As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic spread throughout the world in late 2019 and early 2020, individuals, corporations, organizations, markets, and governments were forced to make rapid adjust-ments to how the economy and employment functioned, with many firms choosing to shift operations to a work-from-home basis. At the same time, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs)—which had first been introduced in the early 2010s—and their applications to the financial and currency realms gained more-widespread adoption.1 By early 2021, comedy powerhouse Saturday Night Live even carried a skit in which Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen was being asked to explain non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrency to a class of high school students.2 Although the United States and Japan, two allied advanced industrial democracies, shared some commonalities in how they adapted to the rise of work from home and DLTs, their experiences in some ways also highlighted different underlying assumptions, approaches, and challenges stemming from their unique sociocultural histories and political landscapes.