Liquid platforms: Theorising the new digital economy

Abstract

Existing scholarship often employs metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded spaces. This paper introduces the concept of ‘liquid platforms’, inspired by the metaphor of liquidity, to critically examine the fluid, layered and contested nature of contemporary digital economies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with non-fungible token collectors and industry leaders based in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how these actors enact a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ through the manipulation of fluid platform boundaries, labour-intensive ‘grinding’ practices and visualisation tools, all aimed at imbuing non-fungible tokens with liquidity. Despite these efforts to manufacture price stability, platforms remain susceptible to structural liquidity corrections. The analysis highlights the increasingly important role that platforms – both as infrastructural and sociotechnical systems – play in generating liquidity. The ‘liquid platform’ metaphor offers a valuable framework for understanding the ever more complex, unstable dynamics that shape modern digital economies.

Within the burgeoning field of platform studies, a growing body of work has sought to acknowledge and interrogate how the term ‘platform’ operates as a metaphor (Cristofari, 2024; Gillespie, 2010). While platform scholars have proposed a plethora of definitions for what constitutes a platform (Ha et al., 2023), a degree of consensus has nonetheless emerged around the pivotal role played by platforms as intermediaries that facilitate and shape interactions between multiple different actors (Poell et al., 2019; Schüler and Petrik, 2021). These understandings often liken platforms to objects such as ‘elevated stages’, ‘marketplaces’ and ‘shopping malls’ (Cristofari, 2024). In so doing, such metaphors hint at platforms that function to connect multiple entities while simultaneously differentiating between them, enabling curation and the management of prominence through varying degrees of visibility and influence. Building on such metaphorical conventions, digital platforms have often been portrayed as technical systems that are discrete, bounded entities of electronic infrastructure on which various actors and goods may sit, flow or be transacted. While ‘reprogrammable’ in nature (Poell et al., 2019), platforms are assumed – by their very essence – to possess a form. This understanding of platforms connotes a degree of fixity, giving rise to a definite outline, shape or structure.

This paper seeks to further enrich the scope of platform metaphors by proposing the novel concept of liquid platforms. This concept responds to both the increasingly fluid boundaries of platforms themselves and also the ever more central role that such platforms play in shaping the (actual or perceived) liquidity of the various assets they help to exchange. Introducing the liquid metaphor to platform studies carries two main benefits. First, it helps make sense of the increasing adoption of decentralised, blockchain-powered technologies, which are purported to be challenging the dominance of incumbent, centralised platforms. Second, it can account for the novel components of digital economies that accompany decentralisation, such as cryptocurrencies, tokenised asset markets and smart contract ecosystems, as well as the networks designed to accelerate transactions within these environments.

To illustrate the analytical potential of the liquid platform metaphor, I draw primarily on data from a series of ‘object interviews’ conducted with Hong Kong-based collectors of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) regarding their ownership of these digital artefacts. NFTs are unique digital identifiers that are recorded on the blockchain in order certify ownership and identity of items, along with managing the transfer of such items. While NFTs can be applied to non-digital items, in practice their chief use to date has been in the transactions of digital assets. For participants, their ownership of NFTs was most often in the form of ‘profile pictures’ (PFPs), simple JPEG images often collected for speculative purposes. Participants’ narratives regarding these NFTs emphasised coordination of a diverse plethora of layered platforms, the centrality of community and constant flux that stemmed from the inherently volatile pricing of these assets. These narratives challenged my own preconceptions regarding the centrality of dedicated NFT trading platforms to the transacting of NFTs, leading me to question the boundaries of what platforms actually are. This corpus of interview data is further supplemented by additional ethnographic data gathered from long-term participant observation conducted at Web3 industry conferences and meet-ups in Hong Kong, revealing how both industry ‘thought leaders’ and ‘everyday users’ who engage in practices of NFT production, collection and exchange are co-participants in the circulation of symbolic representations of NFT liquidity.

The concept of liquid platforms represents a distinctive contribution to this special issue on digital transaction platforms in Asia. Locating this study of NFT collecting in Hong Kong – with its distinctive cultures of financialisation and conspicuous consumption – provides a vantage point through which to analyse how local cultures of exchange interface with ostensibly ‘borderless’ decentralised technologies to contribute to the formation of new digital economies. This approach illuminates how the insertion of novel, blockchain-powered exchanges gives rise to new transactional regimes across local, regional and global scales. While this paper is firmly grounded in the empirical setting of Hong Kong, I draw upon this original data obtained to conduct theorisation that can allow for understanding more far-reaching transformation in the nature of platforms. In so doing, this paper also seeks to respond to the invitation made by the Editors of Platforms & Society for ‘scholarship that unsettles existing assumptions about what platforms are and do’ (Chen et al., 2024: 2).

This article is organised into several sections to illustrate the potential of the liquid platform metaphor for platform studies. First, I provide a brief review of liquidity from various perspectives, which serves as a foundation for analysing how liquid platforms might address the ‘liquidity problem’ faced by NFTs. Second, I outline the methodology of this study, demonstrating how the use of screenshare interviews and industry ethnography enabled insights into how platforms attempt to imbue NFTs with liquidity. Third, I explain how individuals seek to overcome the illiquid nature of NFTs by enacting a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’, layering platforms to create a fluid infrastructure that facilitates NFT liquidity. Fourth, I discuss how liquidity is also socially constructed through ‘grinding’, a process that generates social heat and fuels traders’ desire to exchange. Fifth, I examine how platforms utilise visualisation tools – such as charts and floor prices – to translate this social heat into financial metrics, effectively disguising illiquid NFTs as liquid assets. Sixth, I argue that this artificially produced high liquidity conceals the market’s lack of depth and resilience, leading to ‘rug pulls’ that expose the systemic fragility of the system. Finally, I offer a broader discussion on how the concept of liquid platforms can contribute to understanding transformations in the digital economy, particularly in the context of decentralised technologies emerging in this space.

