of the economy. At the same time, it fulfills companies will jointly work on XRP-enabled payments (Ripple,
2019b). After signing this agreement, MoneyGram’s stock
3 Confidential interview, 15th May 2018, minutes 1:01:25 – 1:02:31. Names of increased by 155% in valuation (Easton and Bloomberg, 2019).
partners and companies removed.
4 Confidential interview, 10th October 2017, minutes 20:00 – 21:40. Names of
partners and companies removed. 5 Confidential interview, 5th December 2018, minutes 1:45–17:35.

The application of Ripple to correspondent banking entailed each other. The frontier of disintermediation and transaction
a change both of its money cultures and the political economy fee reduction is moving to the so-called “Layer 2” and
of its actual use. From a hawala credit network geared toward “Layer 3” technologies, such as payment channels, decentralized
Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), Ripple became more exchanges, and open interoperability protocols (Poon and Dryja,
oriented toward profit maximization. A senior Ripple employee 2016; Casey, 2018; Herlihy, 2018). The Interledger Protocol
synthesized Ripple’s morphing thusly: or ILP is one such technology. However, by making Ripple
potentially interoperable with other payment systems, the ILP
“You can still use the XRP Ledger as a distributed exchange, as simultaneously puts Ripple in danger of seeing its margins eroded
a LETS system, as a hawala-like community credit and lending. by the competition fostered by its technology (Bloomberg, 2019;
And now, we kind of said “what is the product-market fit for this Coppola, 2019; Sloane, 2019).
Ledger? What’s the market that we can target with it?” And most As the struggle for interoperability moves away from
of the use cases that we were most interested in the early days
immediate end-users, blockchain technologies tend to disappear
like community credits and the LETS feature and the issued asset
from view. This eclipse is inherent to technologies becoming
feature, there just wasn’t really a market for it, we didn’t see a way
that we as Ripple as a company could target. That does not mean infrastructural: they become taken for granted, and they reappear
that if another company wanted to use the XRP Ledger to target only when they break down (Star, 1999). In fact, an MTO
community credit market, that would be wonderful, but Ripple employee said that the application of Ripple’s technologies to
had to focus on something6 .” their remittance platform was not associated with co-branding
or with major changes in the user interface and experience7 .
Ripple raised a total of US$ 93.6 million in Venture Capital (VC) However, this disappearance can never be full, lest it becomes
funding across eight funding rounds between 2012 and 2016. unworkable and economically unviable for the actors deploying
The company also holds a sizeable amount of the cryptoasset and running it. Rather than leading to the vanishing of any
XRP, which brought its valuation at US$ 20 billion in January geographical articulation, these media entail specific geographies
2019, given the market price of XRP in cryptocurrency exchanges of calculation (DuPont, 2019, 189). The tensions between
(CoinMarketCap, 2019; Rooney, 2019). The MTO TransferGo, “fictions and frictions” (Pesch and Ishmaev, 2019) that propel
presenting at a public Ripple event, described the aim of the blockchain technologies’ expansion in the payment space is not
partnership in enabling its business to grow: “how do you get accidental, but inherent to the economic theories, models, and
from 1 to 10 to 100 million users?” (Ripple, 2018d minute assumptions that these technologies perform.
5:45). The Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), furthermore, recently
launched a Japan-Thailand remittance product based on Ripple’s CONCLUSIONS
technologies (Marquer, 2017). As SCB’s Chief Technology
Officer reported, the partnership with Ripple and the focus on This paper analyzed remittances by foregrounding the
remittances aim toward an “aggressive ambition and expansion” infrastructure that makes these payments possible, i.e.,
of SCB (Ripple, 2018c minute 7:00). correspondent banking. This focus is all the more timely
The move of Ripple’s solutions toward profit maximization as formalization draws a bigger and bigger proportion of
entails and implies Ripple’s incorporation in existing regulatory remittance flows into formal banking channels. Blockchain
structures. Ripple was the second blockchain company to obtain technologies do not represent a rupture in the tendency toward
a New York bitcoin license in July 2016 (NYS - DFS, 2016). remittance formalization. Instead, these innovations may
Ben Lawsky, the very author of the bitcoin license, went on to strengthen formalization and capitalization on remittances. By
join Ripple’s board of directors (Ripple, 2019a). Ripple has also promising interoperability and frictionless payments, blockchain
been a member of payment improvements working groups of technologies aim to free idle capital, democratize liquidity
established by the Automated Clearing House and the Federal and flatten the existing “pyramid” of monies encompassing
Reserve in the US, and it collaborated on Real-Time Gross MTOs, correspondent banking accounts, clearinghouses, and
Settlement (RTSG) improvement efforts in the UK and Saudi central bank settlement systems (Caytas, 2016; Wandhöfer,
Arabia (Bank of England, 2017; Ripple, 2018b). 2017). Simultaneously, the use of blockchain technologies
Blockchain technologies are the latest development in network to expand the frontier of market relations turns blockchain
technologies promising “frictionless capitalism” (Pesch and technologies themselves into a new market frontier through their
Ishmaev, 2019, 4) in the form of low transaction costs and incorporation in legacy infrastructures, business solutions, and
disintermediation. However, as these technologies gain traction, public and private regulation. Furthermore, the original stress
new forms of expertise, specialization, and institutionalization and focus on anonymity is attenuated by harnessing the capacity
create new frictions and costs. While blockchain technologies of blockchain technologies to better track transactions.
disintermediate internally, they re-intermediate, albeit in a The imaginary of frictionless circulation and transaction cost
decentralized way, between each other. As Nelms et al. (2018) annihilation has its own inherent limits. While a blockchain
have it, blockchain disintermediation coexists with walled can provide interoperability and simultaneity of clearing
gardens and “siloed” networks that cannot interoperate with and settlement, each blockchain is a separate network,
6 Confidential interview, 30th May 2019, minutes 59:00 – 1:00:00. 7 Confidential interview 5th December 2018, minutes 45:40 – 47:00.

