Abstract
In this special issue, we begin to investigate transaction platforms as vital organs in the bodily constitution of digital economies. In grounding this approach, our introductory article introduces different classes of transaction platforms that serve as functional interchanges for the complex transaction chains engendered within network economies. While this categorical analysis aims to be globally applicable, our exemplars are rooted in our respective research in Asia - the region demonstrating the strongest and swiftest transition to digital transactions, reflecting its more-mobile tendencies, digital majority, distinctive transactional cultures, competitive and cooperative investments in digital futures. Because context matters, we infer that digital transactions are not only the nerves and veins of algorithmic capitalism, but also symptomatic of emergent transactional cultures, each arising with their own material histories and aspirations, social and semantic ontologies.
Keywords
To understand the networked, automated and layered nature of digital economies, we have to move beyond the axiom of transactions as simple accounting processes. That is, as tidy transfers of value from one entity to another under contractual terms. Networked digital transactions instead tend to create multiplications and abstractions of value without an endpoint. Similarly, we also have to think beyond purely anthropological notions of exchange, which tend to infer both a mutuality and awareness between market participants that does not entirely capture the expanding range of digital transactions in everyday life that are, as often as not, non-consensual and/or unwitting (Athique, 2020) and shaped by human-machine communication (Guzman et al., 2023). In the multi-sided ecosystems of digital platforms, any market or non-market exchange of information is invariably the tip of an iceberg. Nonetheless, the signal point is that digital transactions are the outcome of strategic designs in the everyday architecture of digital life. As such, transactions are less a matter of negotiation between parties, and more a matter of systemic design. Transactional logics infuse digital environments at the level of code, as much as they infuse the strategic intent of businesses and the interactions of – and between – users. Digital transactions thereby extend well beyond purely monetary functions of valorisation, exchange and accumulation, reaching deeply into the mechanical and organic solidarities of human association. Plainly, to remake the financial system is to remake the social system, and the contemporary coexistence of analog and platform transactions has made many people conscious of such a transformation in our time, if not yet its full implication.
In this special issue, we begin to investigate transaction platforms as vital organs in the bodily constitution of digital economies. In grounding this approach, our introductory article introduces different classes of transaction platforms providing the primary interchanges for the complex transaction chains engendered within network economies. While this categorical analysis aims to be globally applicable, our exemplars are rooted in our respective research in Asia - the region demonstrating the strongest and swiftest transition to digital transactions, reflecting its more-mobile tendencies, digital majority, distinctive transactional cultures, competitive and cooperative investments in digital futures. It would be dishonest to say that the age of digital transactions began in Asia, but it is notable that the region has outpaced the West in terms of the everyday implementation of these logics. Within the region itself, the role of Japan as simultaneously an innovator and late adopter of digital transactions is a regional example of how offshore laboratories are used for financial innovation (See Steinberg in this issue, also (Goggin, 2011; Horst, 2025; Qui and Chan, 2025). Because regional, national and local contexts matter, digital transactions in Asia are symptomatic of emergent transactional cultures across the region, each arising with their own material histories and aspirations, social and semantic ontologies. This is powerfully demonstrated by our featured articles all of which offer richly contextualised studies from across the region.
Platforms as transactional economy
The heuristic of surveillance capitalism privileges the legibility of platform capitalism, whereas the heuristic of algorithmic capitalism privileges the procedural power of markets as acts of code facilitating the velocity of money. In privileging the transactional frame in this special issue as structural rather than metaphorical, we position both legibility and automation as being necessary mechanisms for the larger capture, multiplication and leverage of network transactions. In a straightforward sense, they are the means to this end. As the Internet has grown and dramatically expanded from the 1990s onwards, the commercialisation of the system has been paramount, with each additional layer of functionality adding to the architecture of markets (sometimes purposefully, at other times unexpectedly as in the case of SMS and mobile messaging technology). Thus, the building of the Internet “stack” - as a medium of communication, as a medium of distribution and as a medium of transactions - has been recursively developed towards the present nexus of micro-payments, data mining and peer-to-peer markets (Athique, 2019a). In its commercial life, once the prohibition of trade on the Internet was lifted in 1994, investments in Internet infrastructure have been driven by the impulse to extract value in the form of profits and/or productivity gains (Aspray and Ceruzzi, 2008; Athique, 2000). In the communication layer, value is extracted through the sale of hardware, software subscriptions, data packs and other forms of access rents. In the distribution layer, value is extracted through content subscriptions, pay-per-view offerings, e commerce, and linking user-generated content with the bulk of the world's advertising revenues. At the apex, in the transactional layer, value is extracted from various forms of brokerage, speculation, data mining, machine learning and the aggregation of commissions as a capital resource. Within the design of platform ecosystems, each of these market layers in the Internet economy contributes towards an integrated commodity form designed to facilitate transaction chains both vertically and horizontally across the stack (see Athique, 2020; Athique and Goggin, 2027; Jacobides et al., 2019).
It is obviously significant that the transactional layer of the digital economy became paramount at the precise point at which information technology companies became the most cashed-up businesses on the planet (Birkinbine et al., 2017). The financialization of the digital economy since 2008 has seen investments consistently directed towards the synchronisation and automation of transactions (see Maurer, 2015; O’Dwyer, 2023; Swartz, 2020). Thus, while much discussion of the rise of digital platforms has focused upon the expanding toolkit of apps available to users, their effects on cultural production, and upon the out-sourced labour models of the platform economy, it is reasonable to argue that many of the best-known digital platforms are perhaps best understood as financial entities. Considering platforms as transactional entities in this broader sense requires us to look beyond the affordances of payment apps. In the first instance, the accelerating convergence of the finance and technology sectors evidently requires communication scholars to pay closer attention to the transactional architecture of the Internet, and more radically, to reconsider the Internet as primarily a transactional architecture. Whereas, Sarah Hall argues that fintech platforms need to be understood as an infrastructural transformation of money (2023), we want to emphasise the wider infrastructural convergence of social, cultural and financial transactions (Athique, 2019b). Clearly, embedded transaction platforms are absolutely central to the strategic design and operation of platform ecosystems, channelling peer-to-peer exchanges across an expansive suite of goods and services, interactions and extractions (Athique & Kumar, 2022; Athique & Lorenzana, 2026; Manzerolle and Daubs, 2021; Steinberg, 2019; Steinberg et al., 2022; Westermeier, 2020).