Exploring liquidity in the literature: Why platform economies need a theory of liquidity

Liquidity is widely regarded as being essential for the functioning of modern economic markets, yet its meaning remains multifaceted and can be difficult to pinpoint. It is a concept that has become a part of everyday public discourse, as well as a fundamental principle within financial economics. It has also been discussed at length through the alternative accounts provided by scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropologists, sociologists, human geographers and political economists. This section seeks to systematically define liquidity from diverse vantage points, contextualise it within platform economies and explore the unique nature of NFTs as assets that challenge conventional understandings of liquidity.

In everyday discourse, liquidity typically denotes assets that are held in cash or other transactable items that could be easily converted into cash (Rogers, 2005). For example, a savings account deposit is considered highly liquid, while a bespoke luxury apartment is comparatively illiquid due to the difficulty of finding a buyer. In this quotidian view, liquidity functions as a ‘lubricant’ of economic exchange, facilitating transactions of almost any conceivable good or service. Keynes (2018) elaborated on this by describing ‘liquidity preference’ as a human tendency to favour holding liquid assets for transaction, precautionary and speculative motives – particularly during periods of low interest rates when the opportunity cost of holding such assets diminishes.

In financial economics, the concept becomes more formalised and multidimensional. Finance professionals have extolled the benefits of ‘market liquidity’, seeking to create highly liquid markets featuring many buyers and sellers, tight bid-ask spreads and minimal price impact. Market liquidity is also connected to ‘funding liquidity’ – the ability of individuals, companies or financial institutions to obtain funding to meet their short-term needs – with the presence of these two forms of liquidity understood to mutually reinforce each other (Brunnermeier and Pedersen, 2009). Finance has further sought to capitalise upon differentials in ‘asset liquidity’, for instance, by conducting arbitrage between liquid and illiquid bonds (MacKenzie, 2003). Over time, financial practitioners have developed numerous indicators (e.g. bid-ask spread, trading volume and number of trades) to measure liquidity and assess the presence of potential ‘liquidity risk’ in the hope of maintaining the stability of the financial system (Ortiz, 2020).

Critical scholarship has interrogated the social and political dimensions of liquidity, emphasising its metaphorical and normative aspects (Carruthers and Stinchcombe, 1999; Ciocanel, 2025; Masera, 2018; Ortiz, 2020; Ralph, 2025; Rogers, 2005; Weston, 2013). Langley (2014) highlights how liquidity became a key theme in the governance of the 2008 financial crisis. He calls attention to the dual nature of the liquidity metaphor, which describes both a ‘liquid market’ comprised of willing buyers/sellers and a ‘financial quality’ concerned with how much accessible money/credit exists in a system. He traces how this metaphor was deployed to explain how liquidity ‘evaporated’ from markets during the early stages of the crisis, when money and capital ‘dried up’, ‘seised’ or was ‘frozen over’. It also justified subsequent market interventions by politicians and financial regulators that sought to restore investor confidence by ‘pumping’ liquidity back into the system (Langley, 2014). Weston (2013) notes how the crisis was described through a series of blood-related metaphors (e.g. ‘liquidity’, ‘lifeblood’ and ‘cardiac arrest’) that likened flows of cash and credit in the economy to the closed circulatory system of the human body. Additionally, Ho's (2009) ethnographic study explores how Wall Street investment bankers equate the liquidity inherent in their unstable work environments with the ‘natural’ functioning of the broader market. In so doing, they frame their own work culture as reflective of market norms and project their organisational practices onto corporate America.

Many of the above accounts of the different metaphors and meanings of liquidity aim their analysis at its ideological or immaterial dimensions, tracing how the concept becomes idealised and the social impacts of such idealisations. Indeed, Ortiz (2020: 42) notes that ‘the concept of liquidity, with its multiple meanings, appears thus as part of particular political imaginaries about the fairness of the distribution of resources’. Arguably absent from these accounts of liquidity, however, is a focus on the growing role played by various technologies in delivering and managing liquidity, especially in relation to platform economies. Platform businesses attempt to align themselves to benefit from liquid financial markets, implementing business models structured temporally around ‘liquidity events’ recognised by venture capital funds such as attracting rounds of investment, IPOs or acquisitions (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). Furthermore, platform businesses often seek to create liquid multisided markets within their platforms, allowing them to intermediate and capitalise upon this new form of digital economic circulation (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). For instance, gig-economy platforms entail the creation of liquid markets for services – matching users with ride-hailing drivers, food delivery riders and accommodation providers – in turn generating conditions of ‘liquid uncertainty’ by upturning traditional labour roles such as employer and employee and their associated expectations (Bryant, 2020).

NFTs represent a particularly compelling object of study for theorising liquidity within platform ecosystems. As digital, non-fungible items purportedly carrying value, NFTs initially promised to revolutionise asset ownership and transfer within platform ecosystems. However, their actual market performance has revealed a stark contrast: The vast majority of NFTs are now largely illiquid, with high friction and search costs limiting their exchangeability (Yang, 2023). Their rapid valuation surges and subsequent declines exemplify the inherent tension – NFTs are designed to be unique and indivisible, complicating their liquidity. This situation raises a fundamental question: Why do we need ‘liquid platforms’ for assets that are, by design, inherently illiquid? Understanding this tension is crucial for theorising the platform economy. The remainder of this paper will demonstrate that platforms that facilitate the circulation of NFTs attempt to mitigate illiquidity by creating ecosystems where these assets can be traded more efficiently, yet the intrinsic properties of NFTs often resist liquidity. This paradox underscores the importance of developing new theoretical frameworks that account for the flows, frictions and speculative dynamics characteristic of novel digital assets in platform contexts.

