Vitalik Buterin Shares His Thoughts on Blockchain Non-Financial Use Cases

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and Bitcoin Magazine, shared his thoughts on non-financial use cases of blockchain technology on Twitter.

In a paper titled "Where is blockchain used in non-financial applications?" In the article, Buterin expressed growing interest in using blockchain technology outside of the financial industry. He noted that while other industries have been slow to adopt blockchain technology, he can "see the value of blockchain in many situations."

Distributed ledger technology can help achieve "really important goals like trust and censorship resistance, but sometimes it's purely about convenience," he said. In the article, he says "blockchain as data storage" is in the grand scheme of things. Potentially so important, he hopes they will be used for "cheap and reliable data retrieval".

Another potential use case discussed was open source metrics — a concept still in its infancy that measures diversity and decentralization.

“An ideal voting mechanism would somehow allow for diversity, giving to projects not only backed by the largest number of tokens and even people, but by the largest number of genuinely diverse viewpoints.”

Vitalik concluded his article by saying: “I’m largely unsure how meaningful the level of non-financial blockchain usage in these categories really is, but it seems clear that blockchain as an enabling tool should not be overlooked. "

Ethereum 2.0 is still here, and with it comes the network transition to proof-of-stake. The upgrade has been delayed several times and was recently successfully released on Ethereum's Ropsten testnet. Representatives of the project recently stated that they hope to upgrade to the mainnet by August 2022.