In this light, it is significant that the accretion of Internet market layers over three decades in the West does not necessarily correspond to their simultaneous and more integrated development in Asia's mobile-first Internet stacks. This suggests the need to account for and narrate different digital histories, and parallel trajectories and mechanisms of transactionalism that must be contended with. Importantly, the financial engine of platforms increasingly includes various forms of credit provision to both service providers and customers, as in Ola and Uber's car loan programmes for drivers and Byju's notorious education loans in India (Kumar, 2024; Ray, 2024). It also extends to horizontal investments in new products and services, such as the embedding of on-platform retail banking on super platforms like Grab and GoJek, (Goggin & Athique, 2026; Lin and Dula, 2016; Qadri and D’Ignazio, 2022). In the public circus of the media economy, social platforms monetise attention through complex multi-sided markets that exchange novel social currencies for advertising revenues along with aggregating embedded social transactions both universal and particular (Marwick, 2015; Nieborg and Helmond, 2019). In the public sector, e-payments and transaction data provide the foundational mechanisms for automated governance in programmes (such as Singapore Smart Nation and Digital India) intended to increase the interoperability of services and lower transactional costs for state functions.
Taxonomy of transaction platforms
Whereas Srnicek's foundational taxonomy of platform capitalism was focused upon data extraction and labour relations in platform business models, we approach platforms here not as ‘firms’ per se, but as attempts to institutionalise market systems across a range of domains (Athique, 2019b). In line with Cohen (2017), we therefore define platformisation as a process for the remediation of existing markets (see Athique and Vibodh, 2020: 1–19), as opposed to other contemporary usages referring to a virtual public stage or a technological infrastructure, be that hardware of software (for more on the etymology of the platform, see Cristofari, 2024; Gillespie, 2010). If we approach platforms as market exchanges, then we have to understand them as more than intermediaries (see Langley and Leyshon, 2022) since they effectively own markets, control access and set the rules of exchange. In this sense, platforms are in the business of mediation, but if they are simply intermediaries then factory owners are simply providers of facilities to industrial workers.
It makes sense, therefore, to concentrate our attention upon the ‘core architecture’ and the governance of ‘interaction possibilities’ within platform ecosystems (Srnicek, 2017). From this vantage point, a range of ‘transaction platforms’ comes into focus, including: ‘payment platforms’, ‘banking platforms’, ‘exchange platforms’, ‘escrow platforms’, ‘social platforms’ and ‘citizenship platforms’. At the handset level, this suite of everyday fintech apps provides almost universal and real time access to goods and services, social capital, welfare and peer redistribution, as well as gambling on an array of tokens and global markets. Each transaction platform offers a different set of affordances, according to its design purpose and its configuration within the larger ecology of mobile Internets. Yet, in aggregate, transaction platforms constitute a sophisticated and accessible financial system allowing multi-stage transactions across domains from social labour to purchases and from personal banking to investment and speculation (see Manzerolle and Wiseman, 2016).
Payment platforms
Payment platforms are portals for the transfer of digital money, whether this is achieved remotely or at the point of sale, or whether the payment is for goods or services or a transfer between people or entities for another purpose. In the West, it was the underlying card-based clearance systems of the post-war banking system that facilitated the rise of eCommerce, initially for direct distribution businesses like Amazon and subsequently in peer-to-peer marketplaces via payment mediators such as PayPal. In that respect, the first generation of payment platforms was a minor evolution of traditional cheque and wire services, but rapidly indicated the implications of scale arising from an expanding Internet. This shift also facilitated the fateful relocation of transaction records from the legally protective regimes of traditional bank records into the hands of online retailers, transaction providers and data traders (as ‘open banking’). In Asia, other third party solutions had to be found in domains where card systems were less widely used, and where buyers and sellers had to be connected via mechanisms that negated the need for trust of an unknown interlocutor. This was the critical step taken by Alibaba in developing China's vast eCommerce sector (see Langley and Leyshon, 2026; Lu, 2018; Wang and Doan, 2019). Marc Steinberg (in this issue) recounts equally critical moments in the evolution of payment platforms in Asia, where Japan has pioneered technology for the wider region. These include the early rollouts of cashless payments in convenience stores, the transaction wars between LINE and Softbank, the retooling of Japan's QR codes offshore, and subsequently, via the PayPay app (Steinberg, 2019).
Across Asia, the great inconvenience of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the existing shift to digital transactions, from tighter regulation of a mature ecology in China to annual growth in mostly-mobile digital transactions between 30% and 40% in India and the Philippines. In the West, QR code payments are still much less popular, with super platforms like Google and Apple instead offering contactless payments as part of their smartphone operating systems. They are the major players in the United States, alongside dedicated operators like PayPal, Chase and Cash. In Europe, in-built OS payment apps for point of sale payments are also the market leaders (GooglePay, ApplePay and SamsungPay), alongside eCommerce payment apps from PayPal and Amazon. In India, QR code payments have been implemented via a raft of apps based on the interoperable UPI (Unified Payments Interface) system. UPI is a mandatory architecture owned by the National Payments Corporation of India, conceived as an alternative model to China's privately-owned systems, and as an exportable software model for the Global South. The largest app operating over the top of this system is PhonePe, which makes up just over half of the digital transactions by volume and, characteristically, a third of gold purchases (Singh, 2020).
