Blockchain: a Superpower Short on Purpose

An open letter to the blockchain tech community

November 30, 2022

Blockchain tech has a brand problem, and its advances can’t seem to keep up with its setbacks. Blockchain is so much bigger than crypto trading. Even crypto is so much bigger than crypto trading. And yet the latter is souring the world on blockchain as a whole. As a change-maker who has dedicated my career to solving some of the world’s most stubborn problems, I am heartbroken and angry about this.

Imagine Zoom-pitching an amazing solution to somebody with horrific reception. That’s me and countless other blockchain advocates trying to get through to a world that the blockchain community itself has given every reason not to listen.

So that we can get to the point: while speculation has existed forever and made many people rich, it does not create value. Dealing with crypto’s collapse, people are mourning their cash, the hope of being able to make more, and the fall of another admired personality. Some are acknowledging the negative impact from the loss of philanthropic donations by those who make money on crypto trading. What people are not mourning is problems that now may not get solved or possibilities that may never get unlocked. Not even to the degree they mourned Theranos! They are not mourning this because they don’t know to. After all, you have not shown them what you have shown me.

• If evidence of expertise were logged on the blockchain, involuntarily displaced world-class surgeons would be saving lives within our understaffed healthcare system, not driving car-share.

• Climate change will continue to multiply the millions displaced by conflict. Having failed to deploy blockchain tech to ledger personal and real estate property, we have left those people no better chance of reclaiming their property than Holocaust survivors had. And that was 80 years ago.

• Addressing climate change requires active local energy markets and a seamless integration of distributed energy resources onto the grid. Those require blockchain tech to trace, track, and trade energy. Platforms like Powerledger.io are up to the task and have been punching above their weight. Setbacks they incur due to blockchain’s brand problem will have direct negative climate consequences.

• As of 5 years ago, there were an estimated 1.7 billion “unbanked” adults. That means that globally, 1 in 5 of us does not have access to credit, let alone Zelle. If even 10% of them prove no less eager or qualified than you and I, that is 170 million people that blockchain tech could unleash into the global economy, and with an impact far greater than any economic instrument on the table today.

• Sticking with the logic: if even 10% of today’s 4.8 million trafficked women and girls could escape the hell of being raped at 30-minute intervals should they not depend on the piece of paper called “passport”, that would be 480,000 people reclaiming a chance at hope for a life we take for granted.

In my book, every inch of ground that blockchain tech loses because of the crypto collapse means unnecessary and avoidable suffering.

I beg the leaders passionate about the promise of blockchain technology to intervene and commence what will, no doubt, be a taxing journey to public trust and a shared vision.

Remember the movie Hancock? Will Smith’s character started off using his superpower to facilitate his drunkard life, and we cringed. Like other superheroes, he did not choose his superpower, and yet his story was defined by how he chose to use it. 

I have come to view blockchain technology as a superpower like no other. Fueled by some of the world’s brightest minds, it has evolved for the internet the way that smartphones have merged our physical and virtual experience. Through a superior way of transacting and recording value, blockchain offers efficiency and transparency unimaginable of even the best centralized systems. And yet there are multiple full-service platforms ready to render a pic of my left toe into an NFT while the promised solutions to the real-world problems remain largely at the concept stage.

The world’s knees are wobbling under some bone-breaking loads. The world is pleading for the help that blockchain tech is often uniquely able to offer. Still, while getting ready to speak (on the role of blockchain in sustainability and the green economy) at my last blockchain conference, I walked among too many of the world’s brightest minds seemingly content with building tech for tech’s sake; with trading their superpower in for beer, grub, and a pat on the ego.

Just weeks later, we find ourselves here.

The blockchain tech community has a choice to make.

1. Continue as is and allow most of your superpower to be used frivolously and wait for the court of public opinion to write blockchain tech off completely.

2. Get it together. Get behind those like the Global Blockchain Business Council promoting the genuine value that this tech can bring to the world. Put money behind disowning what has been bad for the brand and – even more importantly – behind those amongst you claiming blockchain for good. You are brilliant, so trust yourselves to find ways to make money and have fun while focusing on what truly matters. And find the humility to shed the jargon: while its walls make you feel like you belong, they act like an echo chamber. What’s more, they look like a creepy castle to everybody you need to bring in if blockchain is to catalyze the wholesale systems change enjoyed by electricity, elevators/lifts, the internet, and smartphones.

The power at your fingertips is beyond my grasp. If you aren’t going to own it, please put people like me out of our misery to fetch hope elsewhere. Otherwise, recognize your power, claim all of us as your movement, and get audacious: just as it can be squandered, superpower often grows with the heros’ resolve.