Frederik Gregaard, chief executive of the Cardano Foundation, told attendees at the Web Summit, one of Europe's largest technology conferences, that the combination of blockchain, digital identity and agentic artificial intelligence could make corporate financial data directly verifiable — a shift he argues would reduce the risk of fraud such as the Wirecard scandal.

The central question he posed: why do markets continue to rely on annual audits and signed documents when even auditors can be deceived? What if financial transactions could be checked in real time, rather than waiting for a yearly review?

For Gregaard, the answer lies not in trusting institutions more, but in moving to an architecture in which information can be verified directly — including by authorized external parties.

The Wirecard Case: €1.9 Billion That Never Existed

Wirecard remains one of the clearest illustrations of the limits of traditional auditing. For years, the German digital payments company — once a constituent of Germany's benchmark DAX index — claimed to hold substantial cash reserves in trustee accounts in Asia. In June 2020, it admitted that the €1.9 billion shown in its financial statements probably did not exist, and the company collapsed that same year.

The problem, Gregaard suggested, was not merely the complexity of Wirecard's operations but the inability to verify concretely the information supplied to its auditing firm. Investigations found that the documents certifying the existence of the bank deposits were not authentic: several Philippine banks denied having any relationship with Wirecard and confirmed that the certificates presented were false.

According to Gregaard, the weak point was the verification process itself. Receiving a document that appeared to come from a bank was not enough; it had to be possible to confirm directly that the bank had actually issued the certificate and that the funds were really present.

The case showed that even a system built around auditors, certifications and independent controls can fail when the underlying information is never checked at its source. The question, he argued, is how to build a system in which falsifying financial information becomes far more difficult.

Blockchain and Financial Statements: Cardano's Proposal

In Gregaard's view, the answer is not simply to move corporate financial statements onto a blockchain. What must change is the entire architecture through which financial data is produced, certified and verified.

A public blockchain can record information transparently and immutably, allowing authorized parties to inspect operations and reconstruct their history. In practice, that could mean verifying an organization's transactions without physically visiting its offices or repeatedly requesting additional documentation.

Gregaard pointed to the Cardano Foundation itself as an example. An investor could consult the organization's financial information — including treasury positions and personnel expenses — through verifiable data and attestations from third parties. Crucially, the model does not involve automatically publishing all confidential information. Instead, it allows parties holding the necessary authorizations to verify its authenticity.

Under this approach, the blockchain becomes an infrastructure for transparency and traceability, while digital identity systems establish who produced a piece of information, who certified it and who is authorized to consult it.

From Lehman Brothers to the LEI Standard

Gregaard also drew on a different crisis: the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, still the largest bankruptcy filing in US history. The collapse exposed a structural weakness in financial markets, where large institutions operated through webs of legal entities, subsidiaries and contractual relationships that were not uniformly identifiable. Reconstructing financial exposures and determining which parties stood behind individual transactions became extremely complicated.

That need gave rise to the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a unique identification code for legal entities participating in financial markets. The system was developed as part of initiatives promoted by the Financial Stability Board at the request of the G20 in 2012, and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), based in Switzerland, was established in 2014 to support its implementation.

The LEI makes it possible to accurately identify the counterparties to a financial transaction and to link information from different sources, and obtaining an LEI has since become a routine requirement in many regulated markets. For Gregaard, it offers a concrete example of how a crisis can accelerate the evolution of financial infrastructure. The next step is integrating these standards with blockchain technologies and interoperable digital identity systems.

Notably, the LEI does not require the use of a blockchain. It is a standard that can be integrated with traditional infrastructure, though blockchain can add new possibilities for verification and traceability.

Agentic AI and Continuous Auditing

The pairing of blockchain with agentic artificial intelligence could make corporate controls considerably more efficient. AI agents are systems capable of autonomously performing defined activities, analyzing information and flagging anomalies according to set rules and objectives.

Applied to accounting, such agents could continuously monitor an organization's transactions, detect unusual behavior and alert managers the moment potential irregularities emerge. Much of today's auditing relies on periodic checks and sampling: auditors select certain transactions to review without necessarily examining every single one. With an adequate digital infrastructure, a far larger share of operations — potentially the entire accounting flow — could be analyzed.

The benefit would be not only greater speed but also the ability to detect anomalies before they harden into problems that are difficult to fix.

For such a model to work, however, AI agents must also be able to verify the identity of the parties they interact with. An autonomous system needs to know whether it is receiving information from a bank, a company or a genuinely authorized party. This is where verifiable digital identity comes in: the blockchain records proofs and makes operations verifiable, while digital credentials establish the reliability of the identities involved.

The Oracle Problem: Blockchain Does Not Guarantee Truth

Gregaard did not understate a fundamental limitation: blockchain alone does not eliminate fraud. A transaction recorded on a blockchain can be verified and cannot be arbitrarily altered, but that says nothing about whether the information was correct when it was entered.

If someone records false data, the technology guarantees only that it will not be changed afterward — not that it was true at the time of registration. This is the challenge commonly known as the oracle problem: the reliability of data entering a blockchain from the outside world.

For this reason, digital identity and third-party attestations become fundamental. It is not enough to know that information has been recorded; it must also be possible to demonstrate who produced it, which authority certified it and through which process it was verified.

The issue carries added weight in a context where fraud can be organized by people inside the very institutions meant to provide assurances. Even a technologically advanced organization must therefore confront questions of individual responsibility, controls and governance.

Reeve and Veridian: The Foundation's Tools

Gregaard's vision fits within the Cardano Foundation's broader strategy of promoting blockchain as infrastructure usable well beyond the world of cryptocurrencies.

A concrete example is Reeve, the accounting and financial reporting solution presented by the Foundation. Reeve records accounting events and financial information on the blockchain, creating a transparent and immutable ledger that facilitates the traceability of operations and the verification of data. The platform aims to make information more accessible to stakeholders while integrating with the ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems companies already use.

Alongside Reeve, the Cardano Foundation is also developing digital identity solutions, including Veridian and its related verifiable identity ecosystem. The goal is an infrastructure in which data, identities and transactions can interact with one another without depending on a single central intermediary.

That aspect is particularly important for the future of digital finance: a blockchain without reliable identification systems may have limited usefulness in corporate and institutional applications. How far Reeve and Veridian move from presentation to everyday adoption by companies, auditors and regulators is the practical test for this verification-first approach.

From Trust to Verification

Gregaard's message was clear: the future of financial transparency will not depend solely on the spread of cryptocurrencies, but on the ability of blockchain technology to solve concrete problems in traditional economic systems. The combination of distributed ledgers, verifiable digital identity and artificial intelligence could transform the way companies, investors and auditors interact with financial information.

A fundamental challenge remains, however. Technology must be accompanied by shared standards, independent checks, clear accountability and effective governance systems. Blockchain cannot prevent a person from lying, but it can make it harder to hide the traces of a transaction — and easier to verify who is responsible for it.