Blockchain is just a ledger. Most systems don’t need a ledger, they need a database. It was a solution looking for a problem in most cases and the marketing/business types don’t listen to the engineers if the engineers are even in the room.
Also, NFTs. Wasn’t there a supposed use case for contract authenticity or something?
Out of those I only know blockchain being used in spain as a way to ensure legality of accounting books, and that business are not commiting fraud by deleting invoices. Not in a public ledger or anything, just a hashed chain that they need to send to irs equivalent.
It’s being used for what it’s very good at. That means very little applications (although there are some), on a different scale, and certainly nothing that can promise a quick buck for free. Basically, empty promises just farted out.
Most of the real world usage were bogus, either because they did not actually work as advertised, or because they had lots of negative properties for businesses (imagine a system that would try to prevent fraud if done well… nobody wants that). There’s also the issue that a lot of “funky, interesting stuff”, once you filtered out the bad and the ugly, were just… less efficient, less useful versions of what we already used to do.
There are still people clinging to it (and the recent fuckery in the US might revive that… although for all the bad reasons), but the press moved forward to the next thing.
AI has taken the spotlight, but this is a good thing.
It’s in the same place as those NFTs that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As always EU silently doing it right with EBSI, that aims to benefit the public sector (and ultimately the public), and hopefully the digital Euro to come.
Money got involved and fucked everything up.
As usual.
Things are still happening, it’s just slow to adopt.
E.g.
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/nasdaqs-calypso-now-supports-blockchain-based-collateral-workflows/
There’s a lot of work being done around tokenizing stocks. The 3 day settlement period would become instant for example. But that’s no small feat to implement. That could be a decades long endeavor between all exchanges for example.
Also until recently, the SEC was hostile towards it all in the USA, with some pivotal multi year long court cases only being resolved in the past year or so where the SEC lost. (E.g is Ethereum a security or not? Well, now it is not. Now we also have the ETFs)
Ethereum only recently had some pretty big upgrades as well, which are going to be key to unlocking growth potential as well. A couple months ago they had a peak of 800 transactions per second, and the road map of these upgrades going to >100k (note these are including the level 2 networks that use the L1 ethereum for their security, like Arbitrum. Level 1 is somewhere between 15-20 right now. As L1 grows, L2s also grow)
I don’t know when the killer app that brings everyone into daily use will happen, but more and more behind the scenes things will slowly adopt it and you won’t even realize it. Like maybe when you do a bank to bank transfer, it’ll be that Visa VTAP thing I linked above, and it won’t take 1 to 3 business days.
Expensive and useless. Decentralization was an illusion and they don’t solve any real problems
To call it useless is just untrue. There are many possibilities, Crypto is just a black hole eating the hype and funding that would otherwise go into valuable tech
