Crypto For Good Claims

A Systematic Assessment of “Crypto for Good”: From Utopian Claims to Practical Realities

Section 1: Introduction - Deconstructing the “Crypto for Good” Narrative

1.1 Context: The Dichotomy of Promise and Peril

Blockchain and its associated technologies, collectively known as “crypto” or “Web3,” are frequently presented through a dichotomous lens. Proponents herald it as a paradigm-shifting force for social progress, offering novel solutions to complex global challenges like financial exclusion, corruption, and inefficient governance.1 In this narrative, the technology’s inherent transparency, decentralization, and efficiency can empower the marginalized and build more equitable systems. Conversely, critics highlight the ecosystem’s high volatility, significant environmental impact from certain consensus mechanisms, lack of regulation, and its use in illicit financing.3

This report moves beyond this simplified binary. Its objective is to conduct a rigorous, evidence-based analysis of the specific, tangible claims made under the “crypto for good” banner. By systematically deconstructing these claims, this assessment aims to separate viable applications from speculative hype, providing a clear-eyed view of where the technology might offer genuine, unique value for social impact and where it falls short.

1.2 Methodological Framework

To ensure analytical rigor, this report employs a four-stage framework to evaluate each “crypto for good” claim identified within the corpus of research.

1. Compilation and Categorization: The first step involves a comprehensive survey of the existing landscape to identify and catalogue the various social-good claims. These claims are then organized into a coherent taxonomy based on their primary social objective, such as financial inclusion or anti-corruption.
2. Formalization: Each claim, often presented in aspirational or ambiguous terms, is deconstructed into its essential components. This formalization process makes implicit assumptions explicit by identifying: (1) the specific problem the claim purports to solve, (2) the technological affordance (i.e., the specific capability of the technology being used), and (3) the core Web3 primitive that enables this affordance. This moves the analysis from marketing language to a technically precise definition.
3. Veracity Assessment: Following formalization, each claim is assessed and sorted into one of three categories, based on a consistent set of criteria:
   • Bunk: The claim is technically unfounded, logically incoherent, or contradicted by empirical evidence. The proposed solution does not or cannot function as described.
   • Inefficient: The claim is technically valid, but the problem can be solved as well or better using simpler, more mature, and less costly non-crypto technologies. The use of blockchain introduces unnecessary complexity without a commensurate, unique benefit.
   • Legitimate: The technology offers a uniquely powerful and demonstrably superior solution to the problem that cannot be replicated effectively with conventional, centralized tools. The core properties of decentralization and immutability are not just features but necessary requirements for the solution’s success.

1.3 Defining Core Web3 Primitives

Understanding the claims requires a foundational knowledge of the core technological components—the “primitives”—upon which they are built. Many seemingly distinct applications are, in fact, variations on a small set of these fundamental building blocks. The success or failure of a social impact project is often determined not by its user-facing design, but by the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the underlying primitive it relies upon.

• Distributed Ledgers (Blockchains): At the base layer is the blockchain, a digital database or ledger that is distributed across a network of computers. Its key properties are decentralization (no single entity is in control), immutability (once a record is added, it is extremely difficult to alter or delete), and transparency (participants can view the ledger’s history).5 This forms the foundation of trust in the system.
• Smart Contracts: These are self-executing programs stored on a blockchain with the terms of an agreement directly written into code.7 They automatically execute predefined actions when specific conditions are met, functioning as the automated “business logic” layer for decentralized applications without the need for an intermediary.9
• Digital Assets (Tokens/Cryptocurrencies): These are units of value recorded on a blockchain. They are critical for understanding different use cases:
  • Cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) are volatile digital assets used for value transfer.
  • Stablecoins (e.g., USDC) are tokens designed to maintain a stable value by being pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. They are crucial for financial applications where stability is required.10
  • Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets representing ownership of a specific item or piece of content, increasingly used in philanthropic fundraising.12
• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): A DAO is an organizational structure where rules and governance are encoded in smart contracts and executed on a blockchain. Decisions are typically made collectively by members who hold governance tokens, which grant them voting power on proposals concerning the organization’s treasury and future direction.14
• Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (e.g., Zero-Knowledge Proofs): Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are a cryptographic method that allows one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself.16 This primitive is fundamental to claims involving privacy, such as verifying one’s age without revealing a birthdate or proving eligibility for aid without disclosing sensitive personal data.16

