Top Blockchain Non-Financial Applications According to Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been quite vocal recently about the non-financial applications of blockchain technology and has published a paper on June 12 listing some use cases.
In a paper titled “Where to use a blockchain in non-financial applications,” in the first place, the Ethereum mastermind said one of the biggest challenges in a cryptographic account system is the issue of private key changes.
He argued that a use case of blockchain can be in "user account key changes and recovery."
Per Buterin, the “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc) paper he co-authored, which explores the idea of non-transferable Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), suggests "to preserve non-transferability, social recovery (or "community recovery") of profiles" that can solve this issue.
A second use case for blockchain can be in "modifying and revoking attestations." Buterin claims that issuing a digital record completely off-chain or on-chain using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would make it hard to modify and revoke when the need arises.
"So instead we can go with a hybrid solution: make initial degree an off-chain signed message, and do revocations on-chain," he said.
He also noted that this is the approach that is already used by OpenCerts, a blockchain platform that generates cryptographic protections for educational credentials.
Another example of where blockchains are valuable in non-financial stances is in "committing to scarcity." In simple terms, blockchains can be used to identify whether an attestation has a provably limited quantity or not, which can then affect the effectiveness of that attestation - i.e., the more limited, the more valuable.
Blockchains are also powerful since they create "common knowledge," meaning they can enable
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