From E-Democracy to C-Democracy: Analyzing Transnational Political Discourse During South Korea’s 2024 Presidential Impeachment on Polymarket

Abstract

This study examines the emergence of cryptocurrency-enabled democracy (c-democracy) through an analysis of blockchain-based prediction markets during South Korea’s 2024 presidential impeachment crisis. Using a mixed-methods approach, namely network analysis, discourse analysis, and statistical validation, we identify transnational communities engaging in Korean politics beyond citizenship boundaries. Findings reveal a discourse–betting disconnect, where expressive, playful discourse coexists with serious financial stakes, reflecting hybrid motivations for participation. We also observe playful activism and transnational community formation that transcend geographical limits. These results highlight c-democracy as a novel form of political engagement that extends, but also complicates, traditional e-democracy frameworks.

1. Introduction

Hundreds of thousands of Koreans protested the president’s impeachment at the National Assembly on 14 December 2024. Another kind of democratic engagement was happening online at the time. Over $15.8 million was wagered on whether the president would resign by 2024 on Polymarket, a blockchain-based prediction marketplace. This disparity demonstrates a basic change in the way that democratic participation functions in the digital era.

Traditional theories of democratic engagement have assumed that political participation occurs primarily within national boundaries, driven by civic duty, and mediated through established institutional channels [1]. However, the emergence of Web3 technologies is challenging these foundational assumptions. This study examines what we term the transition from e-democracy to c-democracy—a shift that represents not merely the digitization of existing democratic processes, but the creation of entirely new forms of political participation.

The theoretical significance of this research lies in its development of a new framework for understanding cryptocurrency-enabled democracy (c-democracy). Unlike e-democracy also known as Digital or Internet Democracy, which applied digital tools to enhance existing democratic procedures [2], c-democracy creates novel participation mechanisms including liquid democracy, economic incentives for accurate political predictions, and transnational political community formation [3]. Our empirical analysis reveals the emergence of diverse discourse communities, the disconnect between economic investment and social engagement, and the formation of global political publics around local democratic events [4].

As early digital democracy theorists observed, networked communication reshaped the conditions of the public sphere. Papacharissi described the virtual sphere as a mediated space that could either expand or constrain democratic participation depending on its architecture and accessibility [5]. Two decades later, participatory environments have evolved beyond discourse to encompass code-based governance and financial infrastructures. In this context, blockchain technologies such as Polymarket do not simply digitize civic engagement, they financialize it. Economic signals, such as bets, stakes, or tokens, become new ways of expressing political preferences and assessing collective belief.

While scholarship on affective and playful publics has illuminated how emotion, creativity, and humor drive participation on social media [6,7], relatively little research has examined how economic incentives and decentralized technologies reconfigure what it means to engage politically. Studies of prediction markets typically focus on market efficiency and information accuracy [8], overlooking their civic implications. This study addresses that gap by conceptualizing how financialized participation transforms democratic action, illustrating how Web3 platforms convert expressions of belief into quantifiable, transactional behaviors.

In this study, cryptocurrency-enabled democracy (c-democracy) refers to forms of participation that merge civic expression with financial speculation. Whereas e-democracy emphasizes communication and transparency through digital media, c-democracy highlights economic participation as a new democratic modality where users’ financial commitments, such as staking, trading, or betting, acquire symbolic and political significance. In decentralized systems, citizens act as both participants and investors, and their economic behaviors are integral to how legitimacy and collective will are expressed.

The emergence of c-democracy raises critical questions about legitimacy, equality, and representation within non-state governance systems. As Papacharissi noted, participation in digital publics depends on visibility and access; in Web3 environments, these are further shaped by financial capacity and technological literacy [5]. C-democracy thus challenges the liberal assumption of equal participation, replacing it with a hybrid model in which political influence is distributed through both code and capital.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Traditional and Digital Democracy

The evolution of digital political participation has shifted from passive consumption to active, creative engagement. Papacharissi introduced the concept of “affective publics” to describe how digital technologies enable emotional engagement with political issues through humor, storytelling and shared experiences [9]. This framework explains how ordinary citizens become emotionally invested in political events through digital platforms.

Building on this foundation, recent scholarship has identified the emergence of “playful activism” as a distinct form of political engagement. Cervi and Divon demonstrate how young generations use platforms like TikTok to express political resistance through creative combinations of videos and hashtags, transforming serious issues into accessible, engaging content that transcends traditional political discourse boundaries [6]. Choi and Park provided early evidence of this transformation in their study of Twitter-based political activism in South Korea [10]. They found that users employed cultural jamming and cyber activism to organize collective action, using humor and creativity as forms of cultural resistance. This research revealed how social media platforms enable new forms of political expression that blend entertainment with serious political commentary. Beyond South Korea, playful activism has been observed in meme-based climate campaigns [11] and protest movements where humor facilitates and sustains participation and mobilization under repression [12]. Extending these insights, Osman et al. show how YouTube’s affordances such as storytelling, audio–visual creativity, and concise narratives, not only enhance audience engagement but also mobilize collective action around climate change [13]. Their findings highlight how playful and affective forms of digital activism thrive on video-based platforms, where entertainment logics are interwoven with serious political participation.