With 85% domestic uptake, the leading China-based apps have been expanding transnationally for some time, although their primary users have tended to remain within Chinese communities due to their embedding in linguistic social networks. As Wang details in this issue, the rapid development of digital payment technologies in the 2010s ran in parallel with the Chinese central bank's intention to liberalise international payments, the steady growth of digital commerce in the Asia Pacific region, and the wider ambitions of infrastructure initiatives such as Belt and Road (He, 2024). Also in this issue, Haiqing Yu details the confluence of economies and political geographies at play in the growing financial integration of the Asian region, where smaller states are developing their own fintech ecologies amidst the wider competition between the US and China for a commanding position in digital architecture (2026). In this context, Jing Wang emphasises the growing importance of transaction platforms that not only facilitate cross-border payments for individuals, but also enable foreign exchange, customs clearance, and customer management for small export enterprises in China. Wang explores Ant Financial's Alipay+, which allows merchants in China to accept payment, for example, from Korean consumers directly via their Kakao Pay app. Conversely, functionality with Alipay + has been built into a range of Asia's national payment apps, including PayPay, PayNow and Lankapay. Thus, the Alipay + platform is part of a wider platformization of international payment infrastructures across Asia (see Hall, 2023).
As businesses, payment platforms make profits either through commissions (notoriously hefty in the Apple ecosystem) or from the monetisation of transaction data (as with Vietnam's ZaloPay). The benefits of uptake for users differ between co-present point of sale and remote online payments. Point of sale affordances resolve issues around diminishing access to cash and its portability risks. Online payment affordances remove time and distance barriers and facilitate participation in the online economy. At the systemic level, the greatest utility of payment platforms is their legibility. It is the automated records created by payment platforms that enable algorithmic management of the financial system, allow law enforcers to track movements and behaviours, and enable governments to collect tax revenues from the online economy. Payment apps are therefore fundamental to the prospects of automated markets, eGovernance, eCommerce, credit ratings and Smart City programmes across the world. That is why the transaction data created by payment platforms is, hands down, the most valuable kind of data in the digital economy (Westermeier, 2020). For tech providers, mandatory payment platforms are a key driver for the universal uptake of devices, access plans, software and increased bandwidth use. Significant challenges arising from the rise of payment platforms are the wholesale erosion of privacy, securitisation of transaction data, and the economic and environmental costs of cashless systems. Digital payments have a far greater material footprint than cash regimes, and current platform models transfer all of those costs (energy, hardware, access, and waste) to their users. Thus, as Marc Steinberg reminds us, we always have to be mindful of the cost of convenience, as well as its multiple positioning as a rationale, motivation, and commodity (2025).
Banking platforms
Banking Platforms are portals that offer facilities for saving and/or credit, thereby remediating the retail functions of both traditional banks and money lenders. This class of transaction platforms is most closely aligned with the UN Cashless Alliance goal of ‘financial inclusion’, with its strong emphasis on providing mobile banking to unbanked and underbanked populations, and on empowering women in the Global South. Whilst they sometimes provide payment functions, the defining function of banking platforms is the provision of lending. Not all platforms offering POS payment or money transfer functions offer credit facilities whereas not all money lenders offer everyday payment logistics. The present suite of banking platforms includes mobile wallets offering loans and insurance, super platforms deploying embedded finance in their ecosystems (See Goggin & Athique, 2026), and a wide array of micro-credit apps providing consumer finance. There are also many specialised credit apps, notably those available to farmers, where loans are made for agricultural purchases that must be transacted through the app, thereby providing a stream of real time agricultural data that can be monetised in the futures market (Gupta, 2021). In India there are numerous platforms that are ostensibly service providers, but are absolutely driven by the issuance of loans (See Athique & Kumar, 2026; Kumar, forthcoming). Worldwide, a multitude of apps now specialise in high risk and short term loans for customers barred from traditional loan services. In response to skyrocketing competition from the rapid expansion of mobile lending, most traditional banks have also ‘appified’ their services to provide similar functionality, speed and portability for customers already considered ‘banked’ by the UN.
In this issue, Cheryll Soriano and Marinel Mamac explore the ecosystem of GCash, a money transmitter currently leading the charge to become the super app for the Philippines. Launched as an SMS-based service in 2004, the GCash smartphone app offers P2P money transfer, POS payment, savings, bill payment, micro-credit, international transfers, and insurance products. Critical partnerships in the GCash business ecosystem include the integration of GCash with Facebook's free messenger service in 2017, and the partnership with the ubiquitous 7-Eleven franchise that allows users to make purchases or cash out their GCash wallets in their convenience stores.GCash is backed by an alliance of China's Ant Financial, the Philippines’ Globe Telecom and the Ayala Group, one of a small number of family conglomerates that own much of the Philippine national economy. These interests are brought together in a holding company, Mynt. In their walkthrough of the GCash app, Soriano and Mamac describe how the app's technical design directs users towards embedded financial products. This prompts Soriano and Mamac to problematize GCash's competing aims: “to provide financial services to the unbanked and low-income population, to become the financial super app for all Filipinos, and to profit as a business requiring continuous growth to sustain itself” (2024). With the Government of the Philippines largely dependent on the platforms like GCash to facilitate small traders entry into the digital economy and create employment, Soriano and Mamac's analysis raises critical questions for the governance of financial super apps in the global south.
