Beyond the Hype: Real World Blockchain Use Cases

When explaining blockchain to people outside the industry, often one of their first comments has to do with its value proposition; what is crypto good for anyway? It’s a legitimate question, and highlights that one of the main challenges faced by crypto is simply its narrative. Those with strong privacy concerns and modern-day gold bugs have dominated the conversation around blockchain-based technology since its advent, and the mainstream press focuses mostly on scams and rugpulls, cyber crimes, and the guy who tossed keys for his 10,000 BTC in the dump. 

All this is to say that the public dialogue around blockchain is one thing, but its actual value is something else entirely. Bankless Consulting has covered a variety of use cases in this newsletter, so you may know that the value proposition for blockchain extends to the limits of our imagination. However, the number of initiatives working to expand the use case for this technology is far larger than could be reduced to print. Fortunately the Policy Team at Polygon Labs recently released TheValueProp, a website indexing all the work being done to further blockchain use cases, and it’s shaping up to be a go-to resource for many within the digital assets space. 

The Value Prop

Work on The Value Prop began with a blog post entitled “Community Policy Initiative No. 1 at Polygon Labs” released earlier this spring. In the post, the Policy Team sought to crowdsource blockchain use cases, to index “all the ways in which blockchain is a fundamental utility in this new era of the internet”.  The Value Prop is the result of this feedback.

The Value Prop can be searched by economic sector, use case, or blockchain network, and cross-referenced. Sectors include education and finance, and most major blockchains are included in the database. The real meat of the database lies in the enumerated use cases, which can alight the imagination on fire:  

And that’s really the value proposition for this database: it enables the crypto curious to begin to learn about the opportunities afforded by blockchain while also permitting those within the digital assets space to peek into the use-case toolbox to see what new combination of primitives may be available to solve a pressing problem, incentivize a particular behavior, or reallocate a precious resource, whether time, attention, or money.

The comprehensive list of use cases provides rough boundaries to begin to frame how blockchain can help your business better track inventory or build more loyal customers, but if you’d like to know how blockchain can be used in your business, please reach out to Bankless Consulting - the world’s first web3-native consulting firm. We can’t change the narrative challenging crypto’s use cases and real-world value overnight, but we can continue to educate, and one by one help our clients prepare for a future that is destined to defy any categorization. 

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO and the Editor-in-Chief at Good Morning News. He is also an Associate at Bankless Consulting, and is helping to build a grants-focused organization at DAOpunks.