Article Author: Prathik Desai

Article Translation: Block unicorn

Britney Spears' songs echoed from every radio, "The Matrix" made us question reality, and teenagers around the world were busy burning CDs to create their own mixtapes. The internet was still clunky, requiring a jarring dial-up tone to connect, but it had begun to seep into daily life. That was the late 1990s.

At that time, search engines existed, but they looked and felt chaotic. Yahoo's directory resembled a phone book, while AltaVista and Lycos would spit out long lists of links, fast but disorganized. Finding the information you needed was often a daunting task.

Then came a white screen with a clean search box and two buttons—"Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky." Once people tried it, they never left.

That was Google's first "magic." The result? The creation by Larry Page and Sergey Brin made the word "Google" synonymous with the act of searching. When you forget some physics theory, you say, "Let's Google it!" "Want to learn how to tie a perfect tie? Why not Google how to do it?"

Overnight, retrieving facts, finding businesses, and even learning to code became second nature.

The company then repeated this strategy with Gmail, Android, and cloud services. Each time, it made chaotic things simple and reliable to the point of being almost boring.

In every field it now dominates, Google was not the first mover but quickly became the leader. Gmail was not the first email service, but while competitors were still limiting megabytes of storage, it offered gigabytes. Android was not the first mobile operating system, but it became the backbone of budget smartphones worldwide. Those who rejected it were forgotten by the world. Remember Nokia?

Cloud services were also not the first hosting solution, but they provided the reliability that startups and banks were willing to bet on.

In every category, Google turned chaotic raw technology into the default infrastructure.

That was thirty years ago. Today, Google is doing something paradoxical.

It is preparing to build on an innovation once envisioned to replace such tech giants—blockchain. With its native layer of blockchain, this tech giant is attempting to replicate its decades of success in the realm of value.

Through Google Cloud Universal Ledger, the company aims to provide financial institutions with an "efficient, trusted, neutral, and Python-based smart contract-supported" internal layer of blockchain.

Global leading derivatives markets like CME Group have already begun to explore tokenization and payments using this chain, said Rich Widmann, Google's head of Web3 strategy.

Why build an internal blockchain now?

Because the funding pipeline needs fixing.

In 2024, the adjusted trading volume of stablecoins exceeded $5 trillion, surpassing PayPal's $1.68 trillion annual transaction volume, second only to Visa's annual payment volume ($13.2 trillion).

However, cross-border payments still take days to settle, costing up to double-digit percentages, and rely on outdated systems. The Economist points out that if not changed, the inefficiency in settlement is expected to cause $2.8 trillion in losses annually by 2030.

Google hopes to start with stablecoins, but the goal is more ambitious. "Stablecoins are just the starting point. The real opportunity lies in tokenizing a broader range of real-world assets and building programmable financial applications on open infrastructure," Google wrote in its blog post.

Who will use it?

The ledger is permissioned. All participants must go through KYC verification. Smart contracts run in Python, a language already familiar to financial engineers. Access is through an API that has been integrated into Google Cloud's existing services.

The industry's skepticism about its "neutral infrastructure" label is understandable. I am not surprised by this skepticism when a tech giant that built its empire on centralized data now claims to offer a "neutral blockchain."

What else sets Google apart besides scale? Widmann believes Google will become the platform on which other financial companies rely. "Tether won't use Circle's blockchain, and Adyen probably won't use Stripe's. But any financial institution can collaborate with GCUL."

Stripe's Tempo will naturally lean towards Stripe's merchants. Circle's Arc is built around USDC. Google's selling point is that it has no competing payment or stablecoin business, allowing it to reliably offer solutions that other companies might adopt.

Google is also not the first in this category. Other corporate giants have previously built their own blockchains.

Meta (formerly Facebook) promised to launch a global stablecoin with Libra, later renamed Diem, but it never launched. Regulators blocked it, warning it could undermine monetary sovereignty. By January 2022, the project's assets were sold off.

R3's Corda and IBM's Hyperledger Fabric established reliable platforms but struggled to scale beyond limited alliances. They are both permissioned chains valuable to sponsors but failed to pull the industry onto a shared track, ultimately falling into a fragmented state.

The lesson is that if everyone believes one company controls the protocol, the network will fail. This is also the shadow looming over Google.

But the first partner of GCUL—CME Group—provides us with clues about direction. If Universal Ledger can handle the daily cash flows of the world's largest derivatives exchange, its scale's appeal will provide a reason for broader adoption. This also addresses the decentralization debate.

Google Cloud's clients already include banks, fintech companies, and exchanges. For them, connecting to Universal Ledger via API may feel like adding another service rather than switching platforms. Google also has the resources to sustain projects that small alliances have abandoned due to budget constraints. Therefore, for institutions already embedded in Google's tech stack, adopting GCUL may be smoother than starting over elsewhere.

For retail users, the impact will be more subtle. You won't log into a Universal Ledger app, but you will still feel its presence.

Think about those refunds that take days to process, stuck international transfers, and the delays that have already become normalized. If Universal Ledger succeeds, these issues may quietly disappear.

You can also expect it to extend to everyday products. Imagine skipping YouTube ads for just a few cents without subscribing to YouTube Premium; paying a few cents for extra Gemini queries; or streaming payments for cloud storage in real-time. The ad-subsidized internet may quietly shift to a pay-per-use model, giving users more choices rather than just one default setting.

Users may finally have the opportunity to choose whether to exchange attention for services or spend a few cents. Businesses could experiment with microtransactions that were previously unfeasible, from streaming payments for cloud storage to on-demand premium search results. If the GCUL model succeeds, Google's empire could shift from being almost entirely reliant on advertising (which accounts for over 75% of Google's total revenue) to a more flexible, transaction-driven model.

The debate between decentralization and centralization will continue.

I believe developers will not choose to build permissionless applications on GCUL. No one will build yield farms or issue meme coins on Google's platform.

Institutions already using Google Cloud and other enterprise tools are likely to be the main adopters of GCUL. The goal is clear and practical: to move value on the internet with lower friction, reduce reconciliation hassles, and provide banks and payment companies with a trusted payment track.

As a retail user, I don't remember when I switched to Gmail. It just became synonymous with email, just as Google became synonymous with web search. I didn't even know Google owned Android when I bought my first Android phone.

If Universal Ledger becomes seamless infrastructure, you won't care about the decentralization issue. It will just be that useful thing.

But that doesn't eliminate the risks.

Google is no stranger to antitrust scrutiny. U.S. courts have previously ruled that this tech giant maintained a monopoly in search and advertising. Building financial channels will only heighten regulatory attention. The collapse of Libra proved that once central banks feel their sovereignty is threatened, projects can quickly unravel.

Currently, Google's UCL is still in the testnet. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has joined, and other partners are actively pursuing. Google plans to roll it out more broadly in 2026. But I believe this ambition is not without merit.

Google bets it can make the flow of funds as boring, reliable, and intangible as typing text into a search box.

The story began with a blank page and a search box. Its next chapter may be a ledger that no one sees but everyone uses.

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