Section 2: A Taxonomy of “Crypto for Good” Applications

This section compiles and categorizes the spectrum of claims made about the use of blockchain technology for social and environmental impact, as identified in the research.

2.1 Economic Empowerment and Financial Inclusion

• Claim: Provide banking services to the 1.4 billion unbanked and underbanked adults globally via digital wallets accessible with a smartphone and internet.19
• Claim: Dramatically reduce the cost (from 5-10% to under 1%) and increase the speed (from days to minutes) of cross-border remittances for migrant workers and their families.20
• Claim: Offer a reliable store of value and hedge against hyperinflation in countries with unstable economies through the use of fiat-pegged stablecoins.10
• Claim: Enable decentralized microfinance and peer-to-peer lending platforms that operate without requiring traditional credit scores or banking relationships, democratizing access to capital.19
• Claim: Create community-powered economies, such as marketplaces for artisans, that use tokens to reward meaningful participation, support, and loyalty, distributing value more equitably among creators and consumers.23

2.2 Enhancing Transparency and Anti-Corruption

• Claim: Ensure the provenance and ethical sourcing of goods in complex supply chains, tracking items like conflict-free minerals, pharmaceuticals, and food products from origin to consumer to combat fraud and human rights abuses.24
• Claim: Provide end-to-end transparent and publicly auditable tracking of charitable donations and humanitarian aid, allowing donors to verify that funds reached their intended beneficiaries.1
• Claim: Create immutable, tamper-proof records of critical events for accountability purposes, such as documenting war crimes or human rights violations.24
• Claim: Improve the transparency and trustworthiness of voting and governance systems within non-profit organizations by recording decisions on an unchangeable public ledger.1

2.3 Reimagining Governance and Collective Action

• Claim: Enable new forms of decentralized, community-led funding for public goods, open-source software, and social impact projects through DAOs.14
• Claim: Facilitate rapid, borderless, and transparent collective action and philanthropy in response to crises, as exemplified by initiatives like UkraineDAO, which raised millions for humanitarian relief.3
• Claim: Pioneer new models for non-profit governance that are more democratic, transparent, and directly driven by stakeholders rather than a centralized board.12

2.4 Individual Sovereignty and Rights

• Claim: Provide secure, portable, and self-sovereign digital identities for marginalized populations, such as refugees, who lack formal documentation, enabling access to essential services.1
• Claim: Enhance user privacy and data protection by allowing individuals to verify attributes (e.g., age, nationality) without revealing sensitive underlying personal data, using technologies like ZKPs.10
• Claim: Offer a censorship-resistant financial system that protects individuals from de-platforming and asset seizure in authoritarian regimes.3

2.5 Novel Incentive Models for Social and Environmental Action

• Claim: Incentivize pro-environmental behaviors by rewarding individuals with digital tokens for actions such as cleaning up plastic pollution from shorelines.24
• Claim: Create the world’s first truly global and transparent carbon marketplace to combat climate change.3
• Claim: Reward a wide range of positive community contributions and civic actions with tokens, creating a digital record of social good.24

Section 3: Technical Deconstruction and Veracity Assessment

This section provides the core analysis of the report, systematically evaluating the key claims identified in Section 2. The analysis begins with a comprehensive summary table that encapsulates the findings for each claim, followed by detailed justifications for the veracity assessments.