Misguided methodologies: ‘guided tours’ on the OpenSea

This paper’s key theoretical contribution – the concept of liquid platforms – would not have been arrived at were it not for preconceptions embedded in my original research methodology, which mistakenly assumed that participants’ narratives surrounding the NFTs they owned could most effectively be elicited through ‘screenshare interviews’ centred on their use of one specific popular NFT trading platform – OpenSea. This methodological approach entailed adapting the method of conducting object interviews (Woodward, 2001) to take place within the context of an ‘elicited screencapture’ (Stornaiuolo and Garg, 2025) encounter, with the goal of uncovering the meanings and values associated with these digital artefacts.

In practical terms, my initial method involved requesting participants use the ‘share screen’ feature of Zoom’s teleconferencing software to give me a ‘guided tour’ of the NFTs that they currently had listed on their OpenSea account. Framing my research encounter through the logic of a tour was intended to articulate with a growing body of established material culture approaches that have sought to go beyond eliciting participants’ verbal accounts of practices, by foregrounding the vitality of the material artefacts under discussion (Woodward, 2015). These tours allowed me to view participants’ NFTs in real-time, while they discussed them. ¹ Importantly, the use of the screen share function gave participants a greater sense of control over the research encounter, evoking Carbone and Lingua's (2023: 4) description of the screen as operating akin to a hedgerow by ‘creating a certain distribution of the visible and the invisible’. The screen brought into relief a distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, allowing participants to manage what was intentionally ‘given’ versus unintentionally ‘given off’ during the research encounter (Goffman, 1956).

Affording participants this high degree of autonomy over which aspects of their NFT collecting they allowed me to observe during the course of the interview enabled them to show me content they believed to be relevant which I may not otherwise have seen – for instance, NFT-related social media content and financial metrics – which they discussed in terms of liquidity. Furthermore, this approach was instrumental in challenging my preconceptions of OpenSea as being the central platform through which NFT transactions could be understood, allowing me to see how participants took advantage of platform fluidity by aligning layered platforms to achieve their goals.

Interviewees were recruited based on both their ownership of NFTs and their residence in Hong Kong, criteria intended to deliver a range of perspectives on these digital assets and the platforms used to transact them. Participants had to own at least one NFT and be normally residing in Hong Kong at the time of the interview. ² Hong Kong was selected as a focus of this study as it had been witnessing a surge of interest in NFT trading in the months prior to the start of my fieldwork. Local media and Web3 industry figures often attributed this intense level of attention to several unique attributes of the city: a deep-seated financial culture, recognition of the city as a centre for the global art trade and official policy commitments to recast the city as a ‘global virtual assets hub’. I interviewed 25 participants in total, over a period of 15 months between January 2022 and April 2023 (inclusive). Interviews were conducted in English by me or, in a small number of cases, with the help of a research assistant.

Screenshare interviews were supplemented with additional data drawn from a separate ongoing ethnographic study into cultural formations of Hong Kong’s Web3 industry, which offered broader insight into the involvement of locally based Web3 professionals in circulating discourses extolling the liquid characteristics of NFT platforms. This separate body of data emerged from extensive participant observation conducted at Web3 industry conferences and meet-ups in the city, where influential industry leaders often delivered keynote speeches or participated in panel discussions regarding emergent industry trends related to NFTs. During my participation in these events, I made extensive fieldnotes recording the social interactions that took place. Conference organisers also regularly published video recordings of speeches/panel discussions on their official social media channels after the event, allowing me to extend my participant observation of these events to consider their associated online presence. This ethnographic component allowed me to analyse the role played by both Web3 industry professionals and everyday NFT collectors in co-creating the liquid qualities of NFT platforms.

Solving the liquidity problem of NFTs: Fluid platforms and makeshift decentralisation

The NFT market is kind of a miracle sometimes, you know? … Anything can happen in a bull market. I have sold one or two of my NFTs at a loss before, because I needed liquidity at that time. Now, I don’t really need the liquidity. … So, I figured there's no rush in in selling.

A defining feature of the screen share interviews conducted with NFT collecting participants like Lok Yin, quoted above, was a sense of ambivalence towards the NFTs held in their crypto wallets. They were unsure whether their now largely worthless digital assets would ever recover in value; nor did they wish to realise their losses through conducting a ‘fire sale’ of these ‘stranded assets’ (Ausserladscheider, 2024). The rapid ascendance and subsequent decline in popularity of NFTs was all the more pronounced in Hong Kong, where even highly respected local institutions such as newspapers, hospital and universities had sought to profit from the 2021–2022 NFT boom by issuing their own digital collectables. In response to this volatility, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (2022), a financial regulator, issued guidance warning investors of the heightened risks associated with NFTs, which included ‘illiquid secondary markets’.

The financially illiquid nature of NFTs became jarring given that both NFT collectors and Web3 industry professionals in the city regularly touted liquidity as essential for the market success of this novel digital asset. This section of the paper describes how these players co-constructed various promises of NFTs (digital ownership, platform interoperability, community membership, etc.). Further, I will outline how, when focused on illiquidity NFT assets, they resorted to a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ whereby platforms were layered to form fluid infrastructures that sought to imbue NFTs with liquidity.

