Trust in the Trustless: Chronotopes of Currency in Adult Industry Crypto

Esra Soraya Padgett

Economic Anthropology, 2026, vol. 13, issue 1

Abstract: Disillusioned by decades of financial discrimination, from the closing of bank accounts to banning by payment processors and exclusion from mortgages, LLCs, and lines of credit, sex workers find themselves in need of an alternative means of transaction. One possible alternative is cryptocurrency, where a shared sense of distrust in financial institutions has created an alliance between two industries seeking financial autonomy and a way around financial exclusion. For many blockchain developers, the goal is trustlessness: the ability of a financial system to operate free of actors whose actions cannot be foreseen or controlled. However, even the sex workers implementing blockchain technology remain skeptical of trustlessness, particularly any system's or application's ability to sustain autonomy from the economic regulations that have impacted their livelihood. Building on ethnographic data, the article explores the analytic utility of trust for understanding the contradictions that inhere in illiberal economies and offers the conceptual framework of chronotopes of currency, an approach to monetary circulation that considers temporal and spatial scalability.

Date: 2026
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