GCUL, Google’s New Layer 1 for Payments, Tokenization and Settlement —

Key Takeaways

• Stablecoins are now mainstream, as transaction volumes in 2024 surged to $30T total, surpassing Visa’s annual payments flow.
• Legacy rails like ACH, RTGS, and card networks are costly, slow, and fragmented.
• Google launched its Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), a planet-scale, permissioned blockchain built for payments and capital markets.
• GCUL is evolutionary, not revolutionary, as it doesn’t replace money but upgrades the plumbing of global finance.

Global payment systems remain the backbone of commerce, but much of the infrastructure behind them is dated and fragmented.

Cross-border transfers are often slow and expensive, and many banks still rely on legacy systems that are costly to maintain and difficult to upgrade.

At the same time, demand for faster, cheaper, and programmable payments has grown with the rise of digital assets and stablecoins.

Against this backdrop, Google Cloud has introduced the Universal Ledger (GCUL) , a new layer-1 blockchain designed for payments, tokenization, and settlement.

Rather than competing with existing forms of money, the platform aims to provide banks and financial institutions with a modernized backbone that combines the compliance of traditional finance with the efficiency of distributed ledger technology.

The Rise of Stablecoins and the Payments Revolution

Stablecoins have quietly become one of the most disruptive forces in finance.

In 2024, stablecoin transaction volumes tripled , reaching $5 trillion in organic activity and over $30 trillion in total settlement volume, according to Visa and Artemis.

For context, that’s nearly four times PayPal’s annual transaction volume of $1.6 trillion and surpasses Visa’s global payments volume of $13 trillion.

Meanwhile, the supply of dollar-backed stablecoins has grown to more than 1% of the U.S. M2 money supply. This milestone underscores that stablecoins are no longer an experiment but an infrastructure.

This shift collides with a payments industry worth nearly $3 trillion annually. Traditional rails—credit cards, ACH, RTGS—are complex, expensive, and slow.

Stablecoins, by contrast, move value seamlessly between digital wallets, often instantly and at negligible cost.

Financial markets are also exploring stablecoins for on-chain settlement of trades, enabling greater transparency, faster clearance, and lower costs.

The demand for a new payments backbone has never been greater. That’s where Google Cloud’s Universal Ledger (GCUL) enters.

The Problem: Today’s Fragmented, Expensive Infrastructure

The global financial system is heavily fragmented. Each country has its own rails, compliance regimes, and standards.

Cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and dependent on fragile correspondent banking chains—a system that has shrunk by 25% in the last decade.

The costs are staggering:

• Annual maintenance for outdated payment systems: $37 billion in 2022 , rising to $57 billion by 2028.
• Lost economic growth: The Economist estimates fragmented payment systems could cut $2.8 trillion (2.6% of GDP) from the global economy by 2030, equivalent to 130 million jobs lost.
• High fees: A retailer like Walmart could save $8B annually in card processing fees by switching to a lower-cost system—potentially boosting EPS by 40%.

Meanwhile, 75% of banks say they struggle to launch new services on outdated payment infrastructure, opening the door for fintechs and neobanks to capture market share.

The Promise of Web3 and Stablecoins

Web3 experimentation has demonstrated that distributed ledgers (DLTs) can solve many of these inefficiencies:

• Always-on, global infrastructure.
• Atomic settlement (simultaneous, irreversible transfers of assets).
• Transparent, shared ledgers reduce reconciliation needs.
• Programmability…