This quality of platform fluidity draws attention to how what constitutes the form of a platform – in terms of its shape, limits or contours – is open to contestation, redefinition and reinterpretation. Existing platform metaphors typically denote platforms in terms of distinct, bounded spaces. For instance, the platform as a ‘stage’ in the form of a ‘raised level surface’ on which activity would be housed, ‘suggesting a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it’ (Gillespie, 2010: 350). Trading centres – marketplaces (Kirchner and Schüßler, 2019), shopping malls (Sadowski, 2020) or emporiums (Athique, 2020) – are prevalent platform metaphors, suggesting delineated zones for coordinating and transacting between multiple actors (Cristofari, 2024). A couple of obscure platform metaphors do suggest expansive qualities – the platform as a ‘stack’ (Bratton, 2016) or ‘Lego’ (Helmond, 2023) – implying modular expansion, rather than fluidity. Overall, the current repertoire of platform metaphors fails to adequately capture the essence of NFT and other blockchain technologies, which those involved in their development and use tended to describe as possessing fluid, adaptable infrastructures.

NFTs were extolled by Web3 industry professionals as being poised to challenge the incumbency of existing centralised platforms or even call into question the need for platforms altogether. For example, at one NFT-themed industry conference, the CEO of a Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming company delivered a speech critical of several NFT marketplaces, which had announced they would no longer pay NFT creators royalty fees for resales of their creations on the secondary market. The CEO spoke of the fundamental difference between the operating principles of Web2 and Web3:

The whole point about Web3 is that it aligns the network effects between the people who are using it: the creators, the owners, and perhaps even the platform … In the Web2 world, that benefit was accrued to the platforms. So, we think of this as something that is free, but nothing is free. You are using Facebook; they farm your data. You think you get it for free. In reality, they take all your data and they take all the value from that data.

Here, the CEO contrasts the communal, redistributive ethos of a blockchain-powered Web3 against the corporative, extractive inclination of Web2. By querying whether platforms might be beneficiaries of this realignment of network effects, he casts doubt over their continued relevance in this ‘next stage’ in the evolution of the internet. It hints at the radical prospect of blockchain technologies potentially leading to the ‘de-platforming’ of platforms themselves.

Another unconventional vision for NFTs advanced by some Web3 industry professionals involved them being considered as platforms in and of themselves. For example, in 2018, the abovementioned CEO published a ‘Vision Essay’ on his company's corporate website in which he claimed that ‘The content is becoming the platform. At least metaphorically speaking’. The article describes a hypothetical situation involving a brand collaboration between two distinct science fiction franchises – Star Trek and Star Wars – made possible through NFT technologies. He writes, ‘Imagine that you could own a digital item that has multiple uses across different platforms. In very simplistic terms, you could take the Star Trek ship into a game about the Star Wars universe (or any other game world)’. Users could further invest in their ‘virtual’ spacecraft by purchasing utility or value-increasing add-ons (themselves NFTs) without reliance on ‘exclusive’ content platforms (e.g. specific app stores, games and publishers). The CEO described this possible future as one in which ‘NFTs allow your digital asset to become the centre of your digital experience: the content itself becomes the platform through which you consume other content’. The chosen example of a ship is particularly apt, highlighting the NFT as a ‘vessel’ that promises portability, ferrying the user between blockchain-mediated virtual worlds, seeking out favourable regimes of value in which to project their digital selves.

Interviews with individual NFT collectors suggested they resonated with such visions of portable digital assets that could act as platforms for the self, but few had actually been able to fully enact such ideals. When discussing their NFTs, many spoke of such capacities as vague possibilities rather than concrete features. For now these digital artefacts appeared to be little more than JPEG images which might, at some point in the future, have unlocked a multitude of possible users in both online and offline settings. In response to this gap between the promises of NFTs and their current constrained use cases, participants improvised their own ‘makeshift decentralisation’ through marshalling fluid platform boundaries.

Particiants’ efforts at makeshift decentralisation first became evident to me during screenshare interviews, when I realised that NFT trading relied on users navigating a constellation of different platforms, undermining my preconception that the focus of my study was OpenSea. I had initially envisaged that during screenshare interviews, participants would take me through all the NFTs listed on their OpenSea page in a systematic, orderly fashion, explaining the history and context behind each purchase. OpenSea did indeed represent the key platform through which most participants ‘experienced’ their NFTs. However, participants also spent a considerable amount of time showing me NFT-related content on a multitude of platforms other than OpenSea as a way of making sense of the NFTs that they owned. Occasionally, these were competitor NFT trading platforms (e.g. Rarible and Axie Marketplace). However, more frequently participants preferred to browse NFT-related discussions posted on various social media platforms (e.g. X, Instagram and Discord), pore over charts on NFT market technical analysis platforms (e.g. NFTGo and Rarity Sniper) and view the holdings in their cryptocurrency wallets (e.g. MetaMask). ³ These behaviours indicate that the idealistic vision of Web3 – a decentralised model of exchange enabling the seamless transfer of digital assets across multiple online worlds – has not yet come to fruition. Instead, participants pursued a kind of ‘makeshift decentralisation’, moving NFT-themed content (and their own attention) between Web3 and Web2 platforms, on-chain and off-chain.

Social media platforms played a central role in fostering communicative exchanges aimed at fostering trades – and liquidity – on the OpenSea marketplace. Users’ flight to social media platforms was partly because OpenSea lacked any function for messaging or communication between buyers, sellers and creators of NFTs within its platform. OpenSea thus presented its platform as an idealised ‘pure’ market economy, wholly dedicated to the provision of fundamental market information (e.g. NFT image, name and price/transaction history) required by ‘rational’ market actors for the purpose of making ‘well-informed’ trades. It was to be unadulterated by more subjective forms of communicative exchange containing emotionally charged content that might unduly influence the decisions of players in the market.

When, in the midst of a screenshare interview, participants navigated their web browser away from the OpenSea website, it was, on the majority of occasions, because they wished to show me NFT-related content on X, Discord or Instagram. The teams that coordinated NFT projects often had their own X accounts or Discord servers where they shared messages announcing NFT drops or whitelist events. These messages would be further amplified by others involved in the community who commented on or reposted this content. Despite the differing natures and remits of these platforms, they can be understood to act as co-constitutive transaction platforms, supporting transactional economies by incorporating ‘key motivating tendencies playing out across the interlocking domain of commerce, technology sociability and logistics’ (Athique and Parthasarathi, 2020).

