Holding Volatility: Exocapitalism and Web3 | Laura Lotti & Andrea Leiter

Thu, Jul 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

Holding Volatility: Exocapitalism and Web3 | Laura Lotti [other Internet] Andrea Leiter [University of Amsterdam] Moderated by: Beth McCarthy What happened to the institutional ambitions of web3? For anyone who has been trying to push a progressive project in the ecosystem, the last years were grim. Funding dried up and many projects closed shop. Meanwhile financial applications continue to grow with the expansion of stablecoins, prediction markets and ever wilder forms of assetisation. Reading Exocapitalism, the new book by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, feels like finally having language for something that could long be sensed. The book stages capitalism as an 'algorithmic germ', a mode of thought that 'can be done on anything'. All it desires is to 'lift' – to abstract itself from terrestrial constraints into a space where 'price becomes worldmaking.' Value accrues through arbitrage – buy-hold-sell – generating ‘economies with absolutely no limits’ that, however, bear little concern for the material and social infrastructure that sustains them. From this standpoint, crypto is paradigmatic of the logic of exocapitalism. ‘This whole thing is lifted af', as the authors put it. In this fireside chat, Laura Lotti and Andrea Leiter use the surface that the book opens up for discussing how value gets produced, distributed and extracted in crypto, and what that means for human agency. Drawing on a decade of experience in advancing social and ecological justice projects with and through blockchains, the discussants will take stock of where we are at, how we got here and – most importantly – where to go from here. The fireside chat will be followed by a workshop inviting those who feel the pull of these questions to continue the conversation and strengthen old and new alliances toward building collective futures that hold volatility beyond arbitrage. Speakers Laura Lotti — other Internet https://other.institute/ X: https://x.com/lottiland Andrea Leiter — University of Amsterdam https://www.uva.nl/ X: https://x.com/andrea_leiter Moderated by Beth McCarthy — Web3Privacy Now X: https://x.com/ontologymachine Follow Web3Privacy Now: 🌐 https://new.web3privacy.info 𝕏 https://x.com/web3privacy 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/web3privacy.info 📸 https://www.instagram.com/web3privacy_now/ 🎤 Neocypherpunk Summit: https://s26ber.web3privacy.info/ Subscribe for more talks on privacy, cryptography, digital rights, decentralized infrastructure, and the future of the open web.