following its own rules and following different accounting actualization of inherent positive or negative tendencies and
standards. As more and more blockchain technologies potentialities, rather than a process of mutual shaping, dependent
emerge, this creates more, not fewer intermediaries, with on enabling and disabling factors. This literature needs to
the result of reproducing the transaction costs that were reconcile with previous scholarship on money and finance
meant to disappear. Hence, blockchain interoperability to understand not only how the new technology impacts
moves the competition from the cross-border to cross- on existing hierarchies, but how both existing and emerging
chain payments, as testified by the emergence of “Layer technologies influence one another. Blockchain technologies
2” interoperability solutions. Despite the flamboyance of are neither embryonic forms of radically different societies
blockchain marketing, its most important applications and monetary systems, nor business as usual. Instead, they
will impact on less flashy and more “boring” sectors of “productively engage in and perform a plurality [of modes
banking and payments, such as middleware (DuPont, of finance], thus blurring the line between alternative and
2019, p. 172) and back-office reporting and interoperability dominant, formal and informal, embedded and disembedded”
(Fanning and Centers, 2016). (Maurer, 2012c, p. 415). The study of digital money needs to
Hence, the “inherent” tendency of blockchain technologies foreground competition, conflict, and redistribution of resources,
toward disintermediation is not unambiguous. As existing beyond both solutionism (Morozov, 2013) and dystopian
and incumbent financial players are flocking toward cynicism (Golumbia, 2016).
blockchain technologies for clearing and settlement of
payments, existing power structures can be challenged but DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
also reinvented and reinforced. Maurer (2015b) rightly
pointed out that the ownership, design, and access to The datasets for this manuscript are not publicly available
payment infrastructures are deeply political problems because of confidentiality and anonymity agreements with
that refer to the nature of money as a social institution. research participants. Requests to access the datasets should be
Blockchain research, based on the novelty and unruly origins directed to LR, [email protected].
of the technology, has produced a wealth of literature
both on its technical aspects and inner workings, on the
alternative imaginaries that inform this design, and on
ETHICS STATEMENT
the economic practices that it can enable. The increased This research project has received ethical approval and clearance
corporate co-optation and competition, comparatively, by the Departmental Research Ethics Geography sub-Committee
received far less scrutiny. This paper, hence, tried to of the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK, on
show the process of co-optation and formalization without the 31st May 2017. All subjects gave written informed consent in
giving analytical primacy to either existing infrastructures or accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
emergent technologies.
The impact of blockchain technologies is ambiguous, both in
terms of costs, risks, and speed, and in political and moral terms AUTHOR’S NOTE
(Campbell-Verduyn and Goguen, 2018). As Caytas (2016) has
This paper draws on 18-month online and offline fieldwork
it, cost-benefit analyses are particularly hard in this field, due to
constituted of participant observation of industry meetings,
its ever-changing transformations (Godfrey-Welch et al., 2018).
conferences and trade fairs, online ethnography in online
Again, the interviews I conducted seem to point toward a general
forums and group skype calls, 15 in-depth interviews,
appreciation of the improvements brought by Ripple, but more
and analysis of regulation, policy papers, and other online
research is needed in the lived experience of the payers. This
multimedia material.
paper pointed out that there is a gap in the literature on the
“rails and pipelines” that underpin remittance transfers, and that
most of the research tends to concentrate on the point of sale. AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
This paper’s limitation is specular: by foregrounding remittance
infrastructure, this paper has comparatively overlooked the The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and
individual end-users. has approved it for publication.
For both blockchain enthusiasts and skeptics, the literature
tends to produce an infrastructural double inversion. Bowker FUNDING
and Star (2000, p. 34) defined infrastructural inversion as a
methodological move that, counter to infrastructure’s invisibility This doctoral research was funded by the UK Economic and
in everyday life, foregrounds the material and technological Social Research Council, North East, and Northern Ireland
substratum that makes social practices possible. Blockchain Doctoral Training Partnership, grant number ES/J500082/1.
literature has been beneficial in foregrounding and in making
“transparent” this technology (DuPont, 2019). However, it ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
has somehow obscured and forgotten the broader social
processes in which it is inscribed and deployed. The adoption I would like to thank Prof. Paul Langley, Dr. Chris Elsden, and
of these technologies is often narrated as a process of the three reviewers for the help in editing this article.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH

published: 17 October 2019

Blockchain Technologies and

Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom

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