Initially, it was the uptake of P2P transfers that provided the impetus for GCash, allowing unbanked users to avoid the hefty commissions extracted from personal transfers and remittances by companies like Western Union since colonial times. The second phase of the business expansion, however, has been centred upon leveraging mobile wallet balances as a credit pool. Thus, in the Philippines, the goal of financial inclusion has been debt creation. This aligns with rapidly flooded markets for mobile lending in China, India and Indonesia, as traditional money lending interests have shifted to mobile apps. In China, thousands of unregulated mobile lenders opened up a credit market previously limited to state banks, leading to numerous instances of debt distress and suicide, with the same business model and outcomes currently provoking public debate in Indonesia (see Kaur and Ilavarasan, 2022; Loubere, 2022; Rao and McDonald, 2023). Typically, lenders demand access to phone camera, mic and contacts as part of their approval process, and subsequently use harassment and social shaming to ensure payment of loans. Thus, we are prompted to question the extension of credit to the unbanked as an unqualified good, given the trail of destruction wrought previously by micro-credit regimes in Kenya and Bangladesh (see Langley and Leyshon, 2022, 2026). In this issue, Rahul Mukherjee explains how a handful of niche fintech as a service (FaaS) providers in India mediate between the vast array of micro-credit lenders and borrowers using data “captured from and flowing through phone and social media activity, that governs loan app decisions about eligibility, payment windows, and interest rates” (2024)
The provision of credit is nonetheless a vital and necessary function of any economic system, and banking platforms now provide credit to actors at all levels of the platform economy. Across the world, they have enabled small businesses to enter the larger digital marketplace, enabled farmers to make capital purchases to increase their production, enabled a large number of unemployed people to acquire assets needed to join the gig economy, and supported a fleet of start up businesses. For more affluent consumers, platform lenders facilitate the advance of future consumption in retail spending, and effectively replace the short term high interest financing of credit cards. These achievements are somewhat marred by the larger contagion of opaque and abusive credit-debt relations common across the platform economy as a whole, including what are essentially indentured loans for many platform workers (see Langley, 2024; Kumar, 2024; Ray, 2024). A clear distinction between mobile wallets and traditional banks is blurring as the latter undergo processes of virtualisation and super platforms like GCash and Grab exploit their user bases to become ‘digibanks’ (Google, Temasek and Bain, 2022). Perhaps the more significant distinction in this class is between saving and lending, given that saving on digital platforms remains negligible in most jurisdictions. Thus, while transaction platforms provide multitudinous avenues for lending, the majority of savings get parked in the traditional banking sector. In this one-sided model, banks are a place for securing profits, but they are not a significant source of business funding. This wider systemic disconnect between saving and lending in the digital economy was a significant factor in the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, which raised important questions around the circulation of capital in the digital economy (Ali et al., 2023).
Exchange platforms
Following the classic trinity of financial services, from paying and lending to speculation, exchange platforms are classed here as a networked rendition of the bourses. That is, platforms whose affordances facilitate trading in financial interests or speculation. This class of transaction platforms covers a wide spectrum with narrow bands of white and black bookending a very large grey area, from which much of the big news on fintech emerges. On this wilder side of transaction platforms are the growing number of apps that interface ordinary consumers with global stocks (such as MooMoo), currency trading (such as MetaTrader), and the motley crew of crypto trading platforms (such as Binance, Swyftx et al.) and NFT platforms for trading in digital assets (such as Rarible and Nifty). Much has been said about the democratisation of stock trading via retail apps, given that they enable ordinary users to speculate on stocks and national currencies, thereby connecting them into the larger weave of algorithmic global markets (eg. Welch, 2022; Tan, 2021). This democratisation of the bourses can be seen as sharing the fruits of international capitalism by disintermediating brokers, and has been celebrated as a site for consumer activism in a financial system dominated by hedge funds and short-selling. It has been noted, however, that the apps interfacing with these global markets offer affordances to consumers that are remarkably similar to gaming and gambling apps, which arguably also fall in this class of transaction platforms (see Lai and Langley, 2023; van den Bulck and Moe, 2018).
Going beyond the disintermediation of traditional brokers to the disintermediation of traditional finance entirely, the novelty of crypto exchanges has sucked much of the air out of debates on digital transactions due to a number of factors, including widespread enthusiasm for digital metallism and its links to libertarian ideology, the quick gains arising from the extreme volatility of value for digital tokens, and the frequent hackings and closure of crypto exchanges and/or the jailing of their operators. Prior to Elon Musk's takeover, crypto interests were the major income stream for Twitter, a platform saturated with advertisements and bots shilling crypto schemes endorsed by a range of celebrities (of which Musk was the most prominent) (see Ante, 2023). Since crypto currencies are explicitly designed to facilitate value storage and speculation outside of the established financial system, a dedicated set of exchange platforms is requisite for trading in coins and for buying into the market with, and cashing out gains into, national fiat currencies. There are both centralised and decentralised exchanges. The latter require a greater technical grasp of the blockchain ecology, whereas centralized exchanges facilitate easy app-based access to investing and trading in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto currencies (and, critically, for making smaller investments in fractions of coins) (see Arslanaian, 2022: 335–350). Ostensibly, crypto exchanges make their money from transaction fees, which vary considerably, but many exchanges also offer wallets for the storage of crypto assets, which allows for holding fees as well as providing them with a significant crypto capital reserve.
The best known example in Asia is the Binance platform. The Binance app promises the benefits of ‘passive income’, with one click features including deposit, battle and liquid swap (www.binance.com/en). In addition to its centralised exchange and wallet features, Binance offers market monitoring tools, a range of derivative products, a decentralized exchange and an NFT trading feature. Originally a Chinese start up with its own coin (BNB), Binance relocated to Japan prior to China's ban on crypto currencies in 2017, subsequently touching ground in jurisdictions such as Malta and Jersey. Links to China remain strong, via a formal alliance with the State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration of the State Council (SASAC), whereas internationalisation involved the issuance of US$ based stablecoin, BUSD. As an ecosystem running its own blockchain, Binance became the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platform by trading volume, currently around US$50bn daily, and big enough to systematically affect the entire crypto ecology and market pricing of the leading crypto currencies (see Vidal-Tomás et al., 2023). It was Binance's refusal to bailout FTX in the wake of the Terra Luna collapse that caused the former's downfall (see Fu et al., 2023). Binance pursued a large investment in Forbes and backed Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022. Nonetheless, Binance was barred from operating in the UK and India in 2021 and 2022 amidst accusations of money laundering and exchanging client data with Beijing and Moscow. In November 2023, CEO Changpeng Zhao resigned after pleading guilty in the US to money laundering and sanctions evasion, with Binance subjected to a US$4.3bn fine (Bushard, 2023).