Table 1: Comprehensive Analysis of “Crypto for Good” Claims

Category	Claim	Problem Statement	Technological Affordance	Core Web3 Primitive(s)	Veracity Rating	Key Justification/Critique
Financial Inclusion	Reduce remittance costs	Traditional remittances are slow and expensive (5-10% fees).20	Peer-to-peer value transfer bypassing correspondent banks.	Public Blockchain, Stablecoins	Inefficient	Ignores significant on/off-ramp costs and friction, which reintroduce intermediaries and fees. Requires digital literacy and internet access, creating barriers for the most marginalized.19
Financial Inclusion	Provide banking to the unbanked	1.4 billion adults lack access to formal financial services.21	Digital wallets accessible via smartphone, independent of physical bank infrastructure.	Public Blockchain, Digital Wallets	Inefficient	Faces the same on/off-ramp challenges as remittances. The digital divide is a major barrier. Centralized fintech apps often provide a better user experience for the same function.29
Anti-Corruption	Ensure supply chain provenance	Opaque supply chains enable fraud, counterfeiting, and unethical practices.24	A shared, immutable ledger providing a single source of truth for all participants.	Permissioned Blockchain, Smart Contracts	Inefficient	Critically undermined by the “Oracle Problem.” The ledger cannot verify the authenticity of real-world data at its point of entry. “Garbage in, garbage out”.31
Anti-Corruption	Transparent donation tracking	Donors lack visibility into how their funds are used, leading to mistrust and inefficiency.5	A public, auditable record of fund flows from donor to beneficiary.	Public Blockchain, Smart Contracts	Legitimate	Uniquely powerful for cross-border, censorship-resistant giving where trust is low or traditional banking rails are unavailable (e.g., aid to Ukraine 3). The transparency is a core, valuable feature.
Governance	Democratic governance via DAOs	Traditional organizations are hierarchical, opaque, and slow to adapt.14	Automated, transparent, community-driven decision-making via token-based voting.	DAO (Smart Contracts + Governance Tokens)	Bunk	”One token, one vote” is inherently plutocratic, not democratic. Governance is dominated by wealthy “whales,” and voter participation is extremely low. The claim of decentralization is an illusion.33
Individual Rights	Self-sovereign identity for refugees	Displaced persons lack formal ID, barring them from essential services.1	A secure, portable, user-controlled digital identity not reliant on a single state or institution.	Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials, ZKPs	Legitimate	A superior model to centralized identity systems, offering user control and privacy. However, the technology is nascent, and major hurdles in usability and legal recognition remain.2

3.1 Analysis of Economic Empowerment Claims

Claim: Reducing Cross-Border Remittance Costs

• Problem: Traditional remittance services, which are a lifeline for millions of families, are notoriously slow and expensive. Intermediary banks in the correspondent banking system extract fees at each step, resulting in average costs of 5-10% of the transaction value.20
• Affordance: Blockchain technology enables direct, peer-to-peer transfer of digital value across borders, eliminating many of the intermediaries that inflate costs and cause delays in the traditional system.20
• Primitive(s): Public Blockchain Ledger, Stablecoins. The use of stablecoins is critical to this claim, as they are designed to mitigate the extreme price volatility associated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, ensuring the value sent is the value received.10
• Veracity Assessment: Inefficient.
• Justification: The claim that crypto remittances are cheaper is a partial truth that overlooks the total cost of the end-to-end process. While the on-chain transaction fee itself can be very low, this ignores the significant friction and costs associated with the “on-ramps” (converting fiat currency into cryptocurrency) and, more critically, the “off-ramps” (converting the cryptocurrency back into the recipient’s local fiat currency).36 These on- and off-ramps often rely on local exchanges or brokers—the very types of intermediaries the technology claims to disintermediate—which charge their own fees and have varying levels of liquidity and reliability. Furthermore, this solution presupposes that both the sender and the recipient possess a sufficient degree of digital and financial literacy, as well as consistent access to smartphones and the internet, which creates a significant barrier for the most economically marginalized populations.19 The claim is only potentially
  Legitimate in hyper-specific edge cases, such as in nations with collapsing financial systems where local currency is worthless and traditional rails have failed (e.g., aid distribution in Venezuela 10), or during acute geopolitical crises that disrupt the banking system (e.g., the early days of the conflict in Ukraine 3). As a general solution for global remittances, it is not demonstrably more efficient than increasingly competitive fintech alternatives.

