Ask HN: Are there any blockchain projects NOT around cryptocurrencies?
It seems that every blockchain related project I see in the wild is always revolving around finance. It's either a coin, exchange, lending platform or DAO for some financial transaction.
This got me wondering. Are there any blockchain projects or products in the wild that use blockchain but are not finance driven.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] threadEdit: Two out of first three words claims that
After few years I am convinced, that anything blockchain/decentralization related must inherently have some monetary incentives flow.
It uses proof of authority
https://www.hyperledger.org
Anything else is just an append only Merkle tree, which has found used for 50 years
- Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon.
- Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way.
- ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system.
- Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc.
- Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially.
- Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
There's a whole ecosystem of apps that use smart contract chains as a trustless/decentralized/distributed compute and storage layer, and use "cryptoeconomics" to incentivize user behavior toward a goal that isn't money-based. It's just far less mature (and noisy) as all the finance stuff, so anyone not actively building in the space isn't seeing most of it today!