Despite that, playful activism is not without limitations. Studies demonstrate that humorous political content can build solidarity among like-minded individuals, reinforce communal identity, and make political critique more accessible and influential [6,14]. Playful activism transforms ordinary users into political participants through collaborative and dialogic functions, making democratic participation more relatable and accessible [6]. However, these benefits are complicated by serious concerns. Users worry about trivialization and hyper-polarization, leading some to avoid participating in meme circulation and seek alternative civic engagement [14]. Others also caution that playful publics can amplify polarization when irony and ridicule are weaponized against opponents rather than used to foster deliberation. These dual potential highlights the ambivalence of playfulness in political communication: it can lower barriers to entry and foster creative solidarity, but it can also reinforce superficiality and division. Importantly, participation in digital publics is not only shaped by expressive forms but also by perceptions of media credibility and political trust. As recent comparative research shows, online political participation is significantly mediated by how much users trust media and perceive information as credible [15]. This suggests that even within playful or affective publics, underlying trust dynamics provide conditions determining whether engagement translates into sustained political action.

The concept of playful publics extends beyond simple entertainment to encompass sophisticated forms of political engagement that make complex issues more accessible while maintaining substantive content. This represents a significant transformation from traditional models of political communication that emphasized formal, serious discourse. In this particular study, where political discourse occurs in a hybrid space that combines humor, memes, and financial incentives, users may joke, deploy slang, or build camaraderie through playful expression, while simultaneously staking money on high-stakes political outcomes. Through this, playful activism intersects with economic participation, which raises the question whether financialized platforms amplify or diminish the democratic potential of affective publics.

Early debates on digital democracy emphasized the communicative affordances of online spaces and their potential to enhance participation. Yet, as digital media have become more commercialized and algorithmically governed, participation itself has taken increasingly emotional and performative forms. These developments paved the way for the rise in affective and playful publics—networked collectives bound together not only by rational discourse but by shared feelings, creativity, and cultural expression.

2.2. Affective and Playful Publics in the Digital Age

Traditional e-democracy initiatives such as online voting systems, e-petitions and digital campaigns have majorly digitized existing institutional processes. While these platforms helped increase the efficiency and accessibility of manual processes, they still face significant limitations in their ability to transcend institutional constraints and geographical boundaries, particularly failing to create fundamentally new forms of democratic participation [16]. Recent work on Web3 adds further nuance to these concerns. Lee and Park show that decentralized news sites differ significantly from non-news sites in terms of design systems, interactivity, and hyperlink structures, but remain heavily dependent on Web 2.0 features [17]. Their findings suggest that, while blockchain-based affordances such as domain autonomy and DAO governance create possibilities for more transparent and participatory ecosystems, the persistence of centralized patterns highlights the ongoing influence of algorithmic structures in shaping digital political communication. Similar methodological frameworks have also been applied outside of political contexts, particularly in advertising research, where Yoo et al. used YouTube Data API v3 and NodeXL Pro ver 1.0.1.540 (https://www.smrfoundation.org/2018/06/11/complete-nodexl-release-history/, accessed on 29 September 2025) to trace earned media effects of landmark digital signage, showing how amplification through sharing produces persistent digital footprints that outlive the original event [18]. This demonstrates the broader applicability of network-analytic approaches to understanding digital amplification logics across domains.

The emergence of Web3 technologies, particularly blockchain-based platforms, represents a qualitative shift and offers possibilities for overcoming these limitations. Its architectures of decentralization challenge institutional gatekeeping and enables cross-border participation beyond formal political structures. Shah et al. identify key problems with traditional betting platforms, including issues of trust, transparency and speed in data and financial exchanges [19]. Blockchain technology addresses these concerns through decentralized systems and smart contracts, by enabling tamper-resistant automated decision-making processes whereas token-based systems enable incentives for participation and collective governance. Smart contracts are “decentralized agreements built in computer code and stored on a blockchain” that can automatically execute terms and control relations between parties without redundant negotiations [20]. This has enabled experiments such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which allow communities to deliberate and vote on shared resources in real time, and liquid democracy systems where citizens delegate voting power flexibly through blockchain protocols [21].

