Big Tech Is Turning Blockchain Into a Corporate Toll Road

When blockchain first emerged, it was treated as a “great leveler”—a system where anyone could build, trade and innovate without a green light from banks or tech giants. Exactly that vision powered the first crypto wave in the early 2010s and inspired hopes that a more democratic financial internet was within reach.

But today, the reality looks very different. What began as an open playground for developers has become an arena where the world’s largest corporations compete for dominance. Google is building its own blockchain-based payment network, while Samsung has launched Cello Trust, a logistics platform built on the technology.

 Are these just signs of healthy adoption? Not exactly. A tool designed for decentralization is gradually turning into a profit center, with rules increasingly shaped from the top rather than the edges.

Why big tech moved in

Before diving deeper, it’s important to look at the movement’s origin. The story started quietly enough. When blockchain first appeared, little more than a few Fortune 500 companies launched pilot programs, treating it as just another novelty in the innovation lab. It didn’t seem to be a full-scale shift, just prototypes and proof of concept. But then money started flowing.

Stablecoins, once an oddity, began to take center stage. They now settle transactions in the tens of trillions each year—numbers that confront, or sometimes even surpass, Visa’s throughput. Suddenly, those “pilots” stopped appearing as side projects. They turned into early positions for the next phase of financial infrastructure.

Regulators then signaled legitimacy. U.S. courts clarified custody and payment rules while Europe introduced the legal framework MiCA, offering a single standard across member states. Meanwhile, Asia, the Gulf and others began openly courting digital-asset firms. As a result, big corporations got the message: It’s finally safe to commit capital and play for keeps.

By the time all three pieces lined up, the picture became clear. Blockchain had transformed into a stage where the largest players could step in with full confidence and enough power to shape the market to their advantage.

The subtle mechanics of enclosure

Once the giants moved in, the technology started to bend. Simply put, blockchain, which earned its reputation by being borderless and permissionless, is now being reshaped into controlled environments. Take Google’s Universal Ledger, which is labelled as “neutral” but in fact functions as a permissioned system. Access, upgrades and participation are dictated by the operator, not the global network. Thus, the promise of openness is replaced by the comfort of compliance.

That shift goes on. A blockchain tied to the corporate stack—a cloud that hosts your data, a wallet that holds your funds or a system that processes your transactions—is a lock-in mechanism. Once you’re inside this mechanism, switching to a different one becomes costly. So, as in the case of Google, convenience often means less control, and moving away becomes harder over time.

Even the meaning of “trust” is changing. Back in the day, trust came from code and consensus, rules that no single person could rewrite. However, in a corporate-led world, trust is a service-level agreement or a compliance guarantee, which, perhaps, feels safer, but is not the same thing. Naturally, once a public good, trust has now become a “private contract.” That’s the irony.

And so, adoption accelerates, though it comes at the expense of openness. The infrastructure is being built quickly, but the more it resembles traditional corporate infrastructure, the less it looks like the financial internet blockchain was meant to be.

The real cost of corporate rails

What’s happening these days is no longer just an abstract fight over competition. It’s about who captures values, who gets to set the rules and what kind of market will be handed over to the next generation. When the core layer is privately controlled, the obvious outcomes, such as higher user costs, fewer independent innovators and a fragile stack that can be rewritten by boardroom decisions, are predictable.

And there’s a close precedent. In the U.S., Apple’s App Store has shown how quickly a platform can turn into a toll road. Epic Games made clear how a single operator could impose steep fees on every transaction and block competing payment options. This is about higher costs both for developers and consumers, who pay more and get fewer choices. So, blockchain, if enclosure hardens, risks following the same path.

If we’re aiming for a different outcome, then it’s high time to appeal to practical guardrails that keep the benefits of scale while preventing enclosure. Start with interoperability. That means corporations that operate ledgers for payments or logistics should support open messaging and data-portability standards. In that case, users and services can leave without losing history or liquidity.

Then, stop self-preferencing on platforms that work both in the cloud and as ledgers, because pricing, listing and priority should be transparent and disputable. Finally, demand clarity around validator and token custody concentration so regulators, customers and markets can spot every failure long before they break. 

Here, Ethereum offers an interesting case. One staking service provider’s dominance had grown so large over the last year that researchers warned it had almost started to outsize its influence over the entire network. Eventually, that share has fallen as new competitors entered, but the fear was enough to prove the key point: too much power in one provider’s hands is a risk no system can afford.

Keeping the promise alive

Blockchain’s future will be shaped less by code and more by control. If it becomes another corporate toll road, innovation will slow and profits will concentrate at the top. Again, that’s not the future this technology was meant to deliver.

It’s still early enough to swing the axe. Guardrails like interoperability, transparency and limits on self-preferencing—already basic lessons from telecom, payments and antitrust—can maintain the benefits of scale while preventing enclosure. Applied now, these rules could mean the difference between an open financial internet and a corporatized one that simply replicates the old order.