The early 2025 memecoin/countrycoin mania was a temperature check for the blockchain space, and the results were not ideal. While the industry was gaining legitimacy with global entities and achieving regulatory wins left and right, we still managed to drop everything, lose our sanity (and shirts), and risk erasing ample progress the moment a few full-court-press coins hit the market. With the dust yet to fully settle, it would be wise for the industry to get back to fundamentals and remember why its technology is such a major boon for humanity.
The Ledger Baggage
Since the emergence of blockchain technology, the two mainstream talking points have been its robustness as both a distributed financial ledger and as a privacy solution. But since the latter — one of the most darling features to the cypherpunk movement — can come with a lot of technical baggage, the ledger aspect has been the loudest feature, though not without its own hindrances. Specifically, whether via the Bitcoin whitepaper or its predecessors like b-money or bit gold, many have been introduced to “the blockchain” as a distributed ledger for peer-to-peer cash systems — a suffocatingly financial lens with the heavy connotational shackles of monetary transactions.
Fast forward multiple decades, and the blockchain industry has given way to the crypto industry, inundated with waves of get-rich-quick vaporware, pump n’ dumpers, and celebrity scams. Drowning in this toxic milieu, blockchain/crypto critics and supporters alike have been perma-chanting and -pining for the fabled “killer app”: “Mainstream adoption won’t happen until there’s a killer app”; “When’s the iPhone moment?”; “Crypto is dead if no killer app this cycle”; “What’s going to onboard the next billion normies?” — and other sentences people should wash their mouths out with soap after saying. The entire industry has been so hyper-focused on accumulating magic Internet coins and making as much filthy money as possible, that it has grossly neglected the fact that the thing enabling the secure and trusted handling of magic internet coins can also handle everything else. The killer app has never come because it’s always been here.
From a pure coding perspective — which, ironically, is the more human angle here — the distributed, financial ledger framing as the major selling point of blockchains has pigeonholed their use. The true scope fans out in all directions. Blockchains enable a persistent, shared (read: agreed upon and verifiable) history of full-spectrum data: city planning preferences, verifiable doctor endorsements for treatments, mass human behavior, futarchic markets, climate record snapshots, world mineral reserves, etc., can all be represented and communicated on the blockchain. Put succinctly, the blockchain provides shared state¹.
Humanity’s Digital Backbone
This framing is nothing new, yet most people outside the industry remain unaware of it, as it’s underrepresented in the overall industry zeitgeist. Several years ago, Balaji Srinivasan wrote a great (though technically slanted) article with shared state front and center, and you’ll find some other non-technical state-specific articles, but the financial ledger remains the stickiest, quicksand-like alias and the prime influencer in public consciousness. That’s why today, an unfortunately large percentage of the industry’s brain power is still mired in a gigantic, rotational cash grab. Team after team churns out decentralized exchange copy-pasta², the same meme token with slightly different spelling and branding, liquid staking platforms with scandalous APYs, NFT series of 10,420.69 profile pictures that primarily just raises gas prices, and now ChatGPT-wrapper grifts — another shiny object to take eyes off the ball. This state of affairs reminds me of one of my favorite Nine Inch Nails songs.
If you look deep enough, people are working on exciting non-monetary use cases. Here are several that have a chance to provide billions (perhaps trillions) of dollars in economic benefits:
You can hear the VCs and founders now:
VC/founder: “Hey bud, hey little guy, these are good ideas and whatever, but here, look at this chart. See how it’s going up and to the right. I mean, just look at it. Look at those thicc green candles. This is what we need to focus on right now. These other ideas can wait for the bear market. That okay, bud?”
Dev: “I’m much more interested in building one of these ideas.”
VC/founder: “We’ll give you $200k to fork Uniswap and put our little twist on it.”
Dev: “Do you know anyone else who is investing in these ideas?”
VC/founder: “We’ll give you $180k to fork Uniswap.”
*Dev tries to find other VC/founders who want to build non-financial apps. Doesn’t and returns to original VC/founder.*
Dev: “Is that offer still on the table?”
VC/founder: “Unfortunately, we overleveraged ourselves and got liquidated, so we can give you $90k to fork Uniswap.”
Dev: “Okay, and then in the bear, can we work on one of these other ideas?”
VC/founder: “Shit, intern didn’t withdraw everything and got liquidated again. We’ll give you $60k to fork Uniswap.”
*Takes job.*
Too-close-to-home jokes aside, if we trade “distributed ledger tech” for “shared state tech” in every blockchain conversation, fresh energies and brains will enter. The space will feel less TradFi bro-y and more regular human-y. The industry would shift its focus, efforts, and funding. We then build out all the aforementioned applications and many more. Goods, jobs, events, sports, inventions, traffic will be quantified and tokenized, and block-by-block they’ll construct the digital backbone of human coordination.
When the majority of societal data is freely accessible, tamper-proof, and verifiable, information asymmetry is brought close to zero. Cities exist in a more present, self-knowledgeable state — their citizenry engaging in continuous collective deliberation, working through dissension and alignment at a faster clip. The time gap between ideas/problems and implementations/solutions reduces. The context gap between people shrinks. Civic life operates atop the first feasible, practical, and proven medium to vet and coordinate societal information. Shared state brings us to a real-time representation of our mutual physical and conceptual reality. And at a higher level, when we abstract away the architecture and mechanics of the blockchain, we establish our first decentralized, constantly verifiable, global store of truth.
Decentralized Truth: A New Primitive
Whether it’s pseudoscience, greenwashing, biased journalism, fraud, the brand industrial complex, or mainstream marketing, humanity excels at selling multiple realities to itself. At a time when the very nature of truth has been gutted, when political and cultural tensions have reached new intensities, when the U.S. has dug deeper into its 25-plus-year modern civil war, when so much of our psychological angst is forged by the latest subjective headlines that blanket the world faster than most of us can even process, shared state can be the tether in the storm. It is the vaunted killer application, and it’s been here for decades.
The distributed ledger evolves into a distributed truth system. On the blockchain, we will build a shared history — a shared and constantly tested codex for humanity — something we have never had. Recorded History began somewhere between 3500 to 3000 BCE. Maybe one day humans will say that Verifiable History (snazzier name to be determined later) started in the 21st century.
We’re quickly approaching the day where every desktop, laptop, and phone can be a node on a blockchain or several blockchains. By that point, humanity will have built a stalwart objective source of truth. Combine that with the right incentives and action extrusion processes, and you’re getting pretty close to a real-time, ubiquitous, human coordination system. If you want to get really saucy, you could even call this the first rudimentary prototype of a human hive mind. And in this novel paradigm, a more resilient and coordinated society will be built.