Cryptocurrency-enabled platforms create novel democratic participation mechanisms by introducing economic incentives for political engagement. Unlike existing models such as networked democracy, which rely primarily on digital connectivity and collective discourse, c-democracy embeds financial logics directly into participatory systems. In relation to the expansion of such advancement, there exists hoped-for equalization effects such as greater access and visibility for newcomers that often give way to normalization where political actors with more resources or pre-existing power tend to gain the most from online visibility [22,23,24]. This tends to translate into offline power such as financial donations. Such contrast is essential for understanding how c-democracy differs, where voices are not only are political, mediated through technology, but political influence as well as participation may be skewed by unequal access to the economic tools that underlie the platform. Prediction markets represent a particularly significant innovation, allowing global users to express political opinions within financialized systems through economic signals while contributing to collective intelligence about political outcomes [25]. Research demonstrates that prediction markets often outperform traditional polling by aggregating diverse information sources and providing real-time updates on political developments [26]. By conforming economic incentives with political prediction, such transformation enables what can be termed “BetPolitics”-a new form of political engagement that transcends national boundaries through financial stakes, therefore transforming opinion into quantifiable economic signals. This mechanism reframes participation not as civic duty alone but as an activity aligned with individual self-interest, echoing Olson’s framework of overcoming collective action dilemmas [27].

The integration of economic incentives with political participation addresses longstanding collective action problems by aligning individual interests with collective outcomes. Traditional models of civic engagement rely heavily on civic duty and altruistic motivations, which often fail to generate sustained participation [28]. Ferguson argues that economic and political development requires societies to resolve collective action problems that arise when individual interests generate undesirable outcomes for society at large [29]. Winecoff and Lenhard find that, while Web3 proponents emphasize decentralization, user autonomy, and financial inclusion, practical obstacles such as rapid technological change, stakeholder conflicts, and difficulties in mainstream adoption threaten these ideals, potentially resulting in corrupt governance and increased digital divide [30]. Others note that financial speculation may distort political engagement by privileging short-term gains over deliberative reasoning, effectively commodifying democracy. Regulatory speculation further complicates legitimacy: decentralized platforms often operate in legal gray zones, raising questions about gamified investment practices, market manipulation, and democratic ideals, questioning the true nature of access and participation in Web3 [31].

Research on blockchain governance reveals significant challenges in balancing economic incentives with democratic participation. According to Park, in his reflections on Web3 technologies and inclusive innovation, within crypto-enabled platforms such as Polymarket, two competing governance paradigms often come into tension: meritocracy and plutocracy [32]. Meritocracy denotes a system where influence derives from demonstrated expertise and consistent performance. In prediction markets, this translates into users who make accurate forecasts gaining credibility and reputational authority over time. Such mechanisms reward data-driven insight, encouraging informed participation and deliberation. Ideally, this produces a governance structure in which knowledge, rather than wealth, becomes the primary currency of power. By contrast, plutocracy concentrates influence in the hands of those with significant financial capital or token holdings. On platforms like Polymarket, participants with large stakes can disproportionately shape liquidity and sentiment, regardless of predictive accuracy. These dynamic risks conflating wealth with legitimacy, thereby undermining democratic ideals and skewing collective outcomes toward the interests of a privileged minority. While Web3 infrastructures hold potential for participatory design and equity, Park cautions that, without careful institutional architecture, they risk reproducing the same hierarchical patterns characteristic of centralized systems. He argues for governance models that privilege transparency, inclusivity, and democratic engagement, particularly within emerging digital economies.

Polymarket therefore sits at a critical juncture: it may evolve into a meritocratic ecosystem that empowers informed participants, or devolve into a plutocratic arena where capital dictates control. Vitalik Buterin similarly observes that token-weighted voting structures tend to privilege wealthy elites, proposing instead hybrid frameworks that combine economic incentives with safeguards for broader representation [33,34]. The central challenge, then, is to design governance mechanisms that reconcile the economic mechanisms of crypto markets with the normative imperatives of fairness, inclusion, and democratic legitimacy.

Papacharissi and others have argued that affective publics emerge through expressions of sentiment, rather than through consensus-oriented deliberation [9]. On platforms like Twitter or TikTok, play and emotion function as connective forces that sustain political engagement. Cervi and Divon describe this phenomenon as playful activism where performative, memetic, and accessible forms of protest are remixed with humor and politics to mobilize collective emotion [6]. Similarly, Divon characterizes playful publics as participatory networks where entertainment and activism converge [7]. These frameworks shift the emphasis from structured debate to affective resonance, illuminating how civic participation unfolds through vernacular and esthetic practices.

While these studies expand our understanding of participation, they remain focused on expressive or cultural dimensions. What remains underexplored is how economic infrastructures such as blockchain protocols, tokens, and decentralized markets, extend affective engagement into financial domains. In this sense, the evolution of participatory publics from communicative to economic systems represents not a rupture, but a continuity: emotion and investment become intertwined mechanisms for belonging and belief.