3.2 Analysis of Transparency and Anti-Corruption Claims

Claim: Ensuring Supply Chain Provenance

• Problem: Modern supply chains are globally complex and fragmented, creating opacity that facilitates counterfeiting, fraud, illegal sourcing (e.g., conflict minerals or illegal fishing), and human rights abuses.24
• Affordance: A blockchain can act as a shared, immutable ledger, providing a single, tamper-proof source of truth that is accessible to all permissioned participants in the supply chain, from producer to consumer.6
• Primitive(s): Permissioned Blockchain Ledger, Smart Contracts. Permissioned (private) blockchains are typically used here to control who can view and write data to the ledger. Smart contracts can automate processes, such as triggering a payment upon verified receipt of goods.
• Veracity Assessment: Inefficient.
• Justification: This widely cited use case is fundamentally undermined by a critical, unresolved vulnerability known as the Oracle Problem.31 A blockchain can perfectly guarantee the integrity of digital data once that data has been recorded on the chain. However, it has no native ability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of that data at its point of entry from the physical world. The “garbage in, garbage out” principle applies with immutable consequences: if a corrupt actor enters fraudulent information onto the ledger (e.g., falsely certifying conflict minerals as conflict-free), the blockchain will faithfully and permanently record that falsehood. The system’s integrity is entirely dependent on trusting the data inputs, which obviates the need for a “trustless” system.
  Successful corporate case studies, such as Walmart’s food safety initiative or De Beers’ diamond tracking, invariably use permissioned blockchains.25 In these systems, all participants are already known, vetted, and contractually obligated to provide accurate data. In such a high-trust environment, a conventional, centralized database with shared access controls and robust audit logs could achieve the same outcome with significantly less technical complexity, cost, and operational overhead.39 The unique value of a decentralized ledger only emerges in adversarial environments where mutually distrusting parties must coordinate without a central authority, a scenario that does not describe the vast majority of commercial supply chains.

3.3 Analysis of Governance and Collective Action Claims

Claim: Democratic and Decentralized Governance via DAOs

• Problem: Traditional organizations, including non-profits, often suffer from hierarchical, opaque, and inefficient governance structures that concentrate power and are slow to respond to the needs of their stakeholders.14
• Affordance: DAOs offer a model for automated, transparent, and community-driven governance where decisions about resource allocation and organizational strategy are made collectively by token holders through on-chain voting.28
• Primitive(s): DAO (a combination of Smart Contracts for rules and execution, and Governance Tokens for voting rights).
• Veracity Assessment: Bunk.
• Justification: The claim that DAO governance is “democratic” is fundamentally false. The predominant governance model, “one token, one vote,” is not democratic but explicitly plutocratic: voting power is directly proportional to financial capital. This design flaw has been empirically shown to result in extreme concentrations of power. Studies reveal that in most DAOs, a small minority of large token holders, or “whales,” control a vast majority of the voting power, effectively centralizing decision-making.33 For example, one analysis found that the top 1% of token holders control over 90% of the voting power in some DAOs.34
  Furthermore, voter participation rates are chronically low, often in the single digits, meaning critical decisions are made by a tiny, wealthy fraction of the community.35 This structure makes DAOs highly vulnerable to governance attacks, including vote-buying and hostile takeovers, where a malicious actor can purchase enough tokens to pass proposals that drain the treasury, as tragically demonstrated by the BuildFinance DAO coup.34 The widely publicized vote at the Uniswap DAO, where a single venture capital firm held enough tokens to single-handedly sway the outcome, further illustrates that DAOs do not eliminate power asymmetries—they simply codify and financialize them.35 The promise of decentralization, in this context, is largely an illusion.45