This understanding of platforms as fluid also takes reference from Gillespie's (2018a, 2018b) discussion of moderation as being the key function of platforms. Gillespie draws attention to how social media platforms have portrayed themselves as mere conduits of information, concealing or disavowing their engagement in moderating content. Platform moderation processes by social media have, Gillespie argues, come to shape public discourse. The multiple interlinked platforms – marketplaces, blockchains and social media – supporting NFT exchanges provide an ideal case to consider the moderating role of platforms not only in terms of content, but in all manner of transactions (financial, informational, conversational, etc.). In this regard, I am influenced by Steinberg's (2019) concept of the ‘platform economy’, in which he foregrounds how terminology often constitutes its own metaphorical economy that permeates and transforms fields. Steinberg emphasises that it is ‘patterns of management (rhetorical and operational) that create the conditions for platform capitalism’ (Steinberg, 2019: 6). Also of relevance is de Vaujany et al.'s (2019) argument that in the context of the collaborative economy, platforms and communities are – despite often being framed as contradictory to one another – in fact mutually constituted by one another. For my participants, owning NFTs meant being part of a platform-based community, and active communities were understood to be essential for delivering liquidity to communities. As hobbyist NFT collector Yan Man described:

They are always talking about community, you know? So, I tried to understand NFT projects, as in, why they have value? It’s because they’re not only trying to sell you the JPEG. The JPEG is an entrance to something else, you know? It’s an entrance to an exclusive club. … And once you get the NFT, it’s a ticket, or, like … a membership to the club.

The alignment between fluid platform boundaries and a sense of belonging illustrates how platforms are designed to facilitate flows of transactions and thus liquidity. Mukherjee's (2019) analysis of Indian telecom operator Reliance Jio provides relevant insight: the company promoted its apps – spanning social media, streaming and financial services – by investing heavily in infrastructure such as cell towers, fibre optic networks and free airtime. He describes this as an effort to explicitly connect ‘pipes’ and ‘platforms’, noting that in contemporary discourse, the metaphor of a platform often alternates between infrastructure and application. Mukherjee suggests that citizens’ ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ of these connections are intertwined with visions of a digitally ubiquitous India, co-constructed by citizens, telecoms and the state. Similarly, the practices of makeshift decentralisation engaged in by NFT collectors reflect efforts to realise an infrastructural vision of a new blockchain-powered digital economy, where interoperability enables seamless digital transactions within and beyond platforms. Next, we turn to how NFT platforms facilitate the construction of social exchanges.

‘Grinding’ and the social construction of liquidity

Makeshift decentralisation could not rely solely on leveraging the fluid boundaries of platforms to generate liquidity for NFTs; it also required the social construction of liquidity through a normative community practice called ‘grinding,’ which itself depended on these flexible boundaries. Grinding is a participatory labour-like practice where users are rewarded for actively contributing to communities around particular NFT projects. Originating from hip-hop culture and gaining mainstream recognition through gaming, ‘grinding’ denotes working with effort and consistency to achieve one’s (often monetary) goals. Used in the context of NFTs, it typically describes the voluntary communicative labour engaged in by followers of NFT projects who frequently post messages on X, Discord and Instagram. These messages are often hyperbolic, enthusing about NFT projects in an attempt to engage others, create a sense of excitement around a project and help answer logistical questions from potential buyers. Users are incentivised to post such messages through the promise of receiving exclusive rewards (e.g. NFT drops and whitelists ⁴ ) that, if the associated project proves successful, they would be able to profit from by reselling on the secondary market. Yan Man, a hobbyist NFT collector, described expending considerable time and energy on grinding activities:

I just spent, I think, the whole Chinese New Year Holiday. I remember the whole week. So, I was just on the Discord server, it’s like a full-time job. I just, you know, say “Hi” to everyone in the morning, when I wake up. Because there’s a quantitative way to figure out your engagement as well, by the number of messages that you have in Discord. So that's actually called grinding. I’m counting the messages that I send, and stuff like that. I also like that the mods make clear that numbers don’t really matter the most, but it’s the quality of the conversation.… And then, it’s a very fair project, because when the time comes, when you reach the level the mods can recognize you, they whitelist. So, I actually got whitelisted from grinding.

Yan Man’s narrative of her engagement in intensive grinding practices to construct a community around an NFT project is indicative of how OpenSea and other NFT marketplace platforms rely upon social media platforms (e.g. X, Discord and Instagram) to bring into existence the market that they aim to place within their platform.

In spite of the current limitations on the portability of NFTs between ‘native’ Web3 platforms, participants sought to capitalise on the fluid boundaries of NFT platforms by posting content about the NFT projects they were grinding for on Web2 social media in ways that promote exchanges on OpenSea. The interactions occurring between these different kinds of platforms further support the notion of liquidity in the way they merge and separate at various moments, becoming inextricably linked and mutually co-constitutive. What can be considered as constituting an ‘NFT platform’ is thus not restricted to OpenSea (or other marketplaces) alone. Recognising this co-constitutive nature encourages us to question oft-levelled claims that Web3 represents the ‘next stage’ in the evolution of the internet. Maurer (2015) cautions against evolutionary narratives asserting that new digital monies replace traditional monies, as obscuring the reality of their co-existence. Similarly, Web3 platforms are not replacing Web2 platforms, but rather are increasingly reliant upon them for their underlying markets to function.

The requirement for community members engaged in grinding to post both prodigiously and profoundly led Yan Man to directly compare the practice to a form of labour:

So, basically all this voluntary work is to get the admins to notice me. This is why we call it grinding. Because, it’s kind of like you’re working. And you know the mods are your boss. Your salary is the whitelist, and you have to pay for it.

