Social Finance Meets Financial Innovation: Contemporary Experiments in Payments, Money and Debt

Abstract

This special section explores the intersection of social finance and financial innovation in contemporary technologies of relational finance. The articles that follow study detailed cases of contemporary experiments in payments, money and credit-debt relations. By way of introduction, in this short piece we outline three paradoxes at the heart of these experiments: the feudal life of capitalist financial innovation; the social life of supposedly asocial crypto-currencies; and the market life of relational financial dissent.