Miguel Kudry is the CEO and co-founder of L1, an operating system for onchain wealth and asset management.
At the 2025 Aspen Leadership Forum on Retirement Savings in Charlottesville, Virginia, we spent three days debating how to expand access and secure lifelong savings. The takeaway was sobering: Despite $44.1 trillion in assets—about one-third of household wealth—the system is sprawling and failing many. A quarter sits in public employee plans; the rest is in corporate plans, IRAs and annuities. Only 53% of private-sector workers have a workplace plan, dropping to 27% for the lowest-paid quarter. When faced with a $400 emergency, 13% of adults are unable to cover the expense at all, and many more are unwilling and/or unable to cover it with cash. About 40% cash out their 401(k)s when changing jobs, siphoning roughly $92 billion a year.
Richard Cook’s “How Complex Systems Fail” came to mind. Cook lists 18 observations, from inherent hazards to fixes that breed new faults. The retirement apparatus, layered over decades of tech and regulation, is textbook complex. Livelihoods at stake invite ever more safeguards. Yet the system runs partly broken, with latent failures hidden. Each new rule piles on parts that can misfire. Complexity itself has become the retirement system’s greatest threat.
A Complex System Buckling Under Its Own Weight
Retirement planning is a maze of actors and subsystems. Policymakers keep tweaking ERISA, tax codes and SECURE Acts, but each fix spawns new account types, rules and limits, compounding complexity. Decades of patches have left a quilt of employer plans, IRAs, annuities and public pensions, each with its own rulebook.
Private and public programs run in silos: Corporate 401(k)s and brokerage IRAs do not interoperate, so savings rarely move smoothly when workers do. Recordkeepers wrestle with data silos and legacy code. Systems were never built to talk to each other, and providers lack the incentive to share. Portability suffers: A 401(k) from a previous job may not merge into a new plan, and savings do not follow people like medical records. About 40% of employees take a check in these cases, despite taxes and penalties.
Fragmentation splinters data, so even simple tasks drag. Unassisted rollovers still take weeks, an unnecessarily complex process amid instant digital transfers. Today’s retirement stewards nurse a Rube Goldberg contraption of laws, one-off integrations and workarounds. The system stays “safe” only through human heroics—plan sponsors, administrators, service reps, compliance officers—patching flaws.
Millions lack a workplace plan, adequate savings, portable accounts or access to effective, wealth-building opportunities. Patches such as automatic enrollment, target-date funds and state IRAs help at the edges yet add gears without fixing the engine: the missing unified, efficient and transparent retirement infrastructure.
Another cog won’t move the marble faster. Retirement is as much a technology and coordination puzzle as a policy one. If we pared back the clutter and offered everyone from Treasury officials to individual savers a calibrated view of the hazards (as Cook put it) and a shared blueprint for experimentation, we might discover space to rebuild key sections from first principles.
Onchain Rails As The Coordination Layer
Onchain rails grew from 15 years of digital money experiments. Bitcoin, ether and later networks showed trillions can move online without intermediaries, sparking protocols, wallets and settlement layers to move any asset. They are no cure-all, but they supply the open, interoperable base that the current retirement planning system lacks.
Think of today’s retirement system as thousands of private spreadsheets, each formatted differently and never fully reconciled. Onchain rails replace those spreadsheets with a single public ledger that any authorized provider can read, write and audit in real time. Every saver controls a digital wallet where dollars and data sit encrypted, and each plan’s rules are encoded in smart contracts, self-executing programs that automatically move money when a trigger occurs, such as a job change or a required minimum distribution.
Crypto’s public protocols offer a model of trustless, transparent infrastructure.
Everyone follows identical code; no central party can edit the ledger. Applied to retirement, stakeholders could share one network that records contributions, balances and entitlements, removing institutional reconciling. A single open standard would replace today’s patchwork of data formats and processes with one common language.
Smart contracts let assets and apps interoperate.
Retirement rules already link 401(k)s, IRAs and Social Security, but today those connections are manual and offline. Onchain, a 401(k) contract could speak directly to an IRA contract, so changing jobs would trigger an automatic, paperwork-free rollover within seconds. Providers could snap together features like Lego bricks, launching auto portability, emergency-savings sidecars and more on one standard. Composability replaces months of institutional negotiation with code-level integration.
Most transformative is true ownership of data and assets.
People can be their own custodians. Imagine a portable digital identity and retirement vault. Work history, balances and identity stay with you, not employers or third-party custodians. When you change jobs, you grant the new plan access to your existing wallet, and employers contribute directly; no orphaned accounts. A lifelong universal account replaces opening a new 401(k) for every job. This portability ends messy rollovers and curbs capital and data leakage. All participants, regulators included, consult the same ledger for balances and transactions, boosting transparency.
By adding these properties, onchain rails could remove much of today’s complexity. Rails alone cannot fix undersaving or inequity; policy and habits must. Yet as a base, crypto rails could enable reforms to take hold more effectively. If Congress mandated autoenrollment, a shared wallet would let every new worker join instantly. Cook would call this a “calibrated view”: The open ledger shows where money flows, stalls or leaks. It also removes blind trust among siloed actors, giving everyone a clear, shared picture.
Challenges
Migrating decades-old, COBOL-era recordkeeping onto new rails will take serious time and money. Interfaces must be rebuilt, staff retrained and self-custody models cleared by the Department of Labor, Treasury, SEC and other regulators. Cybersecurity has to advance in parallel; key-recovery schemes and insurance backstops must be fully stress-tested before launch. The industry also needs to converge on a single KYC/AML standard. Finally, policy must keep pace: Fiduciary definitions, prohibited-transaction rules and capital requirements would all require updates to fit this model.
Rebuilding From First Principles For Better Outcomes
Progress starts by rebuilding from first principles. Onchain rails offer that opportunity: Open, trust-minimized protocols put contributions, balances and entitlements on a single ledger; smart-contract composability lets 401(k)s, IRAs and pensions interact automatically; and portable, self-custody wallets let savings follow workers from job to job. It meets savers where they already transact online.
Open standards resolve the coordination gaps that slow progress, just as the internet replaced closed circuits and unlocked rapid innovation. The Charlottesville discussions showed a deep, shared commitment to practical solutions and a clear consensus that structural complexity, not expertise, is the main obstacle. Onchain rails are no panacea, but they strip away layers that can turn every upgrade into a decade-long slog, allowing improvements to reach savers on the timeline modern finance demands.
Technology compounds, and younger savers already move at that pace. Linking retirement to that momentum might keep the next generation from walking away.
The information provided here is not investment, tax or financial advice. You should consult with a licensed professional for advice concerning your specific situation.
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