Yan Man’s understanding of her engagement in grinding practices – community construction through content production – as a form of reward-bearing labour calls to mind Athique's (2019) description of how, under the digital economy, communication is rapidly attaining the status of a commodity. This, he claims, renders it amenable to what he terms the ‘great integration’ of simultaneous transactions across multiple social domains. In the above example of grinding for a place on the whitelist, we see this integration occurring through the enmeshing of multiple platforms embedded within digital economies. Steinberg's (2019: 6) three-fold typology of platforms is useful for illuminating how grinding practices combine with fluid platform boundaries to make NFTs more liquid. Here, platforms comprise ‘a layered structure’ (social media supporting OpenSea, OpenSea supporting digital wallets), ‘a support for contents’ (the posts promoting NFT projects made by community participants as part of their grinding process) and ‘a structure of mediation or enabler of financial transactions’ (interactions within communities that enable NFT trades). The channelling of the activities of community members through the logic of ‘grinding’ creates the basis for ‘patterns of management (rhetorical and operational) that create the conditions for platform management’ (Steinberg, 2019: 6). By this, I refer to how OpenSea, the underlying blockchain platforms that power it, and a constellation of social media platforms that promote it become structured as a platform ecosystem which recognises, reproduces and rewards grinding practices. Furthermore, the form around NFT projects promotes grinding both as a normative practice and as a highly neoliberal form of self-governance. The efficacy of these ideals is powerfully illustrated by Yan Man's willingness to forgo her Chinese New Year holiday to engage in the ‘voluntary’ work of grinding to receive the ‘salary’ of a possible whitelist place.

NFT projects supported by authentic, active communities were understood to gain liquidity that stemmed directly from those communities and the platforms that facilitate them. Their prolific sharing of content and interacting with other community members became perceived by many NFT collectors as proof of an active community, which in turn was felt to represent liquidity. As Wen Hao, a collector originally from mainland China who had lived in Hong Kong for a number of years, described:

The thing is, once people really enjoy the community, many people want to buy, and other people want to sell. So, it creates the liquidity. So, the liquidity, it actually can make the huge profits.

Wen Hao’s account illustrates how organic, communicative exchanges are intertwined with incentivised, grinding content to create an interactional milieu that – if all goes to plan – users identify as an active community. His depiction of liquidity emerging from active NFT communities aligns with Pasanek and Polillo's (2011) critique of how finance employs the metaphor of liquidity. They argue that the notion of money’s ability to ‘flow’ is often attributed to its inherent nature, rather than to its social and pragmatic context. They assert that ‘the metaphor of liquidity reinforces laissez-faire models of equilibrium and circulation’, in turn concealing the pragmatic and material considerations of money (Pasanek and Polillo, 2011: 233). These practical aspects are vividly illustrated in Wen Hao’s description of NFT project communities replete with adherent followers, whose heated social interactions make it entirely plausible for buyers to become ‘carried away’ in ways akin to traditional art auctions (Thompson, 2008: 128).

Participants used a wide range of adjectives to describe the presence of liquidity-bearing communities they observed on NFT platforms. Participants did not exclusively rely on ‘liquidity’ as the sole term for describing the NFT communities that they were engaged in. Descriptors such as ‘active’, ‘hot’, ‘busy’ and ‘crowded’ also featured in their narratives, usually when they reminisced about the intense communities that coalesced around projects during the market peak. These linguistic conventions called to mind the atmospheres of ‘stock fever’ that Hertz (1998) claimed dominated the booming Shanghai stock market amongst retail investors in the early 2000s. Conversely, the so-called ‘quiet’, ‘empty’ or ‘dead’ NFT communities – perceived as prevalent during the period when many participants were interviewed – came to symbolise the bearish market they currently found themselves trapped within. As one participant, Ming Tak, described while browsing OpenSea: ‘There's no buying or selling going on currently right now. It’s just quiet right now’. The contrast between these two sets of metaphors highlights the fluctuating nature of social heat within these platform-mediated communities, causing rapid changes in the perceived liquidity of the NFT market.

The experience of ‘dead’ NFT markets resonates with Langley's (2014) account of the framing of the 2008 global financial crisis as a ‘liquidity problem’ wherein the material, discursive and affective qualities of liquidity ultimately became intertwined with a distinct governance apparatus. Recently, the team behind the OpenSea platform has attempted to govern their own liquidity problem through technical means, by introducing platform upgrades that allow users to ‘seamlessly access both NFTs and tokens all in one place via integrated liquidity aggregators’ (Opensea, 2025). This measure meant that ERC20 tokens (e.g. Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies, loyalty rewards or company shares) could be bought or sold from within the marketplace alongside NFTs. The public relations exercise surrounding this effort to adjust platform infrastructures to bring new flows of money can be made sense of by considering comments made by the CEO of one Hong Kong-based Web3 entertainment company at an industry networking event: ‘I think there are always some new narratives in crypto right? But one thing that all the narratives need is actually liquidity… that means like, money, right?’

Participants’ understanding that liquidity stems from active NFT project communities runs counter to a body of economic thought that sees liquidity as a force that corrodes community. For instance, Keynes (2018) was highly critical of ‘the fetish of liquidity’ that he characterised as being the most ‘anti-social’ and corrosive of the ‘maxims of orthodox finance’. Organising markets around the notion of liquidity, he argued, forced investors to obsess over being the first to spot imminent changes (e.g. in news, social climate and public sentiment) that might profoundly impact market confidence. Keynes was dismissive of investment institutions’ predilection for holding ‘liquid securities’, arguing that ‘there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole’ (Keynes, 2018: 136). He claimed that, guided by a belief in liquidity, investors focus on trying to ‘time the market’ for private gain, hoping to pass depreciating assets onto unwitting buyers. This desire for achieving personal gain through causing others to lose could be interpreted as eroding investment communities. This contradiction points to the fact that while liquidity was the quality that gave the community its appeal, it also represented a source of concern for potential members. These anxieties were heightened by the ephemeral nature of liquidity, prompting participants to invest significant effort in trying to detect its presence.