2.3. From Affective to Financialized Publics

The emergence of blockchain-based platforms introduces a new dimension of participation: financialized publics, where collective expression is mediated through market mechanisms. On platforms such as Polymarket, users not only debate political outcomes but also wager on them, transforming civic prediction into economic participation. Drawing on Chen et al., these behaviors illustrate how political leanings can be decoded from financial signals, blurring distinctions between ideological conviction and market rationality [35].

Kapp-Schwoerer situates prediction markets within a tradition of decentralized decision-making that replaces intermediaries with algorithmic market makers [8]. In such contexts, liquidity and pricing are not merely technical parameters but indicators of collective belief. These market structures therefore function as new arenas of democratic participation, where public sentiment manifests as economic behavior.

Bridging this with affective publics theory, the affective turn in media politics finds its counterpart in a financial turn in digital participation. Both involve the circulation of intensity, whether emotional or economic, that binds users into shared publics. Whereas affective publics mobilize emotion to generate solidarity, financialized publics mobilize investment to materialize commitment. Together, they illuminate how contemporary democracy operates through hybrid systems of feeling and finance.

2.4. Web3, Blockchain Governance, and the Rise of C-Democracy

The convergence of affective and financial publics underpins what this paper terms cryptocurrency-enabled democracy (c-democracy). In Web3 ecosystems, participation is redefined through ownership, transparency, and incentive structures embedded in code. The governance of decentralized platforms such as DAOs and prediction markets demonstrates how decision-making can occur through programmable contracts rather than institutional authority. Yet these systems also reproduce inequalities in access and capital, raising critical questions of legitimacy and representation [5]. Understanding c-democracy therefore requires integrating insights from political theory, media studies, and financial sociology.

The concept of liquid democracy has evolved from theoretical proposal to practical possibility through technological advancement. Carroll originally theorized delegative democracy as a system allowing citizens to either vote directly or delegate their voting power to trusted representatives [36]. This early vision remained largely theoretical due to technological limitations. While this vision remained aspirational for more than a century, blockchain protocols and decentralized platforms have made it technologically feasible to implement liquid delegation in real time. Hall and Miyazaki show how Ethereum-based DAOs operationalize liquid democracy, enabling participants to dynamically reassign voting rights depending on expertise, trust, or issue salience [21]. Their research shows how citizens can participate directly in specific issues or delegate their voting authority flexibly, creating more responsive democratic systems.

Beyond institutional reform, modern digital platforms facilitate the formation of transnational political communities organized around shared interests rather than geographical proximity [37]. Such online activism creates solidarities forming “glocal” communities that can engage in local political events while maintaining global perspectives, creating new forms of political solidarity that transcend traditional national boundaries. This resonates with earlier theories of cosmopolitan democracy [38], networked publics [39], and connective action [40], all of which emphasize how networked communication infrastructures enable fluid, interest-based communities that challenge the nation-state’s monopoly on political legitimacy.

The combination of Web3 technologies with global connectivity enables what can be conceptualized as a transition from e-democracy to c-democracy (cryptocurrency-enabled democracy). This transformation creates possibilities for more inclusive, transparent, and responsive democratic engagement while raising important questions about legitimacy and representation in transnational political participation [41]. Unlike e-democracy platforms that largely replicated national processes in digital form, cryptocurrency-enabled platforms allow global users to stake resources, exchange views, and influence discourse around domestic political crises. South Korea’s 2024 impeachment illustrates this phenomenon: global participants engaged both discursively and economically in what was formally a national constitutional process, forming transnational communities that blurred the boundaries of citizenship.

3. Methodology

This study employs a mixed-methods approach to analyze political discourse and user behavior on blockchain-based prediction markets during national political crises. The methodology combines computational network analysis, thematic discourse analysis, and statistical validation to provide insights into both structural and semantic dimensions of cryptocurrency-enabled democratic participation. Each methodological step, from data collection, network construction, clustering, and interpretive analysis, was guided by the principle of reproducibility and transparency, consistent with recent best practices in computational communication research [42].

3.1. Data Collection

Data were obtained from Polymarket’s publicly accessible API, covering transactions and discussion threads related to the “Yoon out as President of South Korea in 2024?” market. Following the procedure outlined by Kapp-Schwoerer [8], a Python script was used to collect metadata including wallet IDs, timestamps, token values, and associated comment texts. All personally identifiable information was excluded. The data were stored in comma-separated value (CSV) format for analysis and archived in a version-controlled repository for replication.

