2026-06-14 –, Hauptbühne (Saal 1)
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.
Laura Lotti is a researcher, analyst and writer investigating protocols for material autonomy across new and old technologies. She co-founded Other Internet Research Institute.
Andrea Leiter is the Director of the Amsterdam Center for International Law and a Senior Research Fellow at the Zug Institute for Blockchain Research. Her work explores global inequality and transnational governance through private actors in the digital economy. Trained in international law, she examines how questions of value, ownership, and justice structure our relationship to land and community.
Her current research project, ‘(Re)coding Values in the Digital Economy’, is funded by the Dutch Research Council VENI grant. She is the author of 'Making the World Safe for Investment' (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which traces the historical foundations of property protection in international economic law.
Alongside her academic work, she has co-developed ecological and social justice initiatives at the intersection of economics, technology, and environmental restoration, including the Sovereign Nature Initiative and A Thousand Breaths.
Beth McCarthy is a Berlin-based strategist, curator & experience designer. With her consultancy Abstract Machine Studio, Beth serves clients across the frontier tech, open web and new internet spaces, building ecosystem, culture and relational intelligence. She supports projects like DWeb Camp with strategic partnerships, Web3Privacy Now as Program Director, Funding the Commons with program curation, and other allies as an advisor.
Beth is passionate about digital rights and freedom, tech as a force for resilient communities, and designing for ethical humans and their systems.