Blockchain-Enabled Applications: Myth or It’s About time?

The history of mankind is accelerating at an unprecedented speed after the invention of the Internet. At first, the idea of the internet was merely a hypothesis to connect point A to B. create a more interactive digital tool to transmit information. This “seed” of a distributed network has grown to more than just a common connection mechanism; it has evolved to a 21st-century neuro-network that we humans simply can’t live without.

Now, the concept of blockchain was merely a hypothesis at its creation. Matter of fact, the invention of blockchain was used to set up a pseudo payment system — “Bitcoin” by an anonymous person/group named Satoshi Nakamoto. and it wasn’t until 2015, a kid from Russia named Vitalik Buterin extracted and discovered the diversification usabilities of blockchain technology and created an open-source project called “Ethereum”. With the open-sourced smart contract capabilities, it unleashed what I like to call the “Pandora’s Box”. This allows scammers and amateurs to quickly jump on this opportunity and launch something called an ICO “Initial Coin Offering” and raise a ton of money just to build an MVP.

I was fortunate to witness the whole journey with my very own eyes, which got me thinking:

Although majorities of these projects can be skeptical, I must admit many of their missions can be really sexy when you add the term decentralization to them, for example:

• Healthcare + Decentalization
• Traceability + Decentalization
• Payment + Decentalization
• Storage + Decentalization

…

See! When you add the word decentralization, it makes these projects fit in with the ideology of democratization and autonomous governance. But why many of these blockchain projects still failed and vanished into the thin air? My beliefs are that these projects oftentimes conflict with the existing state of politics, technical and infrastructural developments.

When I am talking about politics, I am actually talking about the global political and economical conversations on topics such as data privacy and blockchain decentralization. If you think for one second countries are handing over their surveillance for your data back to you and letting you make your own choices, then you better think again. So will countries just neglect blockchain completely? Well, at least I don’t think so. The main reason is that blockchain has proven itself to be a much more efficient tool in some cases, and when used correctly, it can be a shifty upgrade rather than a costly downgrade. That is why you are seeing time and time again the discussion around blockchain on a national level is never about “how do we get rid of it”? But rather “how can we co-exist?” This is going to be a very long conversation depending on different nations. But for the time being, this is probably one of the reasons why it is super hard to integrate blockchain into existing functional infrastructures.

We are living through the “dial-up” era of blockchain. There should not be a debate around this topic what-so-ever. The fact that I need to pay a $100 gas fee to transfer $300 worth of ETH, the fact that when the network takes more than 3 hours to complete a single transaction and the fact that some of the biggest applications in the blockchain with the most use cases are NFT gaming and scammy Defi projects are just hilarious. The point is, we saw this type of hyper-excitement around the.com era. People are exploring with a limited amount of resources and infrastructure to build unbelievable amazing stuff.

So if the political environment, technical and infrastructural developments are not mature. Would this just mean that we should just give up our hopes about blockchain as a whole and let our leaders decide on when we can implement blockchain into our society? The answer is no, the so-called “blockchain revolution” has already begun, and it is unstoppable. Bitcoin has stored over more than $1.08 trillion and nearly $50 billion are locked up in Defi projects at the time of this post. So my recommendation for those of you who have an innovative idea about blockchain integration is to be bold and just go for it, the regulatory system and the technical infrastructure will need to be able to adapt to this new industry and learn to co-exist in a semi-centralized fashion.