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.<\/p>\n
Photo by anonymous on\u00a0Pexels<\/a><\/p>\n 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\u200a\u2014\u200aone of the most darling features to the cypherpunk<\/a> movement\u200a\u2014\u200acan 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 \u201cthe blockchain\u201d as a distributed ledger for peer-to-peer cash systems\u200a\u2014\u200aa suffocatingly financial lens with the heavy connotational shackles of monetary transactions.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 dumpers, and celebrity scams. Drowning in this toxic milieu, blockchain\/crypto critics and supporters alike have been perma-chanting and -pining for the fabled \u201ckiller app\u201d: \u201cMainstream adoption won\u2019t happen until there\u2019s a killer app\u201d; \u201cWhen\u2019s the iPhone moment?\u201d; \u201cCrypto is dead if no killer app this cycle\u201d; \u201cWhat\u2019s going to onboard the next billion normies?\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aand 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<\/em>. The killer app has never come because it\u2019s always been\u00a0here.<\/p>\n From a pure coding perspective\u200a\u2014\u200awhich, ironically, is the more human angle here\u200a\u2014\u200athe 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<\/a>, climate record snapshots, world mineral reserves, etc., can all be represented and communicated on the blockchain. Put succinctly, the blockchain provides shared\u00a0state\u00b9<\/em>.<\/p>\n Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on\u00a0Pexels<\/a><\/p>\n This framing is nothing new, yet most people outside the industry remain unaware of it, as it\u2019s underrepresented in the overall industry zeitgeist. Several years ago, Balaji Srinivasan wrote a great (though technically slanted) article<\/a> with shared state front and center, and you\u2019ll find some <\/em>other non-technical state-specific articles, but the financial ledger remains the stickiest, quicksand-like alias and the prime influencer in public consciousness. That\u2019s why today, an unfortunately large percentage of the industry\u2019s brain power is still mired in a gigantic, rotational cash grab. Team after team churns out decentralized exchange copy-pasta\u00b2, 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\u200a\u2014\u200aanother shiny object to take eyes off the ball. This state of affairs reminds me of one<\/a> of my favorite Nine Inch Nails\u00a0songs.<\/p>\n If you look deep enough, people are<\/em> working on exciting non-monetary use cases. Here are several that have a chance to provide billions (perhaps trillions) of dollars in economic benefits:<\/p>\n Electricity trading in microgrids<\/a>Securely sharing healthcare data<\/a> between professionals and facilitiesDecentralized IDs<\/a> (Self-Sovereign Identity)Quadratic Voting \/ Quadratic Funding<\/a> (Can be used for all forms and varieties. Already proven for years in DAO and DeFi governance.)Supply Chain\u00a0Tracing<\/a>Vehicle History, Vehicle-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication<\/a>Combatting AI Deepfakes and Copyright Enforcement<\/a>Medical Attestations (my own idea): Doctors can submit attestations on-chain, endorsing or rebuking specific treatments or drugs. Attestations could be attached to reputations or done so using zero-knowledge proofs, verifying the signer is a doctor but concealing the doctor\u2019s identity. Instead of volleying biased studies that conflict with each other and wasting time and energy arguing on what is misinformation or not, everyone will be able to see doctors\u2019 attestations on-chain. We can all verify if two out of three dentists really do recommend that one toothpaste.<\/p>\n You can hear the VCs and founders\u00a0now:<\/p>\n VC\/founder: \u201cHey bud, hey little guy, these are good ideas and whatever, but here, look at this chart. See how it\u2019s 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?\u201d Too-close-to-home jokes aside, if we trade \u201cdistributed ledger tech\u201d for \u201cshared state tech\u201d 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\u2019ll construct the digital backbone of human coordination.<\/p>\n 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\u200a\u2014\u200atheir 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\u00a0truth.<\/p>\n Image created with\u00a0DALL-E<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s 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\u2019s been here for\u00a0decades.<\/p>\n The distributed ledger evolves into a distributed truth system. On the blockchain, we will build a shared history\u200a\u2014\u200aa shared and constantly tested codex for humanity\u200a\u2014\u200asomething 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\u00a0century.<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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\u2019re 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\u00a0built.<\/p>\n Footnotes:<\/p>\n (If you\u2019re a blockchain pro, feel free to skip this footnote.) <\/em>The \u201cstate\u201d of a blockchain network is the current snapshot of all data stored within the system, accessible by every node. When users sign and send transactions on a distributed ledger blockchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc.), they are effectively sending state changes to a node on the network, which propagates the requested changes to other nodes. Since every node shares the same communication protocol and follows the same logic rules, each node can independently verify these proposed data changes and agree if they are valid or not. The details differ depending on what flavor of blockchain is being used, but after the batch of transactions are propagated through the nodes and consensus is achieved, the batch or \u201cblock\u201d is added to the blockchain of record (sometimes called the \u201ccanonical chain\u201d), and the state is modified for all nodes and users. Coupling this ongoing consensus with the decentralized architecture of a blockchain network, we arrive at the fundamental beauty of shared\u00a0state<\/em>.If you\u2019re a VC or dev, please work on something else besides another DEX or AI agent. There are more DEXes than users on some chains, and the world doesn\u2019t need seven million copies of the same AI agent\u00a0code.<\/p>\n Shared State: Blockchain\u2019s Killer App<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Ledger\u00a0Baggage<\/h4>\n
Humanity\u2019s Digital\u00a0Backbone<\/h4>\n
Dev: \u201cI\u2019m much more interested in building one of these ideas.\u201d
VC\/founder: \u201cWe\u2019ll give you $200k to fork Uniswap and put our little twist on it.\u201d
Dev: \u201cDo you know anyone else who is investing in these ideas?\u201d
VC\/founder: \u201cWe\u2019ll give you $180k to fork Uniswap.\u201d
*Dev tries to find other VC\/founders who want to build non-financial apps. Doesn\u2019t and returns to original VC\/founder.*
Dev: \u201cIs that offer still on the table?\u201d
VC\/founder: \u201cUnfortunately, we overleveraged ourselves and got liquidated, so we can give you $90k to fork Uniswap.\u201d
Dev: \u201cOkay, and then in the bear, can we work on one of these other ideas?\u201d
VC\/founder: \u201cShit, intern didn\u2019t withdraw everything and got liquidated again. We\u2019ll give you $60k to fork Uniswap.\u201d
*Takes\u00a0job.*<\/p>\nDecentralized Truth: A New Primitive<\/h4>\n