Credible neutrality, Google, GCUL, and the Open Money future
Google is building a new “universal ledger” that looks like open infrastructure — but is it really? A quiet shift in financial power is underway.
This week a dominant topic of the crypto chat was Google Cloud’s tease of what it calls the Universal Ledger, an experimental platform that, in their words, “provides a common system of record across multiple financial ecosystems.”
The project is still in its conceptual phase — no codebase, no launch, not even a roadmap — but that hasn’t stopped Google from floating it as a kind of neutral substrate for financial interoperability.
In their vision, GCUL could bridge everything from traditional banking rails to public blockchains, offering a modular, programmable infrastructure layer for financial institutions.
If that sounds like crypto, it’s because it is. But with GCUL, Google is testing the narrative waters: repackaging the values of the open money movement — interoperability, programmability, neutral settlement — in the language of corporate trust and enterprise compliance.
It's a quietly radical move. Not because it pushes decentralization forward, but because it suggests that Big Tech may no longer need to dismiss blockchain outright. Instead, it can assimilate its aesthetics, wrap them in APIs, and offer them back to the market as enterprise software.
This is the beginning of a new trend or a glimpse of what happens when trillion-dollar companies begin to see credibly neutral infrastructure not as a threat, but as an opportunity.
Protocols as public goods
When we talk about “Open Money,” we’re often talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, or their philosophical descendants — permissionless, programmable systems that anyone can access, fork, or build on.
Daniel McGlynn
These are public goods in the deepest sense: protocols rather than platforms, rules without rulers. But increasingly, we’re also seeing a new breed of infrastructure emerge — one that uses the vocabulary of openness but with different architectures.
The real battle, then, isn’t between apps or assets. It’s between competing visions of financial infrastructure. One vision is rooted in transparency, decentralization, and resilience. The other is rooted in efficiency, integration, and reputational trust. The former asks us to trust code. The latter asks us to trust corporations.
If you’ve been around the crypto space long enough, this might all sound very familiar. Sometime between blockchain’s first wave, but before DeFi summer, there was a movement to build corporate-controlled permissioned blockchains. That movement never really yield any kind of innovation that gained wide traction, and fizzled out with the realization that a permissioned blockchain is really just a very complicated database.
What makes GCUL especially revealing is how it attempts to earn the label of “credible neutrality” not through decentralization, but through Google’s reputation. That’s a profound shift.
Balaji
In the traditional crypto worldview, neutrality is a property of protocol architecture — it emerges from the absence of gatekeepers, from public verifiability, from censorship resistance.
But in GCUL’s framing, neutrality becomes a feature of brand identity. “It’s Google. It works. Trust us.”
That framing is persuasive — especially to institutions. In fact, one of the few specifics mentioned in Google’s post is a pilot with CME Group, which is exploring how GCUL might support after-hours settlement for U.S. Treasury trades.
In other words, the primary audience is retail investors or crypto consumers. Instead, it’s a direct appeal to the back-end machinery of global finance: clearinghouses, custodians, trading desks, and compliance teams.
And this is where the open money narrative starts to get twisted.
Because on one hand, this is exactly what crypto has always promised: 24/7 finance, programmable settlement, composable systems. Google is validating those ideas — institutionalizing them, even.
But on the other hand, by centralizing that functionality within a proprietary stack, GCUL risks becoming a complicated version of open-ness. It’s interoperable, until it isn’t. Auditable, until access is revoked. Open, until it threatens the core business.
The danger isn’t that GCUL will outcompete Ethereum or Bitcoin. The danger is subtler: that it will redefine the terms of the conversation, turning open finance into something that lives comfortably within corporate boundaries. Instead of fighting decentralization, Big Tech may simply outscale it, offering something “open enough” for enterprise adoption, while preserving the right to change the rules.
We’ve seen this before. The open web gave rise to the platform economy. Protocols like HTTP and SMTP made possible a world of interoperable communication — and then were slowly surrounded by privately owned ecosystems: Facebook, Gmail, iOS. Each offered superior UX, tighter integration, and convenience at scale. Each slowly became a bottleneck. And each now shapes how billions experience the web, with minimal user recourse.
Are we watching the same pattern emerge in financial infrastructure?
If so, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Because money isn’t just another medium. It is, as Andreas Antonopoulos once put it,
"At its very basic level, money isn’t value. Money represents an abstraction of value; it’s a way of communicating value. It’s a language. Therefore, money is as old as language because the ability to communicate value is as old as language and money. In many ways, it has characteristics that make it a linguistic construct. It’s a form of communication.”
Whoever controls the rails controls that language — decides what can be expressed, by whom, under what conditions, and at what cost.
This is why the Open Money project matters. Not because it’s nostalgic for decentralization, but because it understands that infrastructure is power. And power, once centralized, rarely stays neutral.
So what do we do about these new kinds of emerging blockchain projects?
We pay attention. We refuse to be seduced by enterprise-grade openness. We ask harder questions: Who controls the keys? Who sets the rules? Can this be forked? Audited? Resisted?
And maybe most importantly: what happens when the ledger and the logic belong to the same entity?
Google’s proposal — and let’s be clear, it is still just that — reflects a broader truth: open money is no longer a fringe idea. It is now the territory on which trillion-dollar companies are competing. That’s a kind of victory. But it’s also a warning.
Because if we accept GCUL-style neutrality as good enough, we may win adoption at the cost of autonomy. We may get programmable money — but lose the power to program it ourselves.