Blockchain is more antidote than poison

With more deliberate digital asset rulemaking from legislators and regulators throughout 2025, compliance has become more important than ever inside the industry. But the broader embrace of digital assets has also meant a recognition of how the underlying technology can help companies and individuals stay compliant.

Between a sweep of new ‘crypto’ rulemaking and a growing number of blockchain-powered tools aimed at helping adhere to them, compliance was a big part of the digital asset story in 2025.

Compliance and legislation, of course, go hand in hand. Compliance is the practice of living up to legislation: as a result, there’s a tendency to look at new frameworks such as the GENIUS Act or Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) purely as mechanisms to raise the bar for compliance.

MiCA, for instance, places stablecoin issuers under a raft of obligations: they need approval from a European Union national regulator in order to operate in the jurisdiction, must hold liquid reserves at a 1:1 rate, and their reserves must be segregated from the rest of their business. There’s also the separate-but-linked Transfer of Funds Regulation, which codifies the so-called ‘travel rule’ (requiring all crypto transactions to have the identity of the sender and the receiver recorded), increasing the administrative burden on service providers such as exchanges.

Similarly, under the U.S.’s GENIUS Act, issuers of payment stablecoins are brought within the stringent anti-money laundering (AML) rules of the Bank Secrecy Act, putting them on even footing with traditional financial institutions. In practice, this means the issuers must implement robust record-keeping, identity tracking, and transaction monitoring systems as well as report on suspicious activity.

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These are all arguably great things for the integrity of the digital asset industry and wider financial system.

Opponents to such moves might say they increase the cost of doing business for the world’s most innovative sector. That perspective is understandable. Many corporations, including legacy financial institutions, are now faced with a meaningful regulatory burden in relation to a high volume of ‘crypto’ transactions that they’d been getting by without for years. These new obligations may hit pure digital asset service providers harder than much larger institutions, but the impact will be felt by both. On top of that, the perceived anonymity of many blockchain implementations poses unique challenges for regulated entities as they must get to grips with new methods of, say, money laundering and sanctions evasion.

But it also misses the fact that, thanks to digital assets and digital ledger technology, compliance in relation to both digital asset and traditional businesses has also become easier than ever.

Take the blockchain’s core value proposition, for example: immutability. A blockchain is an immutable ledger, and increasingly, businesses are choosing to record transaction data on-chain rather than sticking to legacy—even paper—systems. This ensures the full glut of transaction information is permanently available and reliable: transaction audits can be done as needed and in real-time, obviating the need for quarterly reporting.

We saw financial institutions take advantage of this precise feature in 2025. In September, payment network SWIFT announced it would be adding a blockchain-based ledger to its systems. In announcing the move, SWIFT CEO Javier Perez-Tasso said:

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One of the engines that makes such a step viable for an institution like SWIFT is smart contracts, which allow for compliance activity to be automated in ways previously impossible. Transactions can be validated against a set of pre-defined rules – such as those prescribed by the Transfer of Funds regulation – automatically, before it’s ever processed. This can, in turn, be set up to kick off an automated ‘suspicious reporting’ path, allowing companies to fulfil their requirements to report on suspicious transactions without needing any human intervention whatsoever: a suspicious transaction can be flagged, segregated, assessed, and then submitted to regulators in one process.

Indeed, smart contracts form a key pillar of SWIFT’s blockchain plans.

“Combining a shared ledger with SWIFT’s existing messaging, APIs and ISO 20022 creates an even more powerful construct—one that can embed risk, controls and compliance requirements from the outset into transaction flows while enabling real-time 24/7 interbank cross border payments with the same trust, security, resilience, scalability and operation excellence SWIFT is known for.”

The World Bank is another traditional financial institution taking the same steps. It announced FundsChain earlier this year, a blockchain project aimed at improving transparency and auditability of the flow of funds from donors and lenders through to the ultimate beneficiaries around the world. The World Bank aims to list 250 of its projects on FundsChain by 2026. This accounts for over 70% of the World Bank’s project financing, according to Anshula Kant, the World Bank Group’s CFO.

“FundsChain allows everyone involved in a project—development partners, borrowers, auditors, and payment recipients – to track disbursements and to monitor how funds are used. It sets a new standard for transparency and accountability, empowers communities, and improves development results,” said Kant in a separate publication.

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Talk of rulemaking and compliance isn’t just talk, of course. Failure to get the compliance question right comes with real consequences, and that was borne out in 2025.

Financial institutions received large fines in 2025 for failing to adequately put required anti-money laundering procedures in place. Revolut was hit with a 3.5 million euro fine in Lithuania for ‘persistent shortcomings’ in its prevention of money laundering, while United Kingdom regulators hit Barclays and Monzo with penalties of £42 million and £21 million, respectively. Monzo was pinged for being too aggressive in its onboarding of new accounts and letting AML go by the wayside as a result. Barclays’ fine didn’t relate to crypto, but that such a large and reputable bank was caught out for AML failings is perhaps the best advertisement for blockchain AML integration there is.

The slate of companies that have been subject to penalties for failing to live up to their compliance obligations tells its own story: whether or not transactions are made in crypto may not be the most significant factor in determining risk for financial institutions; there’s plenty of scope for these failures when it comes to more traditional forms of transacting.

But blockchain technology can—and is—being used to make compliance easier. If anything, 2025 has shown that blockchain technology is an antidote to non-compliance as much as it is a poison.

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Watch: What’s ahead for crypto regulation? Highlights from Blockchain Futurist Conference 2025

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