South Korea’s 2024 presidential impeachment crisis serves as the primary case study of this study. The event represents a high-stakes constitutional crisis that attracted significant global attention and economic investment through prediction markets. The crisis occurred during active blockchain-based prediction market operation, providing real-time data on transnational political engagement. The study focuses on Polymarket, a blockchain-based prediction platform that uses USDC stablecoin for transparent, decentralized betting. Polymarket was selected because it represents the most active cryptocurrency prediction market for political events, with significant trading volume related to the Korean impeachment crisis, while being embedded in a decentralized financial infrastructure. This combination allows observation of both civic discourse and economic signaling, aligning with the theoretical construct of c-democracy. Although Polymarket does not disclose user demographic information such as nationality or location, qualitative inspection of user comments suggests a transnational user base. Several participants explicitly referenced their countries (e.g., in self-identifying phrases such as ‘as a trader from the U.S.’ or ‘here in Europe’) and used language patterns and time zones implying activity from North America, Europe, and Asia. These references, however, are anecdotal and not derived from verifiable metadata (e.g., IP addresses or wallet information). Therefore, the user base is referred to as transnational or globally distributed rather than attributing it to specific regions.

Data collection occurred at a single time point on 14 December 2024, at 5:20 p.m. Korean time, approximately 20 min following the passage of the impeachment vote in the Korean National Assembly. Although the dataset was collected at a single time point, the Polymarket contract itself covered the period from 2 December to 31 December (ET). This means that users’ bets referred to whether the president would lose office at any time during that window, even though the discourse and market data analyzed here were captured only at the immediate post-vote moment. This timing was strategically selected to capture immediate market reactions and user discourse during the period when participants were processing and responding to breaking political developments. The final dataset comprised 582 comments from 83 unique users, along with metadata on transaction size, frequency, and directional bets (Yes/No). This dataset was used to construct interaction networks and to link textual expressions with financial behavior.

3.2. Analytical Procedure

This study employs three complementary analytical approaches to examine political discourse on cryptocurrency platforms. The framework integrates network analysis, thematic discourse analysis, and quantitative validation.

First, a social-network graph was constructed using NodeXL to map user interaction patterns within Polymarket [43]. Users were treated as nodes and interactions (replies, mentions, reactions) as directed edges. Degree, betweenness, and network diameter were computed to assess community centrality and cohesion. The visualization of the network in Figure 1 was generated using the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale algorithm, which optimizes spatial distribution and readability of medium-sized social graphs.

To identify cohesive subgroups, we applied the Clauset–Newman–Moore (CNM) community-detection algorithm, as seen in Figure 2, which is a modularity-based hierarchical clustering method that detects groups of users who exchange comments more frequently with each other than with outsiders. This approach is suitable for medium-density online discussion networks and provides interpretable modular clusters corresponding to discourse communities [44].

Second, discourse data were subjected to an inductive thematic analysis assisted by the GPT-4o large language model, which generated preliminary thematic codes later verified through human interpretation [45]. The process includes initial human coding to identify preliminary themes, AI-assisted analysis to process large text volumes, and iterative refinement through human–AI collaboration. This methodology combines computational scalability with human interpretive depth. This hybrid approach follows De Paoli [42] and De Paoli and Mathis [46], who demonstrate the reliability of large language models in identifying recurring qualitative patterns when guided by researcher-defined prompts. The initial machine-generated codes were refined through iterative reading, memo-writing, and comparison against randomly selected human-coded segments to ensure validity and interpretive depth.

Finally, quantitative validation tested the correspondence between discourse categories and transaction behavior. Spearman’s coefficient correlations were calculated to determine the strength of relationships between thematic clusters and economic participation (e.g., number of bets, wager size). Cosine similarity measures compare discourse patterns across user communities. This triangulation of computational, qualitative, and statistical techniques provides both breadth and depth in understanding the phenomenon of c-democracy.

3.3. Replicability Statement

All data used in this study are publicly accessible via Polymarket’s API (https://polymarket.com). The data collection and preprocessing scripts were written in Python 3.11 and are available on the project’s GitHub ver 3.18.0 repository. The dataset includes wallet IDs, transaction timestamps, and anonymized comment text, totaling 582 comments and 83 unique users. Code for network metrics and clustering is available in the same repository, enabling full procedural replication.

Thematic analysis prompts and LLM parameters (temperature = 0.0; max tokens = 1000) follow De Paoli’s recommended protocol for transparent reporting [42]. Although large language models can accelerate qualitative coding, they may reproduce linguistic bias; therefore, human verification and consensus coding were applied in all interpretive steps. The integration of human and AI analysis aims to enhance reliability while maintaining analytical reflexivity.

4. Results

This section presents the findings from our mixed-methods analysis of political discourse and user behavior on Polymarket during South Korea’s 2024 impeachment crisis. The results are organized into four subsections: descriptive analysis of user engagement patterns, network structure and behavior analysis, discourse community identification, and quantitative validation of qualitative findings.

