Designing for the Real World: Reflections on building with the Finternet

The following is a guest post and opinion from Anurag Arjun, Co-Founder of Avail.

The next financial architecture won’t just move money faster — it will make value, identity, and rights verifiable and enforceable across fragmented systems and real-world institutions.

Every time we build a new payment system, we rebuild the rails. Every new identity solution operates in isolation. “It’s like building a new road for every car we manufacture,” Siddharth Shetty said to me during an in-depth conversation we had in Dubai. After a decade of blockchain innovation, we’ve made transactions faster… but we’re still failing to coordinate value, identity, and agreements at scale. The problem isn’t speed. It’s that the roads don’t connect.

Siddharth, as many of you may know, is the co-creator of the Finternet — a financial infrastructure framework first articulated in a seminal paper by Nandan Nilekani and Agustín Carstens (BIS) in 2024. He’s also a key architect of India’s digital public infrastructure, has been a driving force behind India’s pioneering digital initiatives, and has advised multiple international governments on digital infrastructure strategies.

As our discussion unfolded, it was clear this wasn’t just about technology or policy. Siddharth’s vision for the Finternet is bold: a financial infrastructure that mirrors the openness and interoperability of the internet, yet with the safeguards, verifiability, and enforceability required for modern financial systems to truly work. The vision is that of, as he put it, “a world where value can move with the same fluidity as information does today.”

Reimagining the Roads

A fundamental problem with how financial infrastructure is built today is that it’s fragmented, siloed, and often reinvented from scratch for every new use case. Each new financial product or service comes with the overhead of creating its own infrastructure. Cross-border connections are managed through costly bilateral arrangements, and global coordination is limited to a few proprietary networks. The result is a global financial system that is fast at the edges but fractured at its core. Even the most advanced economies are tangled in a web of bilateral connections, fragmented ledgers, and disconnected identity systems.

Imagine trying to apply for a mortgage when your credit score is locked in a different financial system. Pledging collateral today often means syncing three separate systems: the asset ledger, the legal registry, and the lending platform — all through brittle integrations and reconciliation workarounds. This isn’t just a technology gap. It’s a coordination gap.

At its core, the Finternet is a vision for user-centric, unified, and universal financial coordination. It’s not just about making payments faster or standardizing asset structures. It’s about re-architecting the foundational highways of finance using cryptographic tools and verifiable credentials to make ownership verifiable, rights enforceable, and agreements executable across systems and jurisdictions. By doing so, it unlocks new opportunities for businesses, individuals, and institutions — enabling broader participation in secure, scalable financial ecosystems.

Why the Finternet Is Different

While there have been several attempts at delivering the long-sought promise of an “internet of value,” the Finternet stands apart through pragmatic architectural choices and institutional integration. Unlike earlier efforts that either fragmented into closed systems or attempted to bypass institutions entirely, the Finternet is structured as an open infrastructure layer, much like the TCP/IP of finance. It doesn’t seek to reinvent every wheel or discard what works. Instead, it builds coordination into the architecture itself, allowing digital assets, identity credentials, compliance rules, and legal oversight to interoperate seamlessly.

After years of building in the blockchain space, I’ve seen how far we’ve come in making value move faster. But speed alone doesn’t solve coordination. Bridging the crypto-native world with real-world systems requires more than faster rails — it demands highways that can interconnect digital assets, verified identities, and institutional rules seamlessly.

This approach piqued my interest because it doesn’t ignore the complexities of the real world, but rather is designed to work within them. Shared digital infrastructure like the Finternet can offer a coordination layer where technology-enabled and institutional trust can both operate side by side.

Scaling what works is very different from what works at scale. That’s the shift in mindset we need — not just better blockchains, but better systems. Systems that can flex across jurisdictions, asset types, and levels of institutional maturity.

Back to the Future: A Return to Verifiability and Transactability

Siddharth shared an interesting analogy that stuck with me: “It’s sort of a back to the future situation. In the physical world, you had these tokens such as currency notes, paper shares, and property deeds. You could hand them to someone, and the transaction was done. The proof traveled with the object.”

It’s simple, powerful, and most importantly, self-contained. With physical transactions in cash or coins or some other currency, verification doesn’t require external systems to be online, synced, or integrated. Trust is embedded in the physical currency itself.

If you take a step back and think about it, in digitizing finance, what we gained in scalability and efficiency, we lost in simplicity. Now, a token might live on one ledger, its ownership credential on another, and the relevant legal rules in an entirely different system. To complete even a basic transaction, we rely on a fragile choreography of APIs, bilateral integrations, and institutional intermediaries. The result? Slowness, complexity, and fragmentation.

At its core, a modern financial architecture must seek to restore the simplicity and autonomy we once had in the physical world — but with the advantages of programmability. This requires two foundational capabilities: verifiability, or the ability to independently prove the provenance and validity of an identity, credential, or asset without needing to constantly ping the original issuer; and transactability, the ability to execute meaningful, state-changing actions like renting a property, pledging collateral, or transferring ownership through cryptographic flows that are enforceable, auditable, and usable across systems.

These terms may sound technical, but they speak to something deeply human: the ability to act with confidence, autonomy, and recognition in a system you can’t fully see. It puts the user back at the center.

We’ve spent the last decade building the underlying technology stack. The next decade is about building systems and integrating them into real-world scenarios — systems that don’t just move money, but carry rights, rules, and recognition. That don’t just transact, but coordinate. That work across borders, even when users don’t know what the underlying technology may be.

A New Canvas for Builders

Many of these ideas are no longer abstract. Real pilots are happening across property, energy, capital markets, and stablecoins. Finternet Labs is collaborating with institutions, financial firms, and crypto-native builders to test verifiable credentials, programmable flows, and interoperable ledgers. The tech stack is maturing; now the focus is on usability, adoption, and operating models.

This journey has clarified blockchain’s real potential. While strong in ledger infrastructure and transaction rails, blockchain still struggles with integrating real-world assets, provenance, and off-chain verification. The challenge is to connect crypto-native tools with real-world coordination, enabling secure, cross-system enforcement of assets and agreements.

After a decade of building the tech stack, the next phase is real-world integration — systems that move not just money, but rights, rules, and coordination, across borders and without requiring users to understand the underlying tech.

This is the work ahead.

For developers, this is a call to build applications that hide cryptographic complexity while preserving verifiability, privacy, and compliance — think programmable wallets, interoperable contracts, and interfaces that make trust legible without exposing the underlying rails.

For institutions, it’s a chance to engage in shared infrastructure by issuing tokenized assets, validating credentials, or integrating programmable services into existing systems — driving innovation in financial products.

For regulators and policymakers, it’s a moment to help shape financial systems by focusing less on enforcement and more on embedding trust, accountability, and user protection into programmable infrastructure.

The Finternet is one possible path forward — a practical framework for aligning digital asset innovation with institutional trust and global usability. It’s still early enough to shape, and the canvas is wide open.

What matters now is not just building better vehicles, but ensuring we’re building roads that connect everyone, everywhere.

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