From Boundary Object to Boundary Infrastructure: Governing Bitcoin as a Digital Monetary Infrastructure

The paper conceptualize Bitcoin as a digital infrastructure whose regulation reconfigures novel participation in monetary governance (who can issue, transact, surveil, and innovate), and as a site of competing democratic imaginaries around risk, innovation, and sovereignty. More specifically, the paper proposes a political sociological account of how Bitcoin and adjacent digital instruments are reshaping the governance of money, as digital infrastructures diffuse into democratic polities. Treating Bitcoin as a large scale social experiment, the paper traces how a bottom up monetary insurgency, grounded in libertarian imaginaries and “folk economics”, becomes progressively woven into mainstream financial infrastructures and state projects. It follows this trajectory through community formation, governance conflicts, and institutional absorption, highlighting a paradox of “decentralized centralization”, in which new oligarchies of miners, investors, platforms, and regulators come to steer a technology, originally designed to bypass trusted authorities. The paper situates Bitcoin within a broader hybrid monetary ecosystem that now includes stablecoins, tokenized assets, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It argues that these instruments operate on shared “boundary infrastructures” that blur distinctions between “legacy” finance and “crypto”. Conceptually, the paper shows how Bitcoin has functioned both as a “boundary object” for competing imaginaries of money and as a catalyst for reconfiguring the infrastructural, institutional, and symbolic foundations of contemporary monetary orders. In doing so, it contributes to Section 71’s agenda by foregrounding the institutional and political economy dynamics through which digital monetary infrastructures reallocate participation, authority, and influence in democratic digital governance.