In this issue, Tom McDonald explores the subcultures formed around NFT exchanges, a subset of crypto-adjacent assets, where hobbyist collectors invest their personal funds into acquiring digital artefacts as a source of “passive income”. As McDonald notes: ‘Far from being entirely passive avenues for capital accumulation, collectors instead found themselves embroiled in an NFT platform ecology that demanded attention, effort and resources’ including ‘generating “hype” for NFT projects on social media channels’ (McDonald, 2026). Crypto exchanges and NFT exchanges are inevitably ‘hot’ territories because these are the points where the value arising from unregulated speculation in intangible digital assets is created and where extraterritorial capital flows connect to the mainstream financial system (see Miroshnichenko and Birch, 2025). Significantly, most platform operators are not only keepers of exchange markets but also actors in those markets, a market easily distorted by those holding the larger volume of coins or tokens (see Dupont, 2018). Exchange platforms invariably operate from a handful of the least regulatory jurisdictions, and are frequently prosecuted for operating elsewhere without licenses (generally seen as an operating cost), as well as for money laundering, fraud and sanctions busting (Binance is very much the norm here). Given these risks, around 80% of investments on crypto exchanges are from retail customers (Arslanian, 2022). For users, the app interface of exchange platforms is designed around live market feeds, linking wallets to real-time buying and selling. In this respect, the broader class of exchange platforms is centred upon the promise of winning money from your phone, at home and on the go. In that respect, crypto and NFT markets sit within the same sensory domain as the gamification of formal trading markets and the proliferation of gambling apps across the world (see Reinelt et al., 2021).
Escrow platforms
Escrow Platforms are centered upon the aggregation of transactions and the leverage of money flows between users by the platform (See Athique et al., 2026). Conventionally, escrow accounts are used to provide a third-party guarantee for large transactions which negate the likelihood of trust, such as real estate purchases or legal fees. Here, money will be placed with a third party in an escrow account to be paid out when the contract is fulfilled on both sides, with payment guaranteed by the escrow service. In the peer-to-peer platforms of the digital economy, escrow services are provided en masse for transactions between peers of whatever size. Providing the escrow service ‘on-platform’, as opposed to using a third party system like Visa, has proved to be a distinctive and central feature of platform business models. Indeed, the rise of Asia's super platforms stems directly from the pivotal role of third-party mediation as a solution to the problem of trust between users. The escrow mechanisms of the peer-to-peer marketplaces that dominate e-commerce and service delivery structure the platform economy, effectively determining pricing, market access and the norms of exchange in retail markets. For users, network effects supercharge the utility of these platforms, resulting in large volumes of repeat users who replenish a large pool of monies in transit between peers. For the platforms, the imperative is to multiply the volume of transactions exponentially in order to grow this pool of turnover capital, that is not profit, but which provides the cashflow to fund their expansion and explore opportunities for leverage.
In addition to whatever commissions are taken on peer-to-peer transactions, the escrow accounts holding money transfers between buyers and sellers provide platforms with an elastic capital base for financial activities that often outstrips the profits of the business to which it is attached. This is why Alipay and Ant Financial became a bigger business than Alibaba'
Escrow platforms use the pool of monies in transit between their customers and service providers to facilitate on-platform lending to both groups, as well as financing their rapid expansions into other service areas amenable to the escrow model (Ray, 2024; Soriano, 2021; Vermesan and Friess, 2013). Our exemplar in this special issue is the Southeast Asian super platform Grab, which began life as a taxi app launched by Malaysian Harvard business student Anthony Tan in 2012. Expanding to operate in the Philippines the following year, GrabTaxi became the major regional competitor to the multinational Uber platform (Lin and Dula, 2016). In April 2017, Grab acquired the Kudo payment startup, integrating it with its GrabPay function to allow users to make payments for services outside of its own businesses. In 2018, Grab took a stake in Indonesian payment platform OVO, and formally constituted Grab Financial as a core component of the business covering payments, insurance and lending. In 2019, the company relocated its headquarters from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, underscoring its stated ambition to consolidate its position as the ‘super platform for Southeast Asia’, as well as to emphasise its consolidation as a provider of financial services (Goggin & Athique, 2026). As the head of Grab Financial, Reuben Lai, put it: “we realised that six out of 10 people across South East Asia are underserved by banks…We want to be…the platform that enables financial institutions to serve this emerging consumer” (BBC, 2021). The Grab story provides a useful illustration of how escrow platforms are designed to capture transactions in peer-to-peer markets, thereby generating the capital and digital infrastructure to support their expansion across multiple sectors and, in this case, across a core market covering eight Southeast Asian countries.
The size of the escrow pool is a substantial component of the Grab business, and the key component of its $US40bn valuation. Tellingly, all of the domains into which Grab has entered are high volume transaction markets, precisely because escrow platforms require markets with large transaction volumes and a large number of vendors. Beyond this requirement, escrow platforms tend to be product agnostic. Rapid growth in the user base assures that the escrow pool can be leveraged, while payment demands can be met (although escrow platforms can, and do, extend the escrow window to manage cashflow difficulties). As a scale model, escrow platforms require comprehensive automation of their marketplaces to mitigate logistical costs and ensure the stability of escrow flows. In the platform economy, escrow monies provide a stream of capital that increases without additional cost to the platform. Escrow platforms are essentially being crowd-funded, without the micro-providers of this capital making any formal investment or owning any part of the business. This disconnect is critical, since the escrow model requires that neither buyers nor sellers are employees of the platform, and this is a significant factor in the resistance by escrow platforms towards any formal employment models for their multitudinous ‘partners’. In Asia, the dominant online marketplaces for goods and services tend to be escrow platforms, making them a major source of operating capital for the platform economy.
