Dark Side of The Moon

TL;DR

This is a thought-leadership piece by our CEO, Kenneth Kinsella, in which he explains why the 50-year gap in lunar exploration is the perfect metaphor for the current state of institutional blockchain adoption. He argues that just as the barrier to the Moon was never just engineering but “confidence,” the shift to on-chain money depends on solving the three critical pillars of Certainty, Security, and Trust.

By aligning with regulatory frameworks such as FCA/EMD, we can finally move blockchain from experimental pilots to a system-wide reality, unlocking the $35T+ tokenisation market.

The dark side of the Moon is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not actually in the dark.

The dark side of the Moon refers to the half of the Moon we can’t see from Earth. Its orbit and rotation obscure this half from Earthbound view, which is part of what makes the new images from Artemis II so compelling. There was no way to see its back half, so to speak, without sending a spaceship up to get a good look.

Artemis II is retracing a path last flown by Apollo 17 in 1972. What explains the 50-year gap? It’s not that we lost interest. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Apollo missions fulfilled a political purpose as much as a scientific one. This purpose fulfilled, the Space Race cooled and gave way to American-Soviet collaboration in the mid-1970s. Further appetite for intergalactic risk with human crews eroded in the following decades, largely thanks to the catastrophic Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1986 and 2003, respectively.

There’s a sobering lesson here: Scientific breakthroughs are not self-perpetuating. They advance only when institutions believe the mission and its risks are worth the financial, scientific, and human cost.

The return of space exploration through the Artemis program is exciting because it points to renewed political and scientific will around space exploration. Governments, engineers, operators and the public once again believe the benefits of progress are worth the risk. The barrier was never just engineering. It was also a matter of confidence.

If it took half a century to return humans to lunar orbit, what does that say about the pace of real change in other frontier systems? More specifically, will blockchain need 50 years before institutional banking adopts it at full scale?

For banking, blockchain adoption is the far side of the Moon. It’s pondered, modelled, discussed, yet obscured from view and not actively investigated. It isn’t normalised at the institutional scale. While there has already been real blockchain deployment in finance — tokenised funds, settlement experiments and private distributed ledger networks all exist — full adoption still seems like a moonshot.

From a distance, the blockchain opportunity looks obvious: faster settlement, programmable assets, lower reconciliation costs, more transparent audit trails, and eventually a very different market structure. But whenever institutions are near committing to meaningful balance sheet, client assets and regulatory capital, they tend to baulk. They’re not marvelling at the innovation. They’re frightened by the potential exposure.

Piecemeal deployment is no solution. We need full liftoff when it comes to adoption. If the blockchain spaceship is stuck on the launchpad, it’s not because the idea was weak or the technology does not work. It will be because three conditions of adoption were not solved fast enough: certainty, security and trust.

Certainty before scale

Institutional finance does not scale on possibility but certainty. That certainty has several layers.

The first is legal certainty.

• Does the token claim mean the same thing in every relevant jurisdiction, and will it still mean the same thing to all people in all places?
• The second is operational certainty. Can the system run reliably under stress, at volume, across counterparties and over time?
• The third is governance certainty. Who is accountable when something breaks down, forks, leaks, stalls or gets exploited?

Without those answers, blockchain remains strategically interesting but operationally incomplete.

Banks do not reject blockchain because they fail to understand innovation. They slow down because they understand consequences. A retail user may tolerate experimentation. A global institution will only build critical infrastructure on a sure thing.

Security is not a feature

Security is often discussed as a product attribute in blockchain circles. In institutional banking, it’s the price of admission. A system handling high-value payments, securities, client positions or collateral flows must be resilient in practice — during stress, under attack, across multiple failure points, no matter what.

Smart contract risk, key management, custody architecture, governance vulnerabilities and the irreversibility of many on-chain actions all create a risk profile that institutions won’t wave away as the cost of innovation. This is why incremental deployment does not automatically evolve into mass adoption. Just because a bank is willing to experiment in a ring-fenced environment doesn’t mean they’re prepared to move core activity there. The threshold for trying something is always significantly lower than the threshold for trusting it with systemic importance. NASA understands this logic perfectly. However frustrating the cost of delay, the cost of failure is unacceptable.

Trust needs privacy

Trust is the most misunderstood piece of the puzzle. Many blockchain advocates assume transparency naturally creates trust, and sometimes that’s true.

It’s only partly true in institutional finance. Banks, asset managers and market infrastructures are protecting both customer confidentiality and strategic information. Expose too much, and transparency turns into a competitive threat.

Privacy is central to trust. Ledgers need to be auditable, but systems must be able to prove truths while concealing confidential information. Until that balance is struck, many institutions will continue to admire blockchain from the sidelines but refuse to move their most sensitive flows onto it. This is also why partial deployment regularly coexists with delayed adoption. A bank may use blockchain where the privacy challenge is manageable, but not where strategic exposure becomes intolerable.

The real parallel

Humans only returned to the Moon when confidence in risk management had been restored. Banking will adopt blockchain only under similar conditions.

The history of lunar exploration shows that mere technological capability is not sufficient on its own. The history of blockchain looks decidedly similar. A technology can be powerful, sophisticated and proven in testing environments, but still fall short of system-wide adoption for decades if the surrounding conditions do not mature in tandem.

The missing ingredients are almost always certainty, security and trust.

Is blockchain the Artemis story of finance, a long-delayed but glorious leap forward, propelled by the alignment of confidence and ambition?

That depends on whether the industry can deliver privacy-preserving architecture, robust governance, regulatory clarity and operational resilience strong enough for institutions to commit. Blockchain will be adopted at scale when regulated financial institutions deploy it in a manner that fully aligns with FCA/EMD requirements, merging DeFi’s accessibility with banking’s safety and unlocking the $35T+ tokenization market that permissionless chains cannot serve. The dark side of the Moon could be brighter than ever.