Playing with Money

This chapter introduces ‘cultural economy of finance’ as a framework that guides the book and its analysis and offers a preliminary introduction to blockchain and cryptogaming—the book’s primary focus. It also introduces the book’s key argument—that cryptogames embody logics of financialisation, specifically, logics of speculation, assetization, and arbitrage. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book’s approach, scope, and chapters that follow.