Social platforms
Social Platforms facilitate transaction chains that stem from the utilization of social networks and/or the unitization of social presence (notably via marketing and advertising revenues but also via data extraction and peer-to-peer retail). Whereas payment platforms and banking platforms have principally received attention from scholars working on the anthropology of money and the sociology of finance, social media platforms are by far the most researched apps across all disciplines. There is already a wide-ranging body of work detailing the ruling ideas of the ‘attention economy’, where the online popularity of content creators is transacted for a share of advertising revenues (eg. García-Rapp, 2017; Marwick, 2015). Social media platforms have become the central mechanism for Simon's ‘attention economy’ as a direct consequence of the rich datapoints created by recording audience consumption habits alongside interpersonal communication (Davenport and Beck, 2001; Simon, 1978; Webster, 2014). The now well-established model of providing free public access to P2P utilities funded by advertising has made social media platforms key sites for the embedding of transactional logics in everyday sociability. These massive, and granular, agglomerations of market information enable advertising clients to pay for targeted access to customised publics, enable market researchers and credit assessors to pay for user datasets and profiles, and allow a host of actors to access channels for behavioural influence.
It might seem odd to turn at this point to a Silicon Valley based platform, but it is worth noting that the majority of Meta's users are in Asia and its suite of social media platforms plays an outsized role in South and Southeast Asia. Introduced in the final years of the desktop era as a social profiling website, Facebook enjoyed an obvious first-mover advantage in providing content formats and audience for the smartphone decade (see Ling et al., 2020). Although ostensibly different apps, the wider metaverse of Facebook, Instagram (acquired in 2012), and WhatsApp (acquired in 2014) offers variations on key smartphone affordances ranging across messaging, commenting, likes, image sharing, video streaming and voice services. By 2016, Facebook owned the dominant smartphone apps almost everywhere, commanding the majority mobile public in every region of the world save East Asia. This unprecedented scale of audience is what allowed Facebook to firmly establish its duopoly (alongside Alphabet) over mobile advertising for half of the global population, and to effectively determine the transaction order of the attention economy. Unlike its peers in East Asia, such as WeChat and Kakao, Facebook has remained focused upon maximising this stranglehold on targeted advertising, which still accounts for 90% of its revenues. Beyond their core triple-product market of audience-information-influence, the ubiquitous popularity, open access and internal messaging functions of giant social media platforms make them the central public utilities for the mediated economy as a whole (see Nieborg and Helmond, 2019).
Consequently, Meta platforms facilitate massive retail marketplaces in Asia, allowing multitudinous SMEs to develop and service a customer base over their network infrastructure. Facebook has also held a money transmitter license since 2014, and Facebook Pay (now Meta Pay) remains an available, if less used, feature of Meta ecosystem. There has also been on-and-off experimentation with the Facebook marketplace feature as a P2P second-hand goods market. Essentially eBay without the auction function (of its heyday) and more locally-grounded, Facebook Marketplace was an initial feature, subsequently removed, and then relaunched as a formalization of burgeoning P2P trade that was widespread on the platform. Similarly, common usage of WhatsApp for business in Asia led to the launch of WhatsApp Business on 2018 (see Johns, Matamoros-Fernández and Baulch, 2023). Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp play a critical role in the integration of everyday exchanges across much of Asia, notably as the logistical environment for SMEs. In many parts of the Global South, social media platforms simultaneously serve as the primary amplifier for the informal economy, providing public visibility as well as direct messaging between suppliers, vendors and consumers. Facebook basics in Vietnam and the Philippines, Whatsapp in Malaysia and WeChat in China all play a major role in the coordination of informal labour transactions and interpersonal financial transactions (see Nguyen-Thu, 2022; Qiu et al., 2023; Soriano, 2021).
Across the region, Kakao, Line, TikTok, Zalo and WeChat hold similar monopolies over market information and social communication in their online domains. Asia's social platforms are the major harvesters of Asia's big data, and thus key actors in cascading markets for data profiling, supercomputing and datasets for generative AI. For their users, they enable the monetisation of online popularity as well as its manufacture. Transactional logics are firmly baked into algorithms that reward attention-seeking behaviours with a share of advertising profits and/or rewards for product placement. These modelling cultures rely upon the inculcation of para-social relationships with the personal publics created on-platform, exemplified by its more extreme forms in the economy of live-streaming cultures of East Asia (see Shan et al., 2020, Weltevrede and Lindquist, 2024; Yuan and Lou, 2020). The short video format of Douyin/Tiktok has actively combined performativity and retail, internationalizing these techniques in the rollout of TikTok shop across Southeast Asia (Andon and Annuar, 2023; Nguyen-Thu, 2022; Weiß et al., 2025). The mobilisation of social networks as commercial channels for influencers, advertisers and petty traders has led to the widespread exploitation of affect, intimacy and sociability in both small and large-scale business operations everywhere (eg. Nguyen-Thu, 2022; Wang, 2020). Overall, in the context of this special issue, social platforms of varying configurations and scale can be understood as a broad class of transaction platforms where economic transactions are socialised, and where social transactions are simultaneously monetised.
