Cryptocurrency as a Digital Registration Regime: Blockchain, Inscription, and the Ontology of Financial Value

This article argues that the value of cryptocurrencies does not primarily originate from market speculation but from the existence of a socially recognized and technically stabilized registration regime. Drawing on Registration Regime Theory (RRT), the paper conceptualizes blockchain as a secularized “Book of Deeds” in which ownership, scarcity, and temporal continuity are ontologically fixed through immutable inscription. Speculative price movements operate only on the basis of this pre-existing archival infrastructure and cannot generate value independently. Through an analysis of Bitcoin’s fixed monetary supply, proof-of-work mechanism, the Ethereum DAO fork, and inscription practices such as Ordinals, the study demonstrates how digital value emerges through writing rather than exchange alone. The article situates cryptocurrencies within a historical continuum of divine, bureaucratic, and algorithmic archives, arguing that contemporary finance has entered a new phase of financial ontology, where reality itself is constituted through cryptographic records.