Hey there,
There's a topic I've been carrying for nearly a decade that has never properly made it into the Askara story. Not for lack of trying. Back in 2023, during the freelancing years when I was still exploring what kind of company I wanted to build, I made several attempts to bring this into my public work. It never stuck. The space around it was too noisy, the positions I held too polarising, and the professional cost of being associated with it too high for something that hadn't yet found its place in whatever I was building.
Over the past few weeks, through several podcast conversations with the team, the topic has kept resurfacing. Each time a little more persistently, a little harder to set aside. And then this weekend, while the conversations were still working on me, something clicked into place. Not a new insight exactly, but a recognition of how this knowledge finally connects to what Askara is becoming.
I'm talking about blockchain.
The Seed That Wouldn't Take
I first fell down the blockchain rabbit hole during the initial hype cycle in 2017. Not the speculation side, but the technology itself. The original Satoshi whitepaper described something genuinely revolutionary: a system for electronic cash that could enable micropayments, data sovereignty, and peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries. The promise was that individuals could own what they created and transact directly, cutting out the friction and cost that middlemen extract at every layer of the economy.
I spent years researching this. Reading whitepapers, following developer communities, trying to understand which implementations actually honoured the original vision and which had drifted into something else entirely. I formed strong convictions about specific protocols, and I watched as the public conversation around blockchain got progressively hijacked by cryptocurrency speculation, scandal, and hype that had almost nothing to do with the underlying infrastructure technology.
The damage was thorough. Serious technologists stopped paying attention. The word "blockchain" became synonymous with get-rich-quick schemes and environmental waste. And the implementations I believed in most were systematically marginalised, through developer community fractures, legal battles, and institutional resistance that made mainstream adoption increasingly unlikely. Not because the technology didn't work, but because too many forces were aligned against it.
When I tried to bring this thinking into my content work in 2023, I was still freelancing on ISO consultancy to cover costs while exploring online content creation as a direction. Askara didn't exist yet. And aligning publicly with the positions I held in the blockchain space carried a reputational weight that made it impossible to land with any audience I was trying to build. The topic kept failing to find its footing in my professional story. So it stayed in the background, waiting.
The Current
By the end of 2024, after following yet another high-profile lawsuit that seemed designed to settle certain questions permanently, I had to be honest with myself. The implementations I'd believed in were not going to achieve what I'd hoped. Swimming upstream wasn't producing results.
What I started paying attention to instead was where the current was actually flowing. Institutional blockchain adoption, the tokenisation of assets, cross-border payment infrastructure. These implementations look nothing like the original Satoshi vision. They serve financial institutions rather than individuals. They centralise rather than decentralise. But they are being adopted, rapidly, by every major economy on the planet. Tokenisation of assets was a central theme at Davos earlier this year, and the infrastructure is maturing quietly while most of the technology world remains fixated on AI headlines.
The realisation that landed this weekend connects directly to what I wrote about in "The Instrument." You can choose to resist the direction the current is flowing, or you can position yourself within it and use your knowledge to steer toward outcomes that actually serve people. Resistance felt principled for a long time. But principle without impact is just pride. And the knowledge I've accumulated over nearly a decade of deep engagement with this technology doesn't have to go to waste just because the specific vision I championed didn't prevail.
The current is still built on blockchain technology. The fundamentals still apply. And understanding those fundamentals deeply, even if the application looks different from what I once imagined, is something I can bring to Askara with genuine conviction.
The Convergence
This is where it starts to matter, and why I sat down over the weekend and wrote an internal strategy document to get the thinking down clearly.
AI and blockchain are almost always discussed as separate phenomena. They shouldn't be. They are the two great technological shifts of this era, and their convergence over the coming decade will reshape how organisations operate and where cybersecurity risk actually lives.
Blockchain infrastructure is maturing into something that makes data flows verifiable by default. AI agents are gaining the ability to traverse these networks autonomously. And cybersecurity is evolving from a technical discipline into a governance layer that determines how these systems operate safely. When that convergence plays out, a significant portion of today's compliance overhead simply disappears, because the underlying infrastructure becomes trustworthy by design.
But every wave of technical improvement in cybersecurity has taught us the same lesson: when defences improve, attackers move up the stack. Better firewalls produced more sophisticated phishing. Better encryption produced more targeted social engineering. The technical layer gets addressed, and the human layer becomes the frontier. AI is accelerating this pattern dramatically, industrialising human manipulation at a scale that most organisations are not prepared for.
That is the paradox sitting at the centre of the next decade: as the technical layer becomes more secure, the human layer becomes more exposed, and the tools available to exploit it become more powerful.
The Position
Askara sits at the human layer. We've been building there all along, focused on what people actually do and whether that behaviour makes the organisation more or less secure. What I hadn't articulated until now is how the maturing blockchain infrastructure strengthens rather than threatens that position.
As verifiable audit trails become standard, the behavioural evidence Askara generates gains a natural home. What actually happened, when, and by whom, recorded not as documentation someone prepared but as a byproduct of how the organisation actually worked. Immutable infrastructure doesn't replace that evidence. It makes it more defensible.
We don't need to build blockchain technology. We need to build for the world it creates. A world where technical compliance is increasingly handled by infrastructure, where AI is both the greatest tool and the greatest threat, and where the human layer, the 85% of cybersecurity incidents that trace back to human behaviour, remains stubbornly, irreducibly human.
I've been carrying this knowledge quietly for longer than Askara has existed. The intersection of AI and blockchain, understood together rather than separately, has been shaping my thinking about our direction in ways I haven't fully shared until now. The topic finally has a home in this story.
It felt like it was time to say so.
With care, Ben