This paper seeks to assess the feasibility of utilizing Bitcoin as a currency within Türkiye. To achieve this, the research analyzes long-term cointegration relationships between Bitcoin and both the US Dollar and Euro, employing monthly data from November 2017 to February 2025 and utilizing the Fourier Shin cointegration test. The results of the cointegration tests, bolstered by Fourier series analysis, reveal significant long-term cointegration relationships between Bitcoin and both the USD and Euro. The DOLS analysis indicates that a 1% rise in Bitcoin leads to a 14% decrease in the USD price and a 17% increase in the Euro. These results imply that Bitcoin exhibits a high sensitivity to ex-change rates, positioning it as a speculative investment in the short term. The pronounced inverse correlation between the US Dollar and Bitcoin raises the possibility of Bitcoin serving as a substitute for the US Dollar.
This article explores how Thai men construct and perform masculine identities through cryptocurrency trading, using the concept of crypto-masculinity to examine how digital finance becomes a site for gendered self-making. While existing scholarship on masculinity in financial contexts often centers on transnational business masculinities in Western corporate settings, little attention has been paid to how masculinity is enacted in decentralized, digital financial spaces, particularly in non-Western contexts. Addressing this gap, this article draws upon in-depth interviews with 21 male traders in Thailand to analyze how masculinity is shaped by the internal instability of masculinity and local cultural norms. This study identifies three key themes through which Thai men's subjectivity is negotiated: valorizing failure, homosociality, and ‘becoming a good Thai man.’ As a result, this article challenges assumptions about the naturalized links between men and finance, suggesting the need for further research on how exclusions within digital finances are taking place to better support equality on crypto platforms.
Bu çalışmada, kripto para piyasasında en yüksek işlem hacmine sahip varlıklar arasında yer alan Bitcoin, Ethereum ve Binance Coin’in günlük kapanış fiyatları incelenmiştir. Çalışmada ele alınan kripto para getirilerinin uzun hafıza özelliği gösterip göstermediğinin belirlenmesi ve uygun model tahmininin yapılması amaçlanmıştır. Getiri serilerinin uzun hafıza özelliğinin tespit edilmesi için literatürde sıklıkla ele alınan Hurst katsayısı, Geweke ve Porter-Hudak testi ve Yerel Whittle Tahmincisi kullanılmıştır. Ayrıca uzun hafızanın tespitine yönelik klasik testlerin yanı sıra, çok değişkenli yerel Whittle Skor tipi test ve Qu (2011) tarafından önerilen uzun hafıza testleri de yapılmıştır. Elde edilen bulgulara göre üç kripto para biriminin de uzun hafıza özelliği gösterdiği tespit edilmiştir. Ardından uzun hafızanın varlığı dikkate alınarak getiri ve koşullu varyansın modellenmesi için Otoregresif Kesirli Bütünleşik Hareketli Ortalama (ARFIMA) ve Kesirli Bütünleşik Genelleştirilmiş Otoregresif Koşullu Değişen Varyans (FIGARCH) modelleri tahmin edilmiştir. Tahmin edilen FIGARCH modellerinde kesirli fark parametresi 0
Kamilla Nazirkhanova, Vrushank Gunjur, X. Pilli Cruz-De Jesus, Dan Boneh
Ensuring the privacy of votes in an election is crucial for the integrity of a democratic process. Often, voting power is delegated to representatives (e.g., in congress) who subsequently vote on behalf of voters on specific issues. This delegation model is also widely used in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Although several existing voting systems used in DAOs support private voting, they only offer public delegation. In this paper, we introduce Kite, a new protocol that enables $\textit{private}$ delegation of voting power for DAO members. Voters can freely delegate, revoke, and re-delegate their power without revealing any information about who they delegated to. Even the delegate does not learn who delegated to them. The only information that is recorded publicly is that the voter delegated or re-delegated their vote to someone. Kite accommodates both public and private voting for the delegates themselves. We analyze the security of our protocol within the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We implement Kite as an extension to the existing Governor Bravo smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, that is widely used for DAO governance. Furthermore, we provide an evaluation of our implementation that demonstrates the practicality of the protocol. The most expensive operation is delegation due to the required zero-knowledge proofs. On a consumer-grade laptop, delegation takes between 7 and 167 seconds depending on the requested level of privacy.
