Practice · 2017–2023 · Platform Wars
Blockchain for CRUD
Distributed consensus for problems that needed a database and an audit log.
Blockchain-for-CRUD failed because immutable ledgers fight GDPR, throughput, and basic product iteration. Tokens incentivized demos, not maintainers. Postgres plus an audit table wins every time the CFO asks why.
Cost of the fad
Enterprises funded "innovation labs" to put loyalty points and supply-chain spreadsheets on ledgers. Most pilots ended as slide decks; the gas fees and audits did not.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
Frameworks fought for the runtime
Front-end frameworks consolidated power; TypeScript became table stakes; Next and friends absorbed routing, data, and deploy gravity. Serverless and Jamstack rebranded old ideas with better CDNs, then cooled when auth and personalization refused to stay static. Blockchain-for-CRUD and big-bang rewrites collected dumb budgets. The winners were boring platforms with ecosystems — React gravity, Rust where systems care, Vite for greenfield bundling. The losers were narratives that skipped product-market fit or treated every App Router rewrite as destiny.