Account ownership among Cambodian adults rose from 59% in 2017 to 67% in 2021 to 78% in 2024 (World Bank Global Findex) - with Bakong bringing an estimated 60% of the population into the digital financial fold. 98% of Cambodian businesses are SMEs - the direct beneficiaries of that shift.

Cambodia turned its two biggest constraints - dollarisation and fragmentation - into the world's first blockchain-based national payment system at scale. The model is simple to state and hard to copy: sovereign control held at the permissioned core, with an open, neutral network layer built on top that no single country can withdraw - unlike the correspondent-banking channels francophone markets currently depend on. 

Bakong is the working version. It isn't a one-off: Soramitsu, the technology partner behind Bakong's architecture, is already replicating the same sovereign-core, shared-standard model with central banks across the Pacific.

Francophone finance is under real pressure: the CFA franc arrangement is politically strained, and the correspondent-banking channels carrying the region's cross-border payments are withdrawing. The institutions - sovereign central banks, the Code Civil legal tradition, OHADA's unified commercial law - are sound. What's exposed is the network layer underneath, and that's exactly what Cambodia's model replaces.