3.4 Analysis of Individual Sovereignty Claims

Claim: Self-Sovereign Identity for Refugees

• Problem: Refugees and other displaced populations frequently lack state-issued identification documents, which bars them from accessing essential services like healthcare, education, and financial aid.1 They are dependent on centralized authorities that may be unstable, untrustworthy, or hostile.
• Affordance: A decentralized identity system can provide individuals with a secure, portable, and user-controlled digital identity that is not contingent on any single government or institution.1
• Primitive(s): Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials, and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).
• Veracity Assessment: Legitimate (but nascent).
• Justification: This claim represents one of the most compelling and unique applications of blockchain technology for social good. Unlike a traditional database controlled by a single entity (e.g., a government), a decentralized identity architecture allows an individual to be the ultimate custodian of their own identity data. Using this system, a person can selectively disclose verifiable proofs about themselves (e.g., “I am a UN-registered refugee” or “I am over 18”) to a service provider without revealing all of their underlying personal information, thanks to primitives like ZKPs.16 This is a profound shift in the data ownership model, moving from institutional control to individual sovereignty.
  However, it is crucial to recognize that this field is still in its infancy.2 While the conceptual framework is superior to centralized alternatives, significant practical challenges remain. These include developing user-friendly interfaces, solving the problem of secure key management and recovery (a lost key could mean a lost identity), and achieving widespread legal and institutional recognition of these new forms of credentials. The potential is immense, but the path to mature, scalable implementation is long.

Section 4: Systemic Challenges and Foundational Critiques

The veracity assessments in the previous section reveal a pattern of recurring, systemic challenges that undermine a wide range of “crypto for good” claims. These are not isolated flaws in specific applications but foundational problems inherent to the current state of the technology. Many well-intentioned projects are built upon a stack of these unsolved problems, leading to a predictable causal chain of failure. A project aiming to solve a real-world problem, such as providing decentralized crop insurance for smallholder farmers, illustrates this chain: it requires external data (triggering the Oracle Problem), needs to process many small transactions cheaply (the Scalability Trilemma), uses a DAO for governance (the Decentralization Illusion), and must be accessible to its target users (the Digital Divide). A failure at any link in this chain can render the entire project unviable.

4.1 The Oracle Problem: The Achilles’ Heel of Real-World Interaction

The Oracle Problem is the fundamental inability of deterministic systems like blockchains to natively and securely access or verify data from external, non-deterministic sources (i.e., the real world).31 Smart contracts can only execute based on data that is already on the blockchain. To interact with anything off-chain—be it a price feed, weather data, or the status of a physical shipment—they must rely on an external entity called an “oracle” to feed this data onto the chain.32

This single problem severely compromises or invalidates the majority of claims that depend on real-world information. A centralized oracle reintroduces a single point of failure and a single point of trust, nullifying the core benefit of decentralization.32 If the oracle is compromised or provides incorrect data, the smart contract will execute based on this faulty input, with potentially irreversible consequences. Proposed solutions like decentralized oracle networks (e.g., Chainlink) attempt to mitigate this by aggregating data from multiple sources, but they introduce their own layers of complexity, cost, and crypto-economic assumptions that are far from foolproof.32

4.2 The Scalability Trilemma: The Inherent Trade-offs of Decentralization

The Scalability Trilemma posits that it is exceptionally difficult for a blockchain to simultaneously optimize for three essential properties: decentralization, security, and scalability.49 Highly decentralized and secure blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum’s mainnet, achieve this at the cost of scalability; they can only process a small number of transactions per second, leading to network congestion and high transaction fees during periods of high demand.51

This inherent trade-off renders many “for good” use cases economically non-viable. Applications that rely on micropayments, high-frequency data logging, or serving a large number of low-income users are impractical on a secure Layer 1 chain where a single transaction fee can exceed the value of the transaction itself