Finance Is the Only Legible Use Case for Blockchain—And Here's Why Everyone Got It Wrong

I've watched the blockchain industry chase its tail for a decade.

Every year, the same pattern repeats. New conference. New slide deck. New breathless promise about how blockchain will revolutionize [insert industry here]. Medical records on-chain. Supply chain tracking. Voting systems. Land registries. Digital identity. Education credentials.

You've heard them all. Maybe you've even pitched a few.

They all failed. Not because the technology was wrong. Because the problem was wrong.

And until the industry accepts this uncomfortable truth, we're doomed to another decade of pilot projects that go nowhere, proofs-of-concept that never scale, and "enterprise blockchain solutions" that are really just expensive databases with extra steps.

The Blockchain-for-Everything Delusion

Let me paint a picture you've probably seen before.

A well-funded startup appears at a blockchain conference. They've got impressive advisors. Glossy pitch decks. Maybe some Fortune 500 partnerships "in discussion." They're putting medical records on-chain to solve healthcare interoperability. Or tracking coffee beans from farm to cup. Or creating an immutable voting system that will restore faith in democracy.

The presentation always follows the same script: "Current system is broken → Blockchain provides transparency → Problem solved."

Three years later, that startup is either pivoted into something else entirely or dead. The pilot program with the major hospital system never materialized. The supply chain solution couldn't get past the first retailer. The voting system is still waiting for regulatory approval that will never come.

This isn't a technology failure. This is a problem-selection failure.

The Three-Test Framework Nobody Uses

Here's what the "blockchain everything" crowd fundamentally never understood: You need three specific conditions for blockchain to actually matter. Not two. Not "close enough." All three.

First: Multiple actors coordinating across trust boundaries.

If your participants already trust each other, or if trust can be established through existing institutional relationships, you don't need blockchain. You need a database and maybe a legal agreement.

Medical records? Hospitals within the same healthcare network trust each other just fine. They share records every day. The binding constraint isn't transparency or trust—it's interoperability standards. It's data formatting. It's the fact that Epic and Cerner and every other EHR vendor have no incentive to play nice with each other. Adding blockchain to this mix solves exactly nothing.

Second: Incentive alignment that tokens can enforce.

This is the test that kills most use cases immediately. Blockchain can create transparency, sure. But transparency doesn't eliminate the incentive to lie—it just makes the lie more visible.

Supply chain tracking is the poster child for this failure. Yes, you can put "organic certified" or "conflict-free" on-chain. But who's verifying the data at the point of entry? If I'm a corrupt supplier with an incentive to lie about where my goods came from, that incentive doesn't magically disappear because you gave me a blockchain interface instead of a spreadsheet. Garbage in, garbage out—just with more computational overhead.

Third: Opacity as the actual problem you're solving.

Not inefficiency. Not convenience. Not "disruption." Opacity. The inability to see what's actually happening.

If the core problem is that your system is slow, blockchain probably makes it slower. If the problem is that it's expensive, blockchain probably makes it more expensive. If the problem is that nobody can trust what they're seeing—now we're talking.

Finance Passes All Three Tests

Let's run finance through this framework.

Multiple actors across trust boundaries? Absolutely. Banks don't trust each other. They never have. That's not pessimism—it's institutional design. That's why we have correspondent banking: layers upon layers of intermediaries whose entire job is to verify what should be simple transfers. That's why cross-border payments take days and cost a fortune. That's why settlement times exist.

Incentive alignment through tokens? Check. In finance, the incentive IS the asset. You don't need external verification that someone is holding up their end of the bargain—the token represents the bargain. Smart contracts don't work for tracking coffee beans because coffee beans exist in the physical world and someone still needs to verify their quality and location. But financial assets? They're already digital. They're already abstract. The token can BE the thing, not just a representation of the thing.

Opacity as the core problem? This is the killer argument. Opacity is literally what breaks financial systems. Go through the history of financial crises, frauds, and systemic failures. 2008? Opacity around mortgage-backed securities and who was holding what risk. Enron? Opacity through special purpose vehicles. FTX? Opacity about where customer funds actually were.

Every single one traces back to someone successfully hiding something from someone else. Information asymmetry isn't a bug in financial systems—it's historically been a feature that certain actors exploit for profit.

Blockchain eliminates that feature. And in finance, eliminating that feature actually matters.

The Filter That Should Have Been Applied All Along

So here's the mental model that saves everyone time, money, and disappointment:

Stop asking "what can blockchain do?"

Start asking "what coordination problems require transparency AND incentive alignment?"

This simple filter eliminates approximately 90% of proposed blockchain use cases immediately. No more supply chain theater where you're just creating an auditable trail of lies. No more healthcare vaporware that ignores the actual regulatory and institutional barriers to data sharing. No more solutions desperately searching for problems.

What remains after applying this filter? Mostly finance. Maybe a few edge cases around digital assets and tokenized ownership. But the massive, obvious, staring-us-in-the-face use case is finance.

We've Been Pointing a Good Technology at Bad Targets

The frustrating part? The technology works. Blockchain isn't vaporware. The cryptography is sound. The distributed consensus mechanisms function. We've proven the technology can operate at scale—at least for financial applications.

We've just spent a decade pointing this working technology at problems it was never designed to solve.

It's like using a microscope to hammer nails. The microscope isn't broken. You're just using it wrong, and then declaring that microscopes don't work because your nails aren't going into the wood.

Blockchain doesn't solve data problems. It solves trust problems.

And trust problems—the real, expensive, systemic kind that actually break things when they fail—live primarily in finance.

What This Means Going Forward

If you're building in the blockchain space, this should be liberating. Stop trying to wedge your technology into industries where trust already exists or where transparency doesn't solve the core problem. Stop trying to convince healthcare administrators or supply chain managers that they need a solution they demonstrably don't need.

Focus on finance. Focus on the coordination problems between entities that don't trust each other, will never trust each other, and shouldn't have to trust each other. Focus on making financial infrastructure more transparent, efficient, and resistant to the opacity that historically causes catastrophic failures.

That's a big enough problem to solve. That's a real enough problem to solve.

And unlike medical records on-chain or blockchain voting, it's a problem where the technology actually fits.

The blockchain industry doesn't need more imagination about what could theoretically be put on-chain. It needs more discipline about what should actually be put on-chain.

Finance passes the test. Almost nothing else does.

Stop pretending otherwise.