Can cryptocurrency truly democratize access to financial opportunities? The award-winning research by Professor Jonalou S. Labor, PhD, shows the answer may be more complicated than its advocates suggest.
Labor received the Top Faculty Paper Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) – Philosophy, Theory, and Critique (PTC) Division for his paper, “Beyond Revolutionary Promises: How Cryptocurrency Adoption in Rural Philippines Reinforced Existing Inequalities.”
Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in the Bicol region, the study examined how cryptocurrency communities and government institutions collaborated in promoting cryptocurrency adoption. The research explored whether the technology’s promises of financial inclusion, economic empowerment, and decentralization translated into meaningful benefits for local communities.
Drawing on Campbell-Verduyn’s (2024) framework of “bad policy” in cryptocurrency governance, Labor found that despite the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding cryptocurrency, its adoption often reinforced existing social and economic inequalities.
The study observed that government agencies gained innovation credentials while strengthening their surveillance capacities, and educated entrepreneurs acquired new resources and opportunities while gradually abandoning revolutionary aspirations. Meanwhile, informal traders and unbanked populations, who are often identified as potential beneficiaries of cryptocurrency, remained largely excluded from its advantages.
For Labor, the research was also deeply personal. “Since I am a Bicolano myself, I know my fellow Bicolanos’ eagerness to create new economic pathways for themselves, as the region is known to be economically lagging behind most regions in the country,” he shared. With a poverty rate of 20.3%, which is nearly double the national average, and a young, educated population facing limited local employment opportunities, the Bicol region exhibits both the economic need and demographic conditions often associated with cryptocurrency adoption.
In the study, three mechanisms through which inequalities were reproduced: formalization requirements that created differential participation, infrastructure provision that disproportionately benefited already-advantaged populations, and temporal lock-in that constrained opportunities for policy correction. “This suggests that cryptocurrency’s role in the Global South, particularly in the case of Bicol, may lie less in revolutionary transformation and more in creating opportunities that primarily benefit already privileged actors,” Labor explained.
Reflecting on the project, Labor emphasized the value of documenting the evolving relationship between cryptocurrency communities and state institutions. He expounded that by analyzing these developments through a critical lens revealed how institutional collaborations transformed both government agencies and cryptocurrency communities while “producing deeply unequal outcomes.”
The research is part of a project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and led by Dr. Steffen Köhn of the Department of Anthropology at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. The UP Diliman College of Media and Communication serves as an institutional collaborator through Labor’s postdoctoral research fellowship.
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