Liquid platforms: Theorising the new digital economy

Existing scholarship often employs metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded spaces. This paper introduces the concept of ‘liquid platforms’, inspired by the metaphor of liquidity, to critically examine the fluid, layered and contested nature of contemporary digital economies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with non-fungible token collectors and industry leaders based in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how these actors enact a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ through the manipulation of fluid platform boundaries, labour-intensive ‘grinding’ practices and visualisation tools, all aimed at imbuing non-fungible tokens with liquidity. Despite these efforts to manufacture price stability, platforms remain susceptible to structural liquidity corrections. The analysis highlights the increasingly important role that platforms – both as infrastructural and sociotechnical systems – play in generating liquidity. The ‘liquid platform’ metaphor offers a valuable framework for understanding the ever more complex, unstable dynamics that shape modern digital economies.