The Silent Blockchain Revolution in Corporate Banking Transactions

 

When institutions explore emerging technologies like distributed ledger technologies and blockchains, they often gravitate toward private, permissioned solutions such as Corda or Hyperledger. However, recent news about growing interest from major players in public, decentralized blockchains suggests that practical applications are already beginning to emerge.

But are these truly decentralized systems, particularly Web3? And what about the challenges that public blockchains introduce? What does the near future hold for corporate banking transactions?

In this article, I share my professional journey that shaped my perspective and highlight the technologies I believe are best positioned to bring corporate transactions fully on-chain.

My perspective: where do I come from?

My passion for optimizing business processes and increasing profitability began at 19. I was determined to be competitive and had set my sights on reaching top management immediately after graduating from university. Since then, I’ve spent years helping banks, construction firms, and e-commerce companies grow their margins, while also improving the operational efficiency of government institutions.

At the height of my career in a private IT company, I saw a persistent bottleneck in payment gateways. The delays had become so entrenched that no one questioned them, but I did. I knew things could be faster.

Yet even with all these advancements, the core issue remained: businesses were still not receiving funds in real time. The inefficiencies had become so normalized that even the suggestion of an instant alternative was often met with skepticism. Whether real-time settlement truly leads to higher profitability remains an open question, one I intend to explore in my next piece. I have now joined the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic, where I work on research and development of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), the underlying technology of which will be blockchain, and the payment will be a settlement.

The promise of WEB3 was simple but ambitious: decentralize ownership, control, and value transfer, replacing intermediaries with code. In reality, the systems we call “decentralized” often rely on a complex mix of centralized components: trusted validators and infrastructure providers. Even popular public blockchains can have points of centralization: governance power concentrated in a small group of token holders, reliance on a few node operators, or dependency on centralized oracles and hosting services. All the above technologies for corporate deals are more likely the WEB2.5 technologies rather than WEB3.