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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 effects on costs and speed of retail cross-border remittances. The existing literature has mostly focused on the point of sale of remittances, often overlooking correspondent banking. This paper, in contrast, connects remittances, blockchain technologies, and correspondent banking with the growing interest of critical social science in the significance of payment infrastructures for the constitution and configuration of money, finance, and markets. By unpacking the critical case of Ripple, this paper shows that blockchain applications to remittances focus on profits, risks, costs, interoperability, "trapped liquidity," and "idle capital" in correspondent banking accounts, rather than on financial inclusion per se. In so doing, this paper contributes to critical social studies literature on the formalization of remittances, understood as the transformation of remittances into a market frontier. Blockchain applications are shown to foster, rather than resist, remittances formalization, and they are presently being incorporated into existing infrastructures, business models, and regulatory structures. Rather than representing radically alternative monetary systems, blockchain technologies are the latest iteration of technologies heralding frictionless capitalism. Lastly, this paper shows the tensions and ambiguities inherent to interoperability and formalization. Blockchain technologies are dynamic in a way that problematizes dichotomies such formal-informal and mainstream-alternative. Hence, rather than providing a quantitative assessment of the impact of blockchain technologies, this paper investigates the ambiguities and tensions in the political economy and imaginaries inscribed in the materiality and design of blockchain-enabled payment systems.

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have garnered significant attention in scholarship and beyond. Geographical work on cryptocurrencies has focussed on how their energy demand interacts with local communities and economies. Less is said about the organization of cryptoasset firms and their associated demands. This paper illuminates the complex geographies of one such firm, Bitfury Group, to investigate the global and national forms and structures such companies take and the factors encouraging them to concentrate operations in certain areas. To investigate the latter, we adopt the case study of Bitfury's operations in Georgia, a South-Caucasian country where its presence is significant. We adapt Haberly et al.'s analytical framework to explore Bitfury's geographical dimensions. We highlight how cheap electricity, regulatory and taxation regimes, personal encounters and personalities, and the materialities of hardware and energy-saving technology define these geographies and illuminate how Bitfury actively curates advantageous regulatory spaces. We encourage future work exploring Blockchain and Bitcoin technologies to understand the companies involved as simultaneously material and virtual, and as centrepieces in global networks interweaving production and finance.

This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance. ; Previous title: Intervention: Democratising infrastructure