4.1. Descriptive Analysis

The dataset encompasses 582 comments contributed by 83 users during the period following the impeachment vote passage. Of these users, 46 participated in direct interactions through replies, mentions, and reactions. The participant base included users from the United States, Europe, and Asia participating in discussions about Korean politics. This geographic distribution indicates that cryptocurrency platforms enable political participation beyond traditional citizenship boundaries.

Network analysis reveals 46 nodes connected through 110 edges, with an average degree of 1.36 and a network diameter of 6 steps. The average path length measured 2.54, indicating users could reach each other through short connection chains. The average user contributed 7.01 comments during the observation period. Engagement distribution was skewed, with the most active user posting 86 comments. The platform captured 255 direct replies and 451 user reactions.

Economic engagement through betting behavior differed from discourse participation. Users varied in their economic stakes, with some making minimal investments while others committed substantial amounts to their predictions. This divergence between communicative and economic participation suggests users employ different strategies for expressing political opinions versus making financial commitments.

This structural configuration reflects how digital publics form around both communicative and speculative activity. The denser clusters reveal affective engagement, showing users responding emotionally or humorously to political developments, whereas more transactional clusters correspond to users driven by market performance. This dual structure exemplifies the coexistence of affective publics [9] and what this study terms financialized publics, in which political expression and economic action occur simultaneously. The overlap between these clusters underscores how civic engagement on Web3 platforms is mediated by both emotion and incentive.

4.2. Network Structure and User Behavior Analysis

Network analysis reveals patterns in the relationship between discourse engagement and economic investment on cryptocurrency prediction platforms.

A disconnect emerges between discourse participation and economic stakes as shown in

Table 1. Top 5 commenters.

User	Comments	Bet Amount	Position
Shekel	86	1.007	Yes
Situdanny	73	4807.875	Yes
wefan	59	20,648.850	Yes
Drones	38	592.429	Yes
jayjasonjaydediday	34	807.513	Yes

. The most prolific commenter, “Shekel” with 86 posts, invested approximately 1000 dollars. In contrast, “wefan,” who invested over 20,000 dollars, contributed 59 comments which implies that high discourse engagement does not necessarily correlate with high economic investment. This disconnect suggests that cryptocurrency prediction markets support different motivational structures. Some users prioritize discourse and community engagement, while others focus on economic prediction accuracy as a more serious, outcome-oriented activity. The platform accommodates both social and economic forms of political participation.

Despite market odds showing only 9% probability of impeachment success, all top commenters bet “Yes” on impeachment. Highly engaged users maintained different assessments compared to broader market consensus. Discourse communities can develop perspectives that diverge from aggregate market signals.

4.3. Discourse Community Analysis

Analysis identified seven distinct discourse communities, each characterized by different communication styles and engagement patterns as shown in

Table 2. Cluster description.

Group	Size	Avg Comments	Avg Reactions	Avg Betting	Main Characteristics
G1	12	12.750	9.083	3662.810	Analytical: Links, data, neutral tone
G2	8	12.750	9.125	3556.999	Critical: Political evaluation, definitive
G3	7	7.571	10.714	2266.483	Informational: Verification, concise
G4	3	15.333	9.000	894.628	Emotional: Strong reactions, metaphors
G5	6	19.167	14.333	34,579.609	Reactive: Quick exchanges, yes/no
G6	4	3.500	3.500	4645.089	Casual: Internet slang, brief
G7	3	3.667	2.667	13,260.944	Practical: Simple conclusions, links

. Group 1 (Analytical Discussants) and Group 3 consists of users who share external links and maintain neutral, academic-style political analysis. These users engage in evaluation using evidence-based approaches. Group 2 (Critical Political Evaluators) focuses on critical political evaluation using definitive statements and normative positions about political developments. Group 4 (Emotional Engagers) uses emotional language and metaphors despite maintaining small betting amounts. These users employ informal language and community-building expressions like “bro.” Group 5 (High-Stakes Reactive Traders) represents the biggest bettors, averaging over 34,000 dollars in investments, but uses casual language and quick reactive exchanges rather than extended analysis. Groups 6 and 7 (Casual Participants) engage in casual political commentary, using internet slang and focusing on practical conclusions rather than analysis.

Thematically, these results demonstrate that emotional intensity and financial speculation are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. Users who expressed strong affect, whether frustration, humor, or national pride, often linked those emotions to their market expectations or justification of wagers. Such hybrid engagement aligns with Chen et al. [35], who show that political leanings on Web3 can be inferred from betting behaviors. In this context, emotion becomes a financial signal, and financial participation becomes an affective performance of political belief.

4.4. Quantitative Validation

Statistical analysis provides empirical support for our qualitative observations through correlation and similarity measures.

Our analysis reveals strong relationships between different types of discourse activities as shown in

Table 3. Spearman correlation.

