Stablecoins, commodities and land: digital currency in search of ballast

• Grant number: 21/12392-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• End date: April 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Jose Gilberto de Souza
• Grantee: Leandro Renato Monerato
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências e Ciências Exatas (IGCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The project aims to contribute to the understanding of a central problem: why do commodities become so important during periods of economic crisis? In this sense, we will seek to relate two phenomena that originated in the 2008 crisis, but appear in the literature until then in separate ways, namely, the world race for land and the emergence of cryptocurrencies. The common origin of the phenomena in the crisis of growth patterns allows us to assume the existence of a relationship between them, to investigate concretely what this relationship is. At the same time, the evolution of cryptocurrencies has been marked by the emergence of stablecoins (cryptocurrencies backed by commodities and rural and urban properties), which points not only to the synthesis unit between these two phenomena. Considering that this synthesis can be translated into the existing correlation between territory and money, which both have the configuration of State power as their matrix, it is essential to reflect on their effects on the world market for commodities and land, consolidating an analysis of the correlations between the stablecoins of their home countries, their positions in the world commodity market and the dynamics of their land markets.