Broadridge Financial Solutions processes over $10 trillion in fixed-income transactions daily. In 2024, the company expanded its Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform, which uses blockchain to settle repurchase agreements in real time. Broadridge is not a crypto company. It is a financial infrastructure provider that handles post-trade processing for the world’s largest banks and broker-dealers. When a firm like Broadridge builds on blockchain, it signals that the technology has moved from the application layer (trading Bitcoin) to the infrastructure layer (settling Treasury repos). The global blockchain market, growing at 36.50% annually from $31.18 billion in 2025 to a projected $577.36 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights, is increasingly an infrastructure story, not a trading story.
The Application-to-Infrastructure Transition
Every major technology follows a recognisable pattern. It starts as an application, becomes a platform, and eventually becomes infrastructure. The internet followed this path. In the 1990s, the internet was a place to build websites (application). In the 2000s, it became a platform for commerce, communication, and media (platform). By the 2010s, it was invisible infrastructure that everything ran on (infrastructure). No one “uses the internet” consciously anymore. They use applications that happen to run on it.
Blockchain is in the middle of this same transition. From 2009 to roughly 2020, blockchain was primarily an application layer. People used it to trade Bitcoin, launch tokens, and experiment with decentralised applications. The user was aware they were “using blockchain.” The technology was the product.
From 2020 to the present, blockchain has been transitioning to an infrastructure layer. JPMorgan’s Onyx, Broadridge’s DLR, BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and SWIFT’s tokenisation experiments all use blockchain for what it does (settle transactions, record ownership, enforce rules) rather than what it is. Blockchain’s role in financial infrastructure is shifting from visible technology to invisible plumbing.
What Infrastructure-Layer Blockchain Looks Like
When blockchain operates as infrastructure, three things change: the users change, the design priorities change, and the economic model changes.
The users shift from retail traders and crypto-native developers to institutional operations teams, post-trade processors, and custodians. These users do not care about decentralisation as a philosophy. They care about settlement finality, regulatory compliance, and operational reliability. They need the blockchain to process a specific transaction correctly every time, not to enable trustless peer-to-peer exchange.
Design priorities shift from permissionless access to controlled performance. Infrastructure-layer blockchain deployments overwhelmingly use permissioned networks (Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda, JPMorgan’s Quorum variants) or operate on public networks with institutional access controls layered on top. The priority is throughput, latency, and deterministic settlement, not the open participation that defines Bitcoin or Ethereum’s base layer.
The economic model shifts from token appreciation to service revenue. A blockchain infrastructure provider like Broadridge or Fireblocks earns money from transaction processing fees, custody fees, and software licences, not from holding or trading tokens. According to Coinlaw’s blockchain statistics, 83% of financial institutions exploring blockchain are doing so for operational improvements, not for exposure to crypto asset prices. Institutional blockchain exploration is driven by cost reduction and operational efficiency, not by speculative interest.
The Infrastructure Stack Taking Shape
Financial infrastructure is layered. At the bottom is the settlement layer (where value transfer is recorded). Above that is the custody layer (where assets are held securely). Then the compliance layer (where regulatory rules are enforced). Then the application layer (where end users interact with products). Blockchain is becoming embedded at every level.
At the settlement layer, DTCC’s Project Ion tested distributed ledger settlement for US equities. CLS Group is exploring blockchain for foreign exchange settlement. The European Central Securities Depositories Association is evaluating tokenised securities settlement across borders.
At the custody layer, BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian with over $47 trillion in assets under custody, launched digital asset custody services. State Street, Northern Trust, and Citibank followed. These firms are not crypto exchanges. They are the institutions that hold the world’s financial assets. Their entry into blockchain custody means that digital assets are being treated as a permanent asset class, not a temporary trend.
At the compliance layer, companies like Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs provide blockchain analytics that allow institutions to screen transactions for sanctions violations, money laundering, and terrorist financing. These tools process billions of transactions and are integrated into the compliance workflows of over 1,000 financial institutions globally. Blockchain-enabled transparency makes compliance monitoring faster and more comprehensive than monitoring traditional bank transfers.
Blockchain-as-a-Service and Cloud Integration
The infrastructure transition accelerated when cloud providers began offering blockchain as a managed service. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM all offer Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) products. The BaaS segment accounts for 51.72% of the blockchain market by deployment type, per Fortune Business Insights.
BaaS matters because it removes the operational burden of running blockchain infrastructure. A bank deploying Hyperledger Fabric on AWS does not manage nodes, configure consensus mechanisms, or monitor network health. It uses blockchain the same way it uses a database: as a managed cloud service with an SLA and a support contract.
This is the clearest indicator that blockchain has become infrastructure. When a technology is available as a standard cloud service from the same providers that offer databases, storage, and compute, it has been absorbed into the general infrastructure stack. No one describes using AWS RDS as “adopting database technology.” It is simply how applications store data. Blockchain on cloud is approaching the same status for multi-party financial operations.
Blockchain ecosystem evolution from standalone networks to cloud-integrated services mirrors the database industry’s evolution from on-premises installations to managed cloud services in the 2010s.
What the Infrastructure Shift Means for the Industry
When blockchain becomes infrastructure, competition shifts. The question is no longer “should we use blockchain?” It is “which blockchain infrastructure do we use, and how do we integrate it with our existing systems?”
This creates winners among infrastructure providers. Fireblocks, which provides institutional transfer and custody infrastructure, has processed over $6 trillion in digital asset transfers. Chainlink, which provides data feeds and cross-chain messaging, is integrated into protocols and institutions managing hundreds of billions in value. These companies are the Cisco and Oracle of blockchain infrastructure, providing the picks and shovels for an industry build-out.
It also creates pressure on financial institutions that delayed adoption. An institution that has not built blockchain capabilities by 2025 faces an integration challenge comparable to banks that delayed internet adoption in the early 2000s. The technology is no longer optional for institutions that want to participate in the next generation of financial markets. Blockchain’s financial transformation is becoming a competitive requirement rather than a strategic option.
The clearest sign that blockchain has become financial infrastructure is that the conversation has changed. Five years ago, the question was whether blockchain had a role in finance. Today, the question is how quickly each financial institution can integrate it. That shift, from “whether” to “how fast,” is what separates applications from infrastructure.