Citizenship platforms
A final class of transaction platforms is configured around the relationship between citizens and the state. National agendas for digital transformation invariably demand the institution of digital transactions throughout government. As a central pillar of eGovernance, transaction platforms provide a number of functions for the public sector, including legibility of public finances, streamlining of bureaucratic processes and control of populations. When it comes to facilitating revenue collection and service payments, transaction platforms are rapidly replacing physical public service infrastructure. Consequently, transaction platforms now provide the main point of contact between citizens and government, enabling the automation of welfare payments (as in India's PDS scheme via Aadhaar and UPI), tax payments (such as GIRO in Singapore) and licenses (such as Thailand's SMART License). In theory, transaction platforms in the public sector support better management of public finances, while the integration of information ‘silos’ across departments allows for the elimination of duplication and the data profiling of citizens (see Tkacz, 2022). As a consequence of this managerial paradigm, citizenship platforms facilitate virtual exchanges between government and the governed. In doing so, citizenship platforms effectively automate the social contracts that underpin emerging regimes of eGovernance, from Fabian capitalism in Singapore to state corporatism in Japan. The sensory array of locatable smartphones, unique identifiers and QR codes operationalizes the prevailing political impulse towards an integrated architecture for public sector transactions.
The purported fiscal benefits of universal algorithmic governance include greater efficiencies in public budgets, to be achieved by automating costly processing and assessment regimes, eliminating fraud, and accelerating delivery speed for the public. Gains have certainly been made in this domain, as governments have extended the ambit of government, while simultaneously reducing their workforces. An institutional focus on protecting the state interest draws our attention to the power verticals of automation, where politicians have promoted aggressive regimes to eliminate ‘unentitled’ welfare claimants and recover overpayments. As with Australia's notorious ‘robodebt’ programme, considerable damage has been done to vulnerable populations due to badly conceived and designed algorithms (Carney, 2019). In this case, bureaucrats baked-in the most profitable methodology, which turned out to be both incorrect and illegal (Graycar and Masters, 2022). The sheer range of automation in public services worldwide draws our attention to the often unhealthy relationship between software vendors and public sector managers. In the Indian case, the flagship shift to digital transactions was intended to eliminate fraud by both welfare recipients and public servants, but there is no evidence to date that automation will resolve longstanding problems of structural discrimination. In the aftermath of 2001, transaction data from eGovernance platforms became a significant resource for the securitisation of public space in the West, a paradigm further extended by public health regimes during the COVID19 pandemic (Lyon, 2021).
In the case of Singapore, an ingrained impulse towards sanitisation saw digital transactions promoted for the circumvention of human touch. During the pandemic, the micro-management of citizens combined contact tracing, regulated mobility, and touchless information via QR codes (Goggin & Zhuang, 2023). This complex was built upon the imagination of a normative Singaporean attuned to high-end technologies, conditioned by particular norms of citizenship, and largely served by others (Goggin, 2020). The actual delivery of goods and services doomed vulnerable platform workers to front line exposure (Hargittai, 2022). The disproportionate impact of COVID upon this ‘other’ population of the city thereby evidenced the limitations of Singapore's SMART Nation as a work of social imagination (Lee and Lee, 2020). Touchless payments, which provide no protection towards an airborne disease were, at best, an ontological response to contagion. Nonetheless, it was during the pandemic that the PayNow app and the Grab platform became essential infrastructures of daily life as Singapore, along with the region as a whole, crossed the rubicon into a majority of digital transactions. The heightened visibility of touchless payments and citizen tracking during the pandemic has encouraged a misleading correlation between the pandemic and the advent of these platforms. In fact, the cashless agenda was well entrenched in public sector management before the advent of COVID19, forming a key pillar of eGovernance policies across Asia. Transaction platforms were already growing, and in many cases entrenched, in most countries in the region. Thus, we need to understand the growing complex of citizenship platforms less in terms of the moment, and more in terms of longer term endeavours to sanitise the exchange cultures, and populations, of Asia.
Uniquely for the Asian region, a formal accounting of social virtue on citizenship platforms provides a novel mechanism that locks or unlocks social and economic benefits. This managerial paradigm is rendered in China through the integration of digital platforms with social credit systems intended to not only guarantee creditworthiness but also to instil virtuous and responsible behaviour (Loubere, 2017; Loubere and Brehm, 2018). In the private sector, the AntForest app rewards donations to tree planting with its own social credits, to be aggregated for its own demonstration of corporate social responsibility to the government, as well as providing the dataset for a granular carbon credit market in the future (Keane and Su, 2019; Zeng, 2022). In the West, credit-scoring has historically relied upon public records, demographics and credit histories although, in recent years, private sector assessors of creditworthiness have shifted to the algorithmic judgement of social media data (Langley, 2024). Thus: ideologically different, but functionally similar. Western accusations of digital authoritarianism in China, true or not, tend to obscure the inherently arbitrary nature of eGovernance everywhere, impacting both private and public sector processes. The superiority of private vs public sector credit regimes is also somewhat moot, since any public-private distinction in the platform economy is inherently problematic under the current settings. Fundamentally, the platformisation of governance relies upon private sector infrastructures, and the private sector relies upon its privileged access to public data. As a class, citizenship platforms provide transaction data that serves both purposes.
The velocity of transactions
In this introductory article to the special issue, we have begun to schematise our prompt to reconsider the Internet as a transactional architecture. In doing so, we have identified six classes of transaction platforms that facilitate particular modalities of exchange. The first three categories – enabling payment, credit and speculation - have clearly become ‘everyday Fintech’ in the accepted sense (see Athique, 2025). The second set of three - equally vital organs for the operation of platform economies - connect financial transactions to social economies in various ways, enabling the socialisation of capital formation, the automation of labour markets, the embedding of peer-to-peer markets, the monetisation of sociability, the socialisation of algorithmic governance and the accountancy of citizenship. We feel that this is an important expansion of the frame, especially since the narrower definition of Fintech common in the West has never really held sway in Asia. In part, this can be explained in terms of differing financial systems, variance in financial regulations internationally, and within the region (See Langley and Leyshon, 2026). Needless to say, there are many points of complexity and distinction within each class of transaction platforms that require more detailed elaboration and exemplars, but we could broadly summarise our overall scheme by saying that:
Payment platforms facilitate monetary exchange across a range of digital currencies. Banking platforms embed individuated credit regimes across the platform economy. Exchange platforms enable financial trading and speculation at the handset level. Escrow platforms pool P2P transactions to crowdfund platform economies. Social platforms marketise sociability and socialise the economic, notably via the attention economy but also via capturing economies embedded in social interaction. Citizenship platforms articulate credit regimes with the algorithmic governance of public services and citizens.
