My view on blockchain has changed

Author: Lawyer Liu Honglin

I have a slightly different perspective on the understanding of blockchain.

We have been envisioning blockchain as the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet, discussing it as a technology or application that changes production relationships. However, I think this might be overly grand. From a temporal perspective, the realization of this technology may take decades or even centuries; each generation has its own challenges, and we cannot be preoccupied with the affairs of future generations.

1. Cognitive Misalignment: The Long Cycle of Technological Evolution and Short-term Anxiety

At this moment, blockchain technology has only been around for a little over a decade—since the release of the white paper, it has only been from 2008 to now. While we are doubting, questioning, and worrying about the application value of blockchain, I personally feel that such concerns are not very meaningful.

The reason is that, within our generation's entire time cycle, the application value and popularization speed of blockchain are unlikely to be as fast as we imagine. It is similar to when the internet or computers were just born; the first generation of entrepreneurs and internet practitioners found it hard to imagine that today we can use the internet to hail a taxi, watch videos, or make instant payments. At that time, people only thought of the internet as a cutting-edge technology that could send and receive information, browse news, and read e-books.

Therefore, it is not that we doubt the real value of blockchain, but rather that from a historical and temporal dimension, the application of blockchain into the lives of ordinary people, or achieving large-scale application, still has a long way to go. Many people's anxiety about blockchain today essentially compresses a technological evolution cycle of ten years or even longer into a three to five-year expectation, which itself leads to cognitive misalignment and anxiety.

2. Good Steel Used on the Cutting Edge: Focusing on Fintech

The application of blockchain technology at this stage is definitely good steel used on the cutting edge.

Some characteristics of blockchain technology, such as tamper-proof, decentralized accounting, traceability, and its inherent financial attributes, I believe will likely be limited to the fintech field in the next ten or even twenty years. For example:

• Currency Payments: Whether it is stablecoin payments or large-value transfer tools represented by btc-42">Bitcoin.

• On-chain Traditional Financial Markets: Including the on-chaining of assets such as securities, funds, and bonds (RWA).

I have worked on internet products for several years and led product research teams, and I consider myself an entrepreneur in the mobile internet space. This experience gives me an intuitive judgment: If a technology or application does not provide a tenfold improvement compared to traditional methods, it is not a breakthrough or disruptive innovation. In the past year, I have experienced two things that make me believe that blockchain in the financial sector could indeed provide tenfold or even hundredfold improvements.

1. The Efficiency Gap in Cross-border Payments

The first experience is when I previously tried to transfer money from a mainland bank card to overseas.

• Traditional Method: Subject to foreign exchange management system limits; must go to an offline bank counter to submit personal materials; fees can reach hundreds of RMB; the time cost is extremely high. This is a result of the SWIFT network and the multi-tiered agency mechanism—each layer of institutions adds time and costs.

• Blockchain Method: In the current crypto payments of 2026, using USDT or other stablecoins, the fees are generally between $0.01 and $0.1, and the arrival speed takes only a few seconds to a minute.

Conducting cross-border fund transfers within a legal and compliant framework has seen efficiency improvements of tenfold to a hundredfold. This improvement is not theoretical; it is something any real user can directly feel.

2. The Slowness of Securities Trading Settlement

The second experience just happened last night. Recently, the Nasdaq index (QQQ) surged, and I opened my securities account on Saturday to sell:

• Traditional Method: The system shows that I will have to wait until next Wednesday to know how much I sold for. Coincidentally, with the May Day holiday, the earliest I can withdraw the money is May 8. It takes over ten days from trading to fund recovery. For users accustomed to instant feedback from the internet, this delay is very counterintuitive.

• Blockchain Method (RWA): The "on-chain US stocks" or RWA assets that began to explode in 2025 allow for 7×24 hours of instant trading, theoretically enabling on-chain settlement and asset synchronous delivery.

Although issues like on-chain anti-money laundering, KYC, and regulatory concerns have not been fully resolved, from a compliance business perspective, these can be confirmed and resolved through technology and systems. The tokenization of US stocks or global financial assets is an inevitable trend in the blockchain world.

3. Blockchain: The Elephant in the Room

The reason traditional financial institutions are limited in efficiency is due to the presence of numerous intermediaries, centralized service institutions, and the need for repeated reviews, reconciliations, and confirmations in data transaction processes through technology and manpower.

Blockchain is referred to as the "value internet," and its technical characteristics allow for the circulation of value, rights confirmation, and fund settlement to be completed within a unified ledger system, significantly reducing intermediaries and improving efficiency and transparency.

From this perspective:

1. Tangible Value: Blockchain has practical social value application scenarios and demands in fintech, creating efficiency improvements of over ten times.

2. Future Trends: The application of this technology should ideally have no national boundaries. Whoever can truly embrace blockchain quickly, put traditional financial securities on-chain, significantly enhance trading and settlement efficiency, and achieve high-frequency trading capabilities 7×24 hours in the future will have a highly certain future.

In the current relatively inefficient traditional financial system, blockchain is no longer a "concept of storytelling," but a tool that is genuinely creating efficiency and genuinely changing user experiences.

We may not care whether blockchain can become the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet, but it is clear that at this stage, in the financial sector, it has become a visible and continuously amplifying "elephant in the room."