From alternative assets to systemic change: How cryptocurrencies are transforming international finance

The social need to transform the global monetary and financial system, which is at the stage of rapid self-destruction against the background of growing economic and digital inequality, global challenges, structural shifts and polycrisis revealed the stability of the cryptocurrency industry, which manifested itself in the public acceptance of cryptocurrency assets both as a financial product and as a new ideological doctrine, in accordance with the theory of diffusion of innovation. The impact of the cryptocurrency ecosystem modification on the configuration of the global monetary and financial system has become the subject of this study. The authors analyzed panel data, which is based on 79 socio-cultural, political, demographic and economic indicators in dynamics for 2014—2024. As a result, individual factors have been identified that stimulate the smart society to recognize cryptocurrency realities not from a technological basis, but from the perspective of unique consumer and functional properties. Emphasis is placed on the specificity of the formation of the cryptocurrency landscape: the bidirectional world movement “retail users ↔ institutional players”; the paradoxical effect of tight regulation; conflict between economic reality and “beliefs”, etc. It has been established that the speed and depth of the cryptocurrency assets adoption by society is variable to a greater extent not from objective factors, but from subjective characteristics that affect decision-making and express the need for a new configuration of the global monetary and financial system. A breakthrough direction of socio-economic development is the ideology and design adaptation of the cryptocurrency channel of cross-border money transfers, which ensures the transition to a human-centered ecosystem of a multipolar order with a unique currency transfer standard.