Bakong

Bakong, launched in 2020 by the National Bank of Cambodia, is one of the world's first production-grade central bank digital currencies. It runs on Hyperledger Iroha, an open-source blockchain framework that Soramitsu originally created and contributed to the Linux Foundation.

Context

Soramitsu isn't a typical fintech startup. It's the company that built Cambodia's national payment system.

By 2025, Bakong had surpassed 11 million users and was processing over $500 million in daily transactions, with cross-border QR payment integrations spanning Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, and China (via Alipay+).

My Role

I joined Soramitsu in February 2020 as Head of Design and Brand, the same year Bakong launched. On the enterprise side of the company, my work centered on design quality, UX strategy, brand consistency, and visual communications: product videos, press materials, conference collateral, and stakeholder presentations for an audience that ranged from central bank governors to rural merchants.

Bakong became the benchmark for every CBDC deployment that followed. As Soramitsu's portfolio expanded to Laos, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Palau, the lessons from Bakong fed into the Superwallet initiative: a multi-brand design system and modular wallet framework that let new national wallets be built from a shared foundation rather than from scratch.

Impact

Reflections

This work sits in a different category from most consumer product design. The "users" include central bank governors, and the "product" is a country's financial sovereignty.

What I learned: Trust is the product. And the best technology disappears. A merchant in Phnom Penh never thinks about Hyperledger Iroha. They just interact with their money.