At a systemic level, each class of transaction platforms provides functions necessary to the platform economy as a whole. They represent different functions of exchange, rather than different branded businesses that sit neatly in one category or another. As nodes of exchange, they are vital components of any digital capitalism worthy of the name, synchronising online marketplaces for goods, services, labour, information and credit. They interface with the ‘traditional’ banking sector, as well as markets for raising capital and investing it. More problematically in an era of endemic cybercrime, these are also the places where you steal. As a network, all transaction platforms are two-clicks away from each other within the app ecology, thereby allowing multi-stage transactions across the entire system. As such, this is a full economy, even if some of the platform biographies suggest it is not yet a mature one.
In this Internet of transactions, there are obvious advantages for platforms positioned to facilitate digital transactions in-house, providing leverage to channel third party on-platform providers through their own clearing house (as with ApplePay) (Liébana-Cabanillas et al., 2020; Nieborg et al., 2020). Conversely, there are equally wide opportunities to provide specialised third-party services that facilitate transactions across the economy as a whole (as with WeChat Pay) (Zhang and Chen, 2022). The super apps that have emerged in Asia during the past decade have explicitly sought to combine most of these functions within a single ecosystem (see Goggin in this issue). Even without formal integration, transaction platforms tend to operate in tandem through formal or informal transaction chains (multi-stage transactions across platforms). Citizenship platforms provide data for banking platforms, and banking platforms provide credit that gets traded on exchange platforms or paid into escrow platforms in return for work that eventually gets paid out via a payment platform. Characteristically, in the age of ‘network effects’ most classes of transaction platforms have a far higher degree of ownership concentration and market dominance than the offline markets that preceded them. This aggregation of transactions naturally infers the possibilities for expansion and leverage that come with accumulation.
Transactional cultures
Fundamentally, all classes of transaction platforms are powered by the multiplication of transactions, and serve to increase the velocity of money in digital societies. In different ways, the articles in this special issue thereby demonstrate how transaction platforms facilitate and accelerate exchanges in the digital economies of Asia. The platformisation (market capture) of informal economies in the region also provides an instructive point of convergence with the ‘putting out’ digital economy emerging (or, some may say, regressing) in the Global West. Lana Swartz has noted the linkages between the digitisation of transactional modes, norms, identities, communities and contemporary forms of transactional politics in the United States (2020). From a similarly anthropological perspective, we can reasonably expect civilizational norms to exert a gravitational influence on the evolution of digital transactions in Asia (as per Braudel, 1977). We can see this most clearly in the cultural referents people use to explicate the uses of digital transactions in their own social settings. The digital manifestation of red packets in China is one prominent example of culturally distinct and historically informed practice (Hudik and Fang, 2020). In the Philippines, deeply embedded systems of kinship and obligation determine the pattern and character of everyday redistribution via transaction platforms like GCash (Athique & Lorenzana, 2026). In Singapore, historical meeting point for global trading cultures, the legacies of shipping and godowns, the postcolonial rationalisation of urban life, and the multicultural commerce of the straits all predisposed the active positioning of the city state as the fintech hub for Southeast Asia (see Neilson and Notley, 2019).
In all these exemplars, emergent transactional cultures utilise the new financial architecture in Asia. For their part, the affordances of transaction platforms tend to inculcate the personalisation of exchange, the gamification of trade and the financialisation of gifting. Consequently, at the systemic level, we could see the larger dynamics of (and between) transaction platforms as blurring distinctions between social, commercial and financial transactions. We might also see this as the natural consequence of a polyvalent transaction architecture which unveils the social relationships that constitute the underlying economy as an informational consequence of its own operation. Either way, we remain mindful that financial transactions are always references to social transactions, and any proper account of the age of digital transactions needs to consider the accompanying cultural and political transactions that shape the meanings of digital transfers, exchanges, extractions and abstractions. Just as everyday social interactions cumulatively constitute the interaction order for sociologists, the norms of everyday digital transactions in aggregate are likely to constitute the transaction order of our emerging digital economies. This simple fact makes transaction platforms fundamental building blocks for digital societies in Asia (as societies configured around the affordances and interests of a ruling technology).
The analytical tools required to grasp the full range of digital transactions reach across disciplines, encompassing (at the very least) network analysis and ethnographic methods from anthropology, ecosystem analysis, user studies and interface design from informatics, organizational studies and market analysis from business and finance economics, content, audience and industry analysis from media studies, discursive and ideological deconstructions from cultural studies, as well as macrological lenses from political science, policy studies, international relations and just about every part of economic sociology and geography. In terms of theory, there are many perspectives available across these disciplines, although our foregrounding of network transactions certainly implies an emphasis on relational economics (as per Zelizer, 1994) and the very legibility of digital transactions suggests these would most often be actual (as opposed to hypothetical) relationships. Notwithstanding datafication and procedural shaping, these are human affairs. Accordingly, in the articles that follow, the contributors to this special issue begin to explain how the rollout of digital transactions via Asian internets has been motivated by imperatives that are economic and systemic, but also profoundly cultural and symbolic.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, (grant number DP220100988).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.