Emerging market governments increasingly prioritize the defense of monetary sovereignty over the liberalization of financial innovation, particularly under conditions of macroeconomic fragility, high inflation, and geopolitical uncertainty. This study analyzes Türkiye's post-COVID financial landscape as a critical case through which to examine state strategies aimed at resisting the systemic adoption of cryptocurrencies. Despite escalating grassroots demand for digital assets-driven by Lira depreciation, inflationary pressures, and declining institutional trust-the Turkish government has leveraged a combination of regulatory, monetary, and legal instruments to preserve the Lira's role as the exclusive legal tender. Utilizing theories of monetary sovereignty and financial statecraft, alongside recent literature on crypto regulation in emerging markets and empirical insights from IMF and BIS analyses on FX interventions, this paper formulates a structured set of research questions and hypotheses to interrogate the relationship between cryptocurrency adoption, FX volatility, and institutional resistance. Methodologically, the study employs ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions with Newey-West corrections, lagged models, and event studies centered on Türkiye’s key regulatory milestones (2021–2024) to capture causal dynamics and policy feedback loops. Findings demonstrate a robust correlation between increased BTC/TRY volumes and TRY/USD volatility, underscoring the self-reinforcing nature of speculative feedback loops in fragile monetary environments. The evidence shows that heightened crypto adoption amplifies FX volatility through TRY Volatility Feedback Effects (TFF), particularly during geopolitical crises such as the June 2025 Middle East conflict, where BTC’s decline and USD’s appreciation reaffirmed the persistence of traditional safe-haven behaviors. Türkiye’s institutional response intensified proportionally through bans on crypto payments, licensing regimes, enhanced FX market interventions, and rhetorical strategies aimed at reaffirming sovereign monetary control. Although cryptocurrencies function as informal hedging mechanisms for households, this study confirms they cannot sustainably displace fiat currencies where sovereign defenses remain actively enforced. Instead, they exacerbate volatility, prompting reactive state interventions. This research contributes to broader debates on financial sovereignty in emerging markets by offering Türkiye as a paradigmatic example of how states leverage legal, monetary, and infrastructural tools to constrain decentralized finance amid persistent macroeconomic vulnerabilities. Moreover, the study introduces ValueMesh™, a novel sovereign-aligned alternative developed within Türkiye’s emerging financial ecosystem through the DevPay Türkiye platform. ValueMesh bridges the gap between public demand for high-yield, participatory finance and state imperatives of monetary sovereignty by offering regulated, project-specific micro-equity participation without reliance on blockchain-based assets. This innovation demonstrates that the psychological appeal of crypto speculation can be redirected into legally sanctioned, productive, and sovereign-controlled fintech architectures. Ultimately, Türkiye’s experience illustrates that the future of financial innovation in fragile economies lies not in decentralized disruption but in carefully engineered, state-backed digital ecosystems that integrate speculative incentives within sovereign frameworks. This positions Türkiye’s post-COVID monetary strategy as a critical reference point for policymakers, scholars, and industry leaders examining the evolving interplay between financial sovereignty, decentralized finance, and geopolitical risk.
This thesis challenges the conventional view of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s reform ideas in broad and binary terms as bridging a gap between ‘Islam and Europe’ or ‘tradition and modernity’. I offer instead an analysis of ʿAbduh’s reformist thought in his own words and local practical context in 19th century Egypt, based on a close-reading of his newspaper articles. I argue that ʿAbduh’s reform project, in terms of what was at stake in his job as Director of Publications for the Egyptian state from 1880-1882, is best understood as a bureaucratic publishing project or politics of adab that bridged journalism and the modern state, the Arabic Nahḍa and the Ottoman modernizing reforms known as the tanẓīmāt. He was pioneering journalism as a form of moral education (adab) to mobilize the souls of the reading public in what he conceptualized as a new biopolitical phase of state reform – reform and accountability to law that would operate bottom up from the people. His journalistic pedagogy worked by addressing readers with a polemic about a superficial nationhood and empty modernity that lacked both substance in the people’s souls and visible proof in ‘society’. Locating this project in Egypt’s emerging capitalist economy, I argue that his journalism particularly targeted Egypt’s cotton-enriched landed elite for failing to uphold rule of law and to distribute the benefits of modernization. ʿAbduh’s reform thus becomes a window into a wider dynamic of power taking shape between journalism, bureaucracy and law – itself crucial to understanding a pivotal moment in Egypt’s modern history, known for being the time of the so-called ʿUrābī Revolution.
Open access
Islamic Studies and History
Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East