	Comments	Replies Sent	Replies Received	Reactions	Betting Amount
Comments	1.000	0.823	0.713	0.662	0.329
Replies Sent		1.000	0.616	0.529	0.327
Replies Received			1.000	0.686	0.405
Reactions				1.000	0.418
Betting Amount					1.000

N = 83, ** p < 0.01.

. Users who engage more heavily in commenting also tend to participate more in replies and reactions, with correlations above 0.6. This indicates that the platform fostered genuine interactive communities rather than parallel broadcasting.

Critically, betting amounts show much weaker correlations with discourse activities, measuring around 0.3 to 0.4. This quantitative finding confirms our qualitative observation that economic investment and social engagement follow different logics within cryptocurrency prediction markets.

Cosine similarity analysis validates our qualitative community classifications. As shown in

Table 4. Cosine similarity.

	G1	G2	G3	G4	G5	G6	G7
G1	1.000	0.789	0.755	0.746	0.602	0.534	0.433
G2		1.000	0.861	0.811	0.782	0.479	0.414
G3			1.000	0.748	0.734	0.466	0.406
G4				1.000	0.782	0.483	0.424
G5					1.000	0.418	0.518
G6						1.000	0.246
G7							1.000

, Groups 2 and 3 show the highest similarity at 0.861, both focusing on information sharing and political evaluation. Group 7 shows the lowest overall similarity with other groups, reflecting their distinct practical focus and approach to political discourse.

Cosine similarity was calculated to assess linguistic proximity between community groups. Text vectors were constructed using a bag-of-words model implemented via the CountVectorizer in Python. For each group, all comments were concatenated into a single document and converted into a sparse word-count matrix. The resulting vectors were normalized before similarity computation, allowing the cosine similarity to capture variation in word-usage patterns rather than document length.

These quantitative measures support our qualitative findings and demonstrate meaningful patterns in how users organize into discourse communities on cryptocurrency political platforms. The moderate correlation between discourse activity and wager size suggests a partial disconnect between social visibility and financial stake. This divergence mirrors the tension within c-democracy: individuals can exercise political voice through expression or through capital, but not all participants possess equal capacity for both. As a result, Web3 participation both expands and stratifies democratic engagement, creating new opportunities for collective forecasting while embedding asymmetries of power tied to economic resources.

To ensure the robustness of these findings, validation was conducted through both computational and qualitative checks. Correlations between discourse clusters and transaction patterns confirmed internal consistency across analytical layers. Two independent coders reviewed GPT-assisted thematic categories against human-coded samples, indicating high reliability. This integration of human and AI analysis follows best practices outlined by De Paoli [42] and De Paoli and Mathis [46], reinforcing confidence that the observed thematic patterns reflect genuine communicative behavior rather than algorithmic artifacts.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

This study provides empirical evidence for cryptocurrency-enabled democracy (c-democracy) as a distinct form of political participation that transcends traditional e-democracy limitations. Through analysis of user behavior during South Korea’s 2024 impeachment crisis, we identify four key findings that advance digital democratic engagement theory.

Collectively, these findings illustrate how affective, communicative, and financial layers of participation intertwine within Web3 ecosystems. The coexistence of expressive discourse and speculative trading reflects the evolution of democratic engagement into a hybrid form, as what this paper defines as c-democracy. In such environments, the boundaries between civic expression and market behavior blur, producing publics that are both emotional and economic in character.

First, we demonstrated global political engagement beyond citizenship boundaries. Users from the United States, Europe, and Asia meaningfully participated in Korean politics through economic stakes and discourse, challenging the geographic constraints that limited e-democracy initiatives [45].

Secondly, we reveal a discourse-betting disconnect where high engagement does not correlate with high economic investment, suggesting that cryptocurrency platforms support both intrinsic civic engagement [47] and extrinsic economic participation simultaneously. This divergence suggests that discourse and economic participation operate under different motivational logics. For some users, commenting functioned as expressive participation and community-building, where playful talk, memes, and banter signaled identity and belonging. For others, betting was treated as a serious, outcome-oriented activity, emphasizing financial accuracy over social engagement. This distinction reflects both psychological tendencies—separating “playful politics” from “serious business”—and cultural norms, where affective publics normalize expressive contribution regardless of material stakes [9]. Platform design also plays a role: Polymarket privileges market transactions over discourse features, fostering overlapping but not identical publics. Importantly, however, this disconnect is not absolute. Correlation analysis shows moderate relationships between communication and betting, suggesting that expressive and instrumental participation coexist in tension rather than forming separate spheres.

