From Search Box to the Financial Future: Google Prepares to Reshape Value Flow with Blockchain

Article Author: Prathik Desai

Article Translation: Block unicorn

 

Britney Spears’ songs were playing on every radio station, The Matrix made us question reality, and teenagers around the world were busy burning CDs to make their own mixtapes. The internet was still clunky, requiring a screeching dial-up tone to connect, but it had already begun to seep into daily life. That was the late 1990s.

Search engines already existed at the time, but they looked and felt chaotic. Yahoo’s directory was like a digital version of the Yellow Pages, while AltaVista and Lycos spat out long lists of links—fast, but lacking order. 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 “Google” synonymous with the act of searching. When you forget some physics theory, you say, “Just Google it!” “Want to learn how to tie a perfect tie? Why not Google it?”

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

The company later repeated this strategy with Gmail, Android, and cloud services. Each time, it turned chaotic things into something so simple and reliable that it was almost boring.

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

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

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

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

It is preparing to build on an innovation that was once envisioned to replace such tech giants—blockchain. With its native Layer 1 blockchain, this tech giant is trying to replicate in the value domain what it has achieved over decades in the information domain.

Through Google Cloud Universal Ledger, the company hopes to provide financial institutions with an “efficient, credibly neutral, and Python-based smart contract-enabled” internal Layer 1 blockchain.

Global leading derivatives markets like CME Group have already begun using this chain to explore tokenization and payments, according to Google Web3 Strategy Lead Rich Widmann.

Why build an internal blockchain now?

Because the money pipelines need fixing.

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

However, cross-border payments still take days to settle, cost double-digit percentages, and rely on outdated systems. The Economist pointed out that if nothing changes, settlement inefficiencies are expected to cause $2.8 trillions in losses annually by 2030.

Google wants to start with stablecoins, but its ambitions are bigger. “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?

This ledger is permissioned. All participants must pass KYC verification. Smart contracts run in Python, a language financial engineers are already familiar with. Access is simply through an API, which is already integrated into Google Cloud’s existing services.

The industry is skeptical about its “neutral infrastructure” label. When a tech giant that built its empire through centralized data control now claims to offer a “neutral blockchain,” I’m not surprised by such doubts.

Besides scale, what else sets Google apart? Widmann believes Google will become the platform on which other financial companies build. “Tether won’t use Circle’s blockchain, and Adyen probably won’t use Stripe’s. But any financial institution can work with GCUL.”

Stripe’s Tempo will naturally favor Stripe’s merchants. Circle’s Arc is built around USDC. Google’s selling point is that it has no competing payments or stablecoin business, so it can reliably provide solutions that other companies might adopt.

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

Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Libra, later renamed Diem, promised to launch a global stablecoin but never did. 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 built reliable platforms but struggled to scale beyond limited consortia. They are all permissioned chains, valuable to sponsors but failed to bring the industry onto a shared track, ultimately falling into siloed situations.

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

But GCUL’s first partner—CME Group—gives us a clue about the direction. If Universal Ledger can handle the daily cash flows of the world’s largest derivatives exchange, its scale will provide a reason for broader adoption. This also responds to the decentralization debate.

Google Cloud’s customers already include banks, fintech companies, and exchanges. For them, connecting to Universal Ledger via API might be like adding another service, not switching platforms. Google also has the resources to sustain projects that smaller consortia might abandon 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’ll still feel its presence.

Think about refunds that take days to arrive, international transfers that get stuck, and delays that have become normalized. If Universal Ledger succeeds, these problems may quietly disappear.

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

Users may have the chance for the first time to choose between trading attention for services or spending a few cents. Businesses can try microtransaction models that were previously impossible, 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 ad-dependent (over 75% of Google’s total revenue) to a more flexible, transaction-driven model.

The debate between decentralization and centralization will continue.

I don’t think developers will choose to build permissionless applications on GCUL. No one will set up 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: move value across the internet with less friction, reduce reconciliation headaches, and provide trusted payment rails for banks and payment companies.

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. When I bought my first Android phone, I didn’t even know Google owned Android.

If Universal Ledger becomes seamless infrastructure, you won’t care about decentralization. It’s just that thing that works well.

But that doesn’t mean there are no risks.

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

Currently, Google’s UCL is still on testnet. CME Group has already joined, and other partners are actively being sought. Google plans a broader rollout in 2026. But I think this ambition is not just empty talk.

Google is betting it can make money flows as boring, reliable, and invisible as typing words 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.