Members Only Article

To Cut Through Crypto and Blockchain Confusion, Follow the Ledgers

July 10, 2026 | 8 minutes reading time | By Michael Shashoua

The L of DLT (distributed ledger technology), which derives from a basic component of finance, will guide competition and innovation as digital transaction architectures evolve.

The future of payments and financial markets is taking shape – and has to some extent already arrived – in the form of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and a variety of instruments in tokenized form including deposits, equities and other so-called real-world assets. The origin of bitcoin, after a paper published in 2008, was a big bang that continues to expand and proliferate, and that traditional market structures and regulatory frameworks are still coming to grips with.

Underlying this digitization is an infrastructure layer of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Most familiar is the bitcoin blockchain, which has, in turn, given rise to Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and numerous others and, out of necessity, the concept of cross-chain interoperability.

It all may be new and disruptive, but there is nothing more central to finance, traditional or otherwise, than ledgers. Central bankers, financial institutions and market utilities have been monitoring, working on and experimenting with distributed ledgers for as long as digital or crypto assets have been on the rise. Theories and proposals have competed for mind and market share.

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Topics: Digital Assets, Financial Markets

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