In a recently published interview with a respected media outlet, crypto savant and co-Founder of the Ethereum ecosystem, Vitalik Buterin, was quoted as saying that the misapplication of blockchain technology within certain industries is leading to a lot of wasted time and energy (for all of the involved parties).

In addition to this, Buterin also stated that while many companies are trying to establish more transparent operational frameworks for their businesses (using blockchain), the technology is not really applicable across every industrial domain.

Elaborating further on this stance of his, Buterin stated:

“Sometimes it is for marketing hype. Sometimes it is just people who are genuinely excited about blockchains and want the thing they are personally excited about and their job to align more with each other, which is a totally legitimate, human thing to want to do.”

Talking about the various industrial sectors where Buterin thinks blockchain can be best implemented, he instantly replied ‘cryptocurrencies and cross-border payments’.

He then went on to mention:

“All of the other ideas — whether we’re talking about products or the self-sovereign identity stuff — that’s clearly something that still needs much more time to be worked out before we can see [whether it] makes sense at scale. They [blockchains] definitely don’t provide 100 percent guarantees of things, especially in the real world,”

Following this statement, Buterin then went on to criticize multinational corporations such as IBM for trying to monopolize the crypto ecosystem.

“I don’t understand this deeply, but the detail that jumped out at me is they’re saying ‘Hey, we own all the IP and this is basically our platform and you’re getting on it.’ And like, that’s… totally not the point….”

With that being said, Buterin did acknowledge that IBM’s blockchain-based food tracking system did have a lot of “intrinsic potential value”.

In rounding out his interview, Vitalik stated that he is really into the idea of using blockchain for non-financial applications such as “authenticating university degrees” ( something that has already been implemented in Singapore). When using such a system, a university has the ability to ”digitally issue education certificates on a proprietary blockchain network”– thus eliminating chances of fraud and allowing for more streamlined job application processes.

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