Facing blockchain’s double bind: Trustless technologies and “IRL friends” in Berlin’s NFT community

Abstract

How does a community remain committed to an imagined digital future despite that future’s inherent contradictions? This article analyzes such a challenge as it was faced by Berlin’s NFT (non-fungible token) enthusiasts. Dominant narratives about NFTs and other blockchain technologies envision a virtual and ostensibly trust-free future, but these enthusiasts’ pursuit of such “trustless technologies” resulted in a double bind. In this bind, they repudiated trust relations on the web without the means to fully obviate such relations, leaving blockchain’s trustless future in doubt. To resolve this bind, Berlin’s NFT enthusiasts expanded their interactions by assembling in-person. In Berlin’s offline spaces, they found trust relations they deemed permissible according to the dominant blockchain ideology. Rather than blur the boundary between the virtual and physical, this community maintained distinct interactional norms in each, enabling them to maintain their imagined blockchain future.