Quick note: I won’t be back in your inbox till w/c 19th December as I’ll be in Mexico for the Sandbox Global Summit. Excited to hang around with like-minded people for a week and travel with friends - will share some snaps in the next newsletter!

Due to a busy December, I’ve been cramming in some friend catchups over the past couple of weeks.

More than once, I’ve been asked about how my crypto is doing *crying*.

After I’m done wiping my tears, I’m then asked a question around ‘apart from meme coins and going to the moon, what are some actual use cases?’. This is justified, as there have been few use cases that have made it to a mainstream audience.

Of course, the newsletter Gods heard me and presented me with this article - 34 Blockchain Applications To Know in 2022.

I decided to choose three to tell you about from this list - this could even be an ad-hoc series (similar to when I dive deep into a company profile, or when I summarize a list of interesting companies at a demo day).

Anyway, let’s get into the list and see who makes our inaugural list of three.

1. Money Transfer

I’d be remiss not to put money transfer and DeFi (“decentralized finance”) at the top of the list.

DeFi is essentially peer-to-peer financial services on public blockchains.

With DeFi, you can do everything you can do with a bank (earn interest, borrow, lend, buy insurance and more) but it’s faster and doesn’t require paperwork or a bank to facilitate the transaction.

DeFi is global, peer-to-peer and permissionless (anyone can participate).

It’s essentially a digital alternative to Wall Street, but without the costs (office towers, trading floors, people to manage the money etc).

What can you do with DeFi?:

• Lending: Lend your crypto and earn interest and rewards every minute

• Getting a loan: Obtain a loan instantly without filling in paperwork (sounds scammy but you gotta put up some collateral, and if the value decreases you get liquidated immediately)

• Saving: Put some crypto into savings account alternatives and earn better interest rates than you’d typically get from a bank.

What are the downsides?:

• This is all new-age stuff - this can be off-putting and not have the easiest UX for anyone to understand what to do or how this works.

• Rug-pulls happen - things can go wrong! There are a lot of scammy operators out there and it’s not the easiest landscape to navigate - we need to do better to make it easier for people to know how they can enter the DeFi playground, safely.

• Tax - It’s a b*tch wherever you are and whatever system you partake in, it’s just harder to keep track of while in DeFi land.

2. Property Ownership

Smart contracts are the new in-thing.

They’re just like regular contracts, except the rules of the contract are enforced by code, on the blockchain. This eliminates the need for humans or a middleman to manage the process. This saves businesses time and money, while also ensuring compliance from everyone involved.

Let’s take an example of property ownership - instead of having a title registry hidden away in a central institution or being susceptible to a form of fraud, this lives on the blockchain. This also becomes easily transferable, as you can verify ownership and reduce any legal loopholes.

3. Blockchain in Government

One of the most groundbreaking applications was found in the form of the public sector.

Some state governments like Illinois are already using the technology to secure government documents, but the blockchain can also improve bureaucratic efficiency, accountability and reduce massive financial burdens on already-constrained public offices.

The blockchain has the potential to cut through millions of hours of red tape every year, hold public officials accountable through smart contracts and provide transparency by recording a public record of all activity.

Blockchain may also revolutionize our elections. Blockchain-based voting could improve civic engagement by providing a level of security and incorruptibility that allows voting to be done on mobile devices.

One company that stands out is Follow My Vote. It’s a secure online voting platform using an open-source virtual ballot box.

You can essentially avoid physical ballots and vote via any device.

One of the challenges to blockchain-based voting is having your vote public to everyone (on the blockchain!) - Follow My Vote implements a range of different tools to provide safety and confidence in the voting process, as well as reduce the likelihood of ballots getting lost or being mishandled (which is common in many developing countries).

Conclusion:

More and more use cases are coming up every day - soon, we’ll start seeing the blockchain entering every industry.

While the benefits are apparent, it’s also important to exercise a word of caution. We’re early enough, whereby major fires are still happening most of the time and once-credible institutions are going under.

Be careful out there.

🔗 Links Of The Week

🤯 The rise of the Jasper Empire

Jasper is one of the companies leading the Generative AI charge right now - this is a fascinating insight to their origins and how they’ve grown so fast.

📕 Learning to Live

Six stories to change your perspective - I particularly liked “Your Appearance Matters More Than You Think” & “Never Settle” (this last one was about relationships).

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

As mentioned at the start, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off for my Mexico trip and then be back with an edition on the w/c 19th December for a year round-up, before the Xmas holidays.

Got feedback? Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Fahim