Decentralised finance: another end of geography?

This collection asks whether Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is a mode of financial intermediation that disrupts and reconfigures the current geographies of global finance. While geographers have paid ample attention to the digitisation and platformisation of finance, the geographies of DeFi have received relatively little attention from economic and financial geographers. Crucially, though, DeFi has become much more than being about cryptocurrencies alone. Accordingly, this collection pushes the scope beyond a strict definition of DeFi. It asks how the underlying technologies become entangled with Traditional Financial (TradFi) institutions and spaces and enable new practices, sometimes beyond what occurs in DeFi spaces. Where relevant, the collection is attentive to pre-histories of decentralisation in finance and their implications for understanding contemporary DeFi debates. The papers cover a broad spectrum of financial intermediation. The collection recasts the question as one that is less about the autonomous spatial logic of DeFi, but more about how the mainstreaming of the underlying financial technologies shapes the changing spatial articulation of finance.