Kailash Sadangi says blockchain could reshape corporate governance

Kailash Sadangi argues that distributed ledger technology could change how boards, shareholders and managers share power, verify records and carry out fiduciary duty. His December 2025 paper says the shift could make governance more continuous, more automated and more exposed to new risks.

Why it matters: - Distributed ledger technology could move corporate governance away from annual meetings, retrospective audits and intermediary-heavy systems. - The shift could give shareholders faster access to ownership records and voting, while forcing boards to rethink how accountability is enforced. - The market opportunity is large: the global blockchain distributed ledger market reached USD 8.91 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to USD 145.28 billion by 2035.

What happened: - Kailash Sadangi published a December 2025 discussion paper, From Boardroom to Blockchain: Reconfiguring Agency, Accountability, and Governance in a Digitally Mediated Economy. - The paper argues that blockchain and smart contracts challenge long-standing assumptions about hierarchy, accountability and institutional intermediation. - Sadangi frames the issue as a corporate governance problem, not just a technology trend.

The details: - Permissioned ledgers can create near-real-time, immutable records of ownership, transactions and corporate disclosures. - Those records can support continuous or event-driven voting instead of relying mainly on annual meetings and share registry intermediaries. - A 2025 systematic review of 106 peer-reviewed studies published in Frontiers in Blockchain found that blockchain strengthens governance mechanisms, shareholder oversight and managerial accountability, and increases trust in organisations. - Sadangi says smart contracts could encode compliance checks and reporting controls into governance systems. - That would push boards toward overseeing strategic risk, ethical judgment and the digital infrastructure itself. - Sadangi argues that boards cannot delegate fiduciary duty to code. - The governance question shifts from whether management followed rules to whether the rules were designed, implemented, monitored and updated correctly.

Between the lines: - Sadangi treats blockchain as both a fix and a source of new governance risk. - Oracles and off-chain data feeds widen the attack surface. - More transparency can improve auditability and ESG disclosure, but it can also create privacy and surveillance concerns. - Digital participation can deepen inequality when technical literacy or token ownership is concentrated. - The paper’s bigger point is that governance does not disappear; it becomes hybrid, with algorithmic controls working alongside human judgment, legal frameworks and institutional legitimacy. - That view sets the work apart from simple blockchain hype.

What’s next: - Hybrid governance models are already emerging. - By 2025, 43% of DAOs had implemented AI tools to analyze voting patterns and suggest policy changes, according to Glavx.org. - Peer-reviewed research cited in the source material says non-algorithmic, off-chain voting governance leads to a substantial discount in DAO value. - Sadangi’s executive background across the GCC, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Australia gives him a practical lens on how these changes could affect real boardrooms. - His broader message is that corporate governance rules are being rewritten, not abandoned.

The bottom line: - Sadangi’s core argument is that distributed ledger technology could turn governance from a periodic compliance exercise into a continuous, code-supported system of oversight, but only if institutions can manage the new risks it creates.