Next, we observe playful activism where users discuss serious constitutional processes through casual language and memes while maintaining substantive political engagement, contradicting Sunstein’s concerns about degraded digital political discourse [48]. In fact, the interplay between playful discourse and financial stakes underscores the hybridity of c-democracy, where expressive identity work and rationalized prediction are not mutually exclusive but dynamically co-present. This dynamic is conceptually parallel to amplification in media studies, where landmark digital signage produces secondary earned media effects as audiences extend campaigns online, generating enduring visibility well beyond their physical duration [15]. In both cases, digital infrastructures enable extended lifecycles of participation, whether through meme circulation in political discourse or algorithmic recommendation structures in advertising, highlighting how participatory cultures transform initial acts of engagement into broader, more durable publics. At the same time, legitimacy in c-democracy hinges not only on technological affordances but also on how participants assess the credibility of information and institutions. Studies of online political participation in Indonesia and Pakistan demonstrate that media use only fosters engagement when mediated by political trust and perceptions of credibility [18]. This underscores that for c-democracy to move beyond novelty or speculative participation, governance structures must also address the informational trust deficit that shapes digital political engagement across contexts.

The results extend Papacharissi’s theorization of digital and affective publics by showing that emotional connection now operates through financial mechanisms [5,9]. Within c-democracy, participation is measured not only by visibility or speech but by economic stake. Such reframing challenges conventional models of legitimacy and representation by locating political influence in both communicative and financial capacity. Consequently, blockchain-based publics reveal how democracy can be simultaneously more participatory and more stratified.

Lastly, we find transnational community formation organized around shared interests rather than geography, with seven distinct discourse communities transcending national boundaries. This demonstrates that playful activism and affective publics offer new avenues for political participation, blending humor, creativity, and emotional engagement with collective action. As recent studies suggest, sustaining digital mobilization requires more than the delivery of information; it relies on the strategic use of affective and creative affordances. Osman et al. illustrate this in their analysis of climate activism on YouTube, showing how storytelling, concise narratives, and audio–visual design can transform engagement into collective action [13]. These findings reinforce the argument that playful activism and affective publics are integral to the evolving dynamics of C-democracy. At the same time, the governance logics of crypto-enabled platforms remain contested, oscillating between meritocratic dynamics where credibility is earned through accurate predictions and expertise and plutocratic tendencies, where influence is disproportionately shaped by those with greater financial capital. This duality highlights the normative stakes of c-democracy, where innovation in participation coexists with risks of reproducing inequality. From this perspective, the future of democratic engagement will depend on how institutions, activists, and citizens adapt to these hybrid, participatory forms of digital politics.

These findings contribute to democratic theory by distinguishing c-democracy from e-democracy along four dimensions. While e-democracy digitized existing processes without addressing institutional constraints [49], c-democracy creates new participation mechanisms. Participation becomes global rather than citizen-based, motivation shifts from civic duty to include economic incentives, decision-making moves from periodic to continuous engagement, and communities form around interests rather than geography. This framework realizes Miller’s vision of liquid democracy [50] and addresses Olson’s collective action problem through economic incentives [27].

These insights have practical implications for digital-governance design. Platforms that incentivize participation through economic means must also address equity, accessibility, and transparency to prevent new forms of exclusion. If economic stake becomes a proxy for political voice, ensuring distributive fairness becomes a democratic imperative. Future platform policies and algorithmic governance models should therefore balance openness, accountability, and inclusivity to sustain legitimate civic engagement within tokenized environments.

However, this study has limitations. We studied crypto-literate users with economic resources, creating sampling bias toward privileged populations that echoes Norris’s digital divide concerns [51]. We analyzed only one political event, limiting generalizability to routine democratic processes. This cross-sectional study captured one moment rather than tracking long-term patterns.

This study manually examined potential automated or duplicate accounts but did not implement specialized bot-detection or wallet-linkage algorithms. As such, coordinated or repeated user activity cannot be fully ruled out. In addition, because the analysis centers on a single political event involving crypto-literate participants, the findings should be interpreted as context-specific rather than universally representative of global democratic participation. Future studies could integrate advanced detection techniques and cross-platform or multi-event comparisons to validate and extend these findings.

Despite these limitations, this research demonstrates that Web3 platforms create new democratic spaces where global citizens participate in local politics through economic and social engagement. C-democracy represents an evolution that addresses many e-democracy limitations while creating novel challenges related to inclusion and legitimacy. Future research should examine how these innovations can be made more inclusive while preserving their democratic potential.

In summary, this study contributes to three areas. First, it theorizes cryptocurrency-enabled democracy as a new model of participatory practice that merges affective and economic engagement. Second, it demonstrates a mixed-methods framework—combining network, discourse, and AI-assisted thematic analysis—that can be replicated for other Web3 contexts. Third, it foregrounds normative questions of legitimacy and inclusion in financialized civic spaces. Future research should examine cross-platform comparisons and longitudinal dynamics to understand how c-democracy evolves as decentralized infrastructures mature.