Does blockchain have any good to give to the world?

The software developer had a complaint. 

A longtime Technical.ly reader, he recently came up to tell me that hosting a “Web3” tech talk was giving a platform to outright scammers. Anyone talking about cryptocurrency, NFTs or blockchain, he said, was either delusional or peddling quackery. 

What a fall from our 2018 developers conference, when each of multiple sessions dedicated to building on the blockchain drew hundreds of attendees. In spring 2022, 100 NFT boosters gathered in to talk about digital art collections featuring “bored apes” that were temporarily worth millions. 

NFTs are now effectively worthless and a crypto-enthusiastic Trump administration has coincided with plummeting cryptocurrency prices. All of this is built on the same underlying technology. Are we done with it yet?

“Blockchain has gotten a reputation over the last 10 years,” said Karla Ballard, the social entrepreneur Technical.ly first profiled in 2022. I interviewed the blockchain-enthused, onetime vice presidential candidate this month because she remains a defender of the technology. “A lot of people hear the word and their eyes roll back, or they feel like someone’s trying to scam them out of money,” she said.

“But there’s so much good we can still do with blockchain.” 

Navigating breakthrough and bluster in a new technology

First developed in the 1990s by cryptographers, the premise of blockchain is relatively simple: to make a transparent timeline of records. The goal was to track when a file was created and whether it had been altered. 

In October 2008, a now legendary white paper was published to a cryptography mailing list under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, proposing a peer-to-peer system that decentralizes that timestamping idea to solve a specific problem: preventing digital money from being spent twice. The paper pointed readers to bitcoin.org, a domain registered a few months earlier, to demonstrate the concept as a distributed ledger paired with a digital currency. 

Blockchain and cryptocurrency have been linked in the popular imagination ever since. Anonymity, emerging technology and financial transactions have always attracted hucksters — and crypto’s purported threat to entrenched interests meant many powerful institutions had reason to further discredit experiments. The highest profile use of this technology has turned off most Americans.

Last year, 3 in 5 Americans had no interest in cryptocurrency, per Gallup. Even with tepid regulatory approval, just 14% of US adults overall own some, with higher rates among young men and conservatives. 

Over the last decade, like other tech news orgs, Technical.ly has tried to navigate the dizzying swings between breakthrough and bluster:

Brooklyn-founded Consensys promised in 2015 the “smart contracts” of Ethereum would “change the world.” Blockchain could reinvigorate Delaware’s financial technology strengths. DC biohackers were using the tech to tackle HIV. In a true marker of the 2010s, a Maryland startup was going to use blockchain to address the banking woes of cannabis companies. Along the way, people opened crypto coworking spaces, developed a Wikipedia alternative and got married on the blockchain.

I personally felt the need to stay familiar with anything we reported on: I bought bits of cryptocurrencies in the 2010s, contributed to a bizarre attempt in 2021 for a so-called “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO, in the lingo) to buy a copy of the US Constitution and, yes, I really did buy an NFT to support an artist. 

No emerging technology is without era-defining foolhardiness. As electricity first entered homes in the 1890s, entrepreneurs sold “electropathic” belts that promised to cure everything from nervous disorders to impotence. In 1896, when automobiles were still rare, investors in Britain floated the Great Horseless Carriage Company, without ever making any cars. In January 2000, the so-called “dot-com Super Bowl” set a high-water mark for internet exuberance when Pets.com spent lavishly to market a service that lost them money. 

Even by these standards, though, blockchain is puzzlingly short on practical uses. Will anyone build something real and durable?

Disentangling from crypto, widely judged as ‘risky’

To be fair, a few serious, established uses of blockchain have reached scale — from the Ethereum Name Service and BlackRock’s tokenized BUIDL fund to the World Food Programme’s Building Blocks aid platform — while stablecoins continue to find traction in cross-border payments and settlement. Karla Ballard is part of a newer wave of entrepreneurs trying to apply the same tools to larger social and economic questions, even as the surrounding ecosystem remains crowded with bluster.

A native of Philadelphia’s Germantown and later a corporate executive now living in southern Delaware, she has traveled through many different social circles. She speaks with warmth and maintains a brand of cross-culture spiritualism infused with elements of afrofuturism and techno-optimism, all of which seems in retreat today. 

“I’ve overcome plenty before,” Ballard told me. She’s a Black woman who proudly navigates divergent worlds, as comfortable speaking with a hard-charging crypto-bro as someone from a disinvested community of color.  

Bridging the two is her focus with HUMN, a startup focused on using blockchain infrastructure to verify work, skills and economic contribution. The vision is a kind of time-banking barter system: Help your neighbors and exchange a digital token. Storing the exchange of value in a community is a timeless human endeavor, and, Ballard says, blockchain is effective. 

Ballard’s claim is narrower than most blockchain evangelists. The problem, she argues, is not that blockchain failed; it’s that cryptocurrency became its public face.

“I’ve been focused on the underlying technology,” Ballard said. “The speculative energy is the currency. What I care about is the infrastructure — what it does.”

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were intended as the best demonstration of the technology. Made ineffective for transactions by volatility, evangelists pushed them as alternative stores of value like gold. 

Instead, a 2022 Bank for International Settlements paper found cryptocurrencies “failed to hedge against inflation” and instead moved closely with risky assets. A 2023 IMF analysis similarly concluded that crypto adoption “has not delivered the promised benefits” for financial stability or inclusion. Meanwhile, enforcement agencies and researchers have documented how crypto markets became fertile ground for fraud, wash trading and retail investor losses.

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Ballard is among the remaining defenders of the promise. She points to her own 2020 vice-presidential run as an example of blockchain’s potential upside. She was among the candidates whose votes were recorded on a blockchain-based system.

“That vote is immutable,” she said. “I can go back right now and see it on the blockchain.”

But election security experts remain deeply skeptical. As Technical.ly has previously reported and another analysis more recently showed, early blockchain voting pilots described the debate as unresolved and contentious.

This tension sits at the heart of blockchain’s credibility problem: Trust in code does not automatically produce trust in systems.

Flipping the script to rebuild blockchain trust

Any honest assessment of blockchain in 2026 must also reckon with who is embracing it. 

Glaring reports that the Trump family is leveraging various crypto schemes to, at best, enrich themselves, or at worse, function as bribery, have further challenged the narrative of blockchain as anti-establishment. Prominent cryptocurrency enthusiasts corresponded regularly with notorious financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

That pattern aligns with broader critiques from economists and policy researchers: Blockchain’s most successful large-scale deployments so far have concentrated wealth, not distributed it. Ballard does not deny that history. She argues that abandoning the technology guarantees that outcome.

“Trust is eroding right now,” she said. “And the trust factor of this technology, when used correctly, is high.”

HUMN reflects Ballard’s attempt to make blockchain do something modest but concrete: record and verify short-term work, skills and collaboration inside trusted networks. That, she hopes, turns social capital into something legible, and potentially portable, across jobs and institutions.

“I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she said. Unusual among blockchain enthusiasts, Ballad is open to certain banking regulations, including so-called “know your customer” and “know your banker” policies. The term “Web3” refers to a philosophy that the internet should be more decentralized, a noble goal that is widely overshadowed by hype and speculation.

“Blockchain has attracted its share of bad actors,” she said. “Ultimately, if more of us do good with these tools, it will last.” 

What if Ballard is more exception than rule? She told me: “Our communities need this too much.”