Why Kailash Sadangi Believes Distributed Ledger Technology Will Rewrite Corporate Governance Rules

The boardroom, as the world knows it, is on borrowed time. Hierarchies built on trust are delegated through intermediaries. Boards are relying on retrospective audits. Shareholders are consigned to annual meetings for a fleeting vote. These are the conventions that Kailash Sadangi, one of the most incisive governance thinkers operating at the intersection of finance and emerging technology, argues are fundamentally incompatible with the economy that is already arriving.

The Paper That Reframes the Conversation

In his discussion paper From Boardroom to Blockchain: Reconfiguring Agency, Accountability, and Governance in a Digitally Mediated Economy, published in December 2025, Sadangi examines how Distributed Ledger Technology, including blockchain and smart contracts, challenges established corporate governance assumptions about hierarchy, accountability, and institutional intermediation (Kailash Sadangi, Medium, December 2025).

The stakes are considerable. The global blockchain distributed ledger market hit USD 8.91 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 32.20% CAGR, reaching USD 145.28 billion by 2035 (Expert Market Research, Blockchain Distributed Ledger Market Report, 2025). This is not a niche experiment. It is a structural reshaping of how commerce, ownership, and accountability are organised at a global scale.

Rethinking the Principal-Agent Problem

At the core of Sadangi’s argument is a rethinking of agency theory: the foundational framework that describes the tension between corporate owners and the managers entrusted to act on their behalf. Drawing on agency theory and transaction cost economics, he examines how DLT reshapes stakeholder relationships by reducing information asymmetry and transaction costs while simultaneously generating new forms of agency, accountability gaps, and systemic governance risk. Solving old problems, he argues, can create new ones. Only those who understand both dimensions can architect governance systems that actually hold.

What Changes for Shareholders

For shareholders, the implications are immediate. Permissioned ledgers can create near-real-time, immutable records of ownership, transactions, and corporate disclosures, supporting continuous or event-driven voting mechanisms and reducing reliance on episodic annual meetings and share registry intermediaries. A 2025 systematic review of 106 peer-reviewed studies, published in Frontiers in Blockchain, found that blockchain enhances corporate governance mechanisms, shareholders’ oversight, and managerial accountability, and directly boosts trust in organisations (Ogedengbe & Adelowotan, Frontiers in Blockchain, October 2025).

A New Definition of Fiduciary Duty for Boards

For boards, Sadangi identifies a profound shift in how fiduciary duty itself is exercised. If compliance checks and reporting controls are encoded into smart contracts, boards may spend less time validating data integrity and more time overseeing strategic risk, ethical judgement, and the governance of the digital infrastructure itself. Boards cannot delegate fiduciary duties to code. Accountability shifts from “did management follow the rules?” to “were the right rules designed, implemented, monitored, and updated?”

This is a genuinely radical reconception. It moves governance from a policing function to an engineering one. Not every governance professional is prepared for it.

Honest About the Risks

Sadangi is equally alert to the dangers. Where oracles or off-chain data feeds are required, the attack surface widens and governance risk increases. Broader stakeholders may benefit from verifiable audit trails and stronger ESG disclosures, but transparency also raises privacy and surveillance concerns. Digital participation mechanisms can exacerbate inequality where access depends on technical literacy or concentrated token ownership.

This intellectual honesty separates Sadangi’s work from breathless blockchain boosterism. His conclusion is not that DLT will make governance obsolete. He argues that DLT reconstitutes governance into hybrid configurations in which algorithmic controls coexist with human judgement, legal frameworks, and institutional legitimacy.

The Hybrid Future Is Already Here

That hybrid future is already materialising. By 2025, 43% of DAOs had implemented AI tools to assist in governance, analysing voting patterns and suggesting policy changes to enable quicker and better decision-making (Glavx.org, The Future of DAO Governance Models, 2025). And peer-reviewed research confirms the cost of falling short: empirical analysis of DAO structures shows that non-algorithmic, off-chain voting governance leads to a substantial discount in DAO value (ScienceDirect, Voting Governance and Value Creation in DAOs, 2025).

A Map for the Decade Ahead

What Kailash Sadangi brings to this conversation is rare: the practitioner’s grasp of what actually breaks in boardrooms, combined with the scholar’s discipline to interrogate why. With over three decades of executive finance experience across the GCC, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Australia, spanning multinational corporations, public private partnerships, and major private conglomerates, his perch is not theoretical. It is a frontline view (The Org | ZoomInfo).

The rules of corporate governance are not being abandoned. They are being rewritten. And Kailash Sadangi is among the few already fluent in the new language.

Sources:

1. Kailash Sadangi, From Boardroom to Blockchain — medium.com/@dba16ks
2. Expert Market Research — Blockchain Distributed Ledger Market Report 2025 — expertmarketresearch.com
3. Frontiers in Blockchain, Revolutionising Corporate Governance, October 2025 — frontiersin.org
4. Glavx.org, The Future of DAO Governance Models, 2025 — glavx.org
5. ScienceDirect, Voting Governance and Value Creation in DAOs, 2025 — sciencedirect.com
6. Kailash Sadangi professional profiles — The Org | ZoomInfo