My thoughts on the state of the blockchain spaceI was asked to answer several questions for a media feature, but the article was unfortunately shelved, and I didn’t want my responses to go to waste :)I realized while answering these questions, that this was the first time I publicly talked about blockchain really “high-level” — even though it’s something I think about a lot — so I thought it would be a good opportunity to share these “bird’s-eye view” thoughts on my blog (where I tend towards talking more low-level about technical blockchain-related things).So, here are my warm & hot takes on blockchain, as they stand presently.In general, there are many institutional processes in our world that rely on numerous trusted intermediaries & middlemen. It’s truly unfathomable what kinds of cost savings would result by removing all of this friction by relegating these outdated processes to a trustless peer-to-peer network.The financial applications of blockchain are well-exemplified by existing networks like Bitcoin and application ecosystems like DeFi (Decentralized Finance) on the Ethereum network. These use cases are still in their relatively early stages, but show tremendous progress and further potential.Now, beyond financial applications, the most interesting use cases with the most immediate potential, in my opinion, are: insurance, prediction markets, organizational management & coordination, and dispute resolution. Some existing projects addressing these use cases do exist, however they are still very much in their infancy, even compared to DeFi.I’ll give a concrete list:Transparency. All financial transactions are visible on the blockchain. For example: if stocks were issued on the blockchain, you wouldn’t need to guess how much short interest a given stock has (sound familiar?); it would be directly visible to anyone with access to blockchain data (which anyone can do by simply running a node on their computer).Openly auditable financial…