Visualising liquidity: Platform presentation of NFTs as liquid assets

NFT platforms also featured tools and services that visualised liquidity concentration – through trading charts, price indicators and other metrics – enabling ‘skilled’ NFT collectors to perform technical analysis on the market. These visualisation tools became a mechanism through which collectors discerned whether the social heat emanating from communicative exchanges around particular NFT projects was mirrored by actual trading activity. In this way, the visualisation tools worked to effectively disguise illiquid NFTs as liquid assets.

During screenshare interviews, participants routinely referred to webpages containing graphical ‘stock market’-style charts visualising economic data related to the NFT artworks/projects under discussion. These charts typically displayed variables such as the change in price of a specific artwork over time or aggregate data (e.g. listings, sales, bids and transfers) for all the NFTs linked to a specific project. Almost always, the user was able to adjust the timescale of the horizontal axis from the shortest period of ‘1D’ (24 h) up to ‘ALL’ (which typically covered several years for which data was available). Participants typically accessed such charts within OpenSea itself. One participant, named Yat Lei, attributed OpenSea’s popularity amongst NFT marketplaces to the mastery of the platform in the graphical representation of data: ‘There’s a reason that many people use OpenSea: they were early, and they have good charts’.

While OpenSea’s capacity for visualising NFT market data had helped it gain a dominant position amongst NFT marketplaces, several third-party analytics platforms were used by participants to gather additional insights into the performance of NFT projects. Yat Lei showed me a free tool named NFTGo which could be used to display data regarding any NFT artwork/project. As Yat Lei browsed through the site, he marvelled at the ‘professional scale’ of the service and the ‘pretty good numbers’ that this platform provided. At one point, he stopped to show me a single chart that combined at least five different categories of data pertaining to an NFT project: the floor and average prices of across time as plot lines, prices of single purchases from within the project as grey scatter dots, the highest and lowest value purchases as scatter dots highlighted in other colours, as well as scatter dots for purchases conducted by ‘whales’ represented by a tiny icon of the same animal. ⁵ ‘So amazing!’ he exclaimed, seeming in awe at the data vision panopticon afforded by these graphs.

While participants praised the fidelity of the data visualisations provided by platforms such as NFTGo and OpenSea, they also recognised the knowledge and skill required by users to be able to discern liquidity from reading charts. ⁶ During our discussions, Yat Lei pulled up on his screen an OpenSea chart showing the price change of an NFT project named Azuki. He had previously purchased an NFT belonging to this project. Yat Lei moved his cursor along the chart starting at 20 January 2022, where the average price was 3.9 ETH ($11,718 USD) and 2187 NFTs were sold in a day. About a third of the way along the horizontal axis, on 1 February 2022, the line peaked when the average price hit 18.7 ETH ($52,120 USD) and 643 sales occurred. This marked the beginning of a gradual decline over the following 5 weeks until the price had fallen to 10.7 ETH ($27,576 USD), and only 11 sales occurred on that day. With his cursor hovering over the low point at the far right of the declining chart, he suggested that the current situation was ‘very bearish’. He explained that while ‘Some people may think it’s a good thing, and you can get the price cheaper, but it’s not really the thing in NFTs’. This, he observed, was fundamentally a problem of liquidity:

The biggest risk of an NFT is the liquidity. So even if the price is dropping, if the liquidity is still ongoing, [it’s] the support side. So, that means it’s just the ideas conflicting between the buyers and sellers.

In this explanation, a low price is not necessarily a bad thing, provided that the relationship between the price of NFTs belonging to a project and the volume of transactions around that project remains sufficiently intact. The worst-case scenario, Yat Lei lamented, was one which involved holding an NFT that belonged to a project that was experiencing low liquidity. ‘It’s like, very scary, especially in a bearish market’. He commented that in such situations, when the price of NFTs belonging to a project drops, people would be less likely to wish to buy into a project. Price decreases tended to expose the speculative emotions surrounding NFTs which, when combined with the absence of physical underlying assets, acted to deter most bargain hunters who might otherwise be inclined to ‘buy the dip’.

Participants’ efforts at locating liquidity through technical analysis go beyond an understanding of liquidity as a purely qualitative economic measure, instead encompassing a kind of ‘embodied knowledge’ with regard to the mood of the market. Yat Lei was seen to be reading these charts for relevant information about movements in process, sales volume, highs and lows and the presence of whales in the market. These insights, gleaned from careful observation of platform-generated data visualisations, had to be assimilated and then integrated alongside other knowledge to try to divine the emotions at play amongst different NFT communities. While cases of divergent emotions might in certain situations be beneficial for liquidity, the overarching concern is to avoid the very worst-case scenarios, where prices are falling and all market participants share uniform pessimism about the state of the market.

Even when users perceived liquidity as being absent from the market, the social architecture of NFTs led participants to choose to keep them on public display within platform marketplaces, allowing them to retain hope for a spontaneous return of liquidity. This seems to align with Langley's (2014) concept of liquidity as the availability of money or credit within a system at a given moment. However, a closer reading reveals how NFT platforms and their users enable the fluid qualities of liquidity. The willingness of participants to hold onto their assets, the role of marketplace platforms in providing a structural space for community connection – even when those communities are largely inactive – and the optimistic expectation of a market revival all highlight the flexible nature that underpins the concept of liquidity in this context.

Getting ‘rug pulled’: Vanishing liquidity and enduring platforms

Liquidity has also been a significant concern for prospective members of NFT communities, particularly regarding the risk of falling victim to what is commonly termed a ‘rug pull’. This slang describes a situation in which the seemingly solid foundation supporting one’s wealth is unexpectedly withdrawn, leaving investors exposed. It reflects the notion that what appears to be a healthy, well-functioning platform marketplace – on which investment decisions are based – may in fact be an illusion, capable of collapsing at any moment. One participant noted how the proliferation of rug pulls within the NFT space discouraged others from buying into NFT projects:

I feel like the game has been overplayed so much … People want to try, and they get rug pulled. They’re like “oh, you know, the floor price has suddenly dropped after I buy it”, or “The team doesn’t really deliver anything”. … And newbies usually don’t know what's happening. So, after they get rug pulled once, they’re like “OK, I’m done”.

The phenomenon of rug pulls, which exploit asymmetric knowledge, runs counter to the ideal that ‘the social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future’ (Keynes, 2018: 136). The shock of a project being unexpectedly ‘rug pulled’ is heightened when contrasted with the project roadmaps published by NFT creators on their websites. These roadmaps serve as blueprints, projecting a tangible future for the project – detailing upcoming drops, collaborations and online or in-person events as discrete milestones along a timeline. Such plans imply a structured development trajectory. However, as NFT collector Yat Lei observed:

You know, 60 or 70% of the projects, they say “We are a great project, and we’ll do whatever we can to build up our community. Our roadmap shows 1, 2, 3, 4 …” But it turns out to be nothing, and you could lose a lot of money from this.

This final example of rug pulls underscores the unsustainable nature of the artificially generated liquidity that NFT enthusiasts and Web3 advocates co-create through the alignment of various platforms. NFTs, which are made to appear highly liquid through the ‘social heat’ generated by community interactions – fostered by grinding and visualisation tools – mask a market that fundamentally lacks depth and resilience. Rug pulls are not mere accidents; rather, they are structural features of this fragility. In such cases, the role of platforms becomes evident in facilitating what Keynes (2018) identified as the anti-communitarian aspect of a preference for liquidity: multiple investors attempt to time the market for personal gain by passing depreciating assets onto unsuspecting buyers.

Conclusion: Towards the study of liquid platforms

This study has introduced and elaborated the concept of ‘liquid platforms’ to critically engage with the shifting landscape of digital media, especially within the context of NFT trading in Hong Kong. Moving beyond established metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded entities, the liquid platform concept emphasises their fluidity, layering and ongoing redefinition. This perspective underscores that platforms are not static structures but fluid assemblages shaped through social practices, technological innovations and ideological imperatives, challenging the notion of clear-cut, territorially bounded digital spaces.

A key contribution of this paper lies in illustrating how platform boundaries are actively negotiated, contested and reconfigured by both the owners and users of those platforms. This is especially the case for blockchain technologies, exemplified by NFTs, which explicitly seek to challenge the conventional image of platforms as centralised, controlled entities. However, this paper demonstrates this reconfiguration as not a purely technical process, but rather as a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ whereby players assemble various layers of platforms – both Web2 and Web3 – to come closer to realising some of the promises of blockchain technologies.

Furthermore, the concept of liquid platforms can make a key contribution to illuminating the increasingly important role played by platforms in actually creating liquidity. Empirically, the data from Hong Kong reveal how liquidity has to be socially constructed through practices – such as ‘grinding’ – that involve active engagement, content sharing and social coordination. Platforms have also been shown to materialise liquidity, for instance, through NFT visualisation tools that render NFTs observable via an array of financial metrics. Such findings challenge pervading economic notions that treat liquidity solely as a technical or quantitative measure, emphasising instead its embeddedness in platform-mediated social and cultural processes.

The notion of liquid platforms highlights how platforms not only facilitate asset and information flows but also act as social spaces in which notions of community, economic ideologies and alternative futures are produced and recirculated. However, the liquidity that these platforms give rise to is inherently fragile. Events like ‘rug pulls’ expose the precariousness of these arrangements, revealing that liquidity in digital platforms is always embedded within broader social and economic systems which have their own liquidity constraints. As such, platforms are dependent on social cohesion, narratives and trust for their liquidity, all of which can fracture rapidly. The concept of liquid platforms also necessitates attending to these wider structural concerns.

Beyond its specific focus on Hong Kong and NFTs, this study offers a broader theoretical contribution to platform studies. In an era increasingly characterised by decentralisation and technological hybridity, the metaphor of liquidity provides a vital analytical lens for understanding how digital spaces are becoming less fixed and more contested. It underscores the importance of critically examining the sociotechnical processes that produce and sustain fluid platforms – processes that have profound implications for issues of trust, authority and social inequality in digital economies. While the concept of liquid platforms seems particularly well suited to the study of blockchain technologies, it also holds potential for illuminating the functioning of liquidity across a diverse range of platforms – both online and offline – in contemporary society. Phenomena such as decentralised finance (DeFi), open-source social media (e.g. Mastodon and Lemmy), mobile trade fairs and even ‘pop-up’ street markets could all potentially be analysed as instances of liquid platforms.

The study signals a need for scholars to move beyond static models and metaphors, recognising that the future of platforms involves ongoing negotiation, adaptation and contestation. As digital economies become ever more embedded with social and political life, understanding their fluid boundaries and their capacity for marshalling liquidity will be crucial for grappling with questions of power, governance and ethics in transforming societies. Ultimately, this work challenges us to rethink the foundational assumptions of what platforms are, who controls them and how they transact. This will allow us to see emergent digital economies more clearly, appreciating them as ongoing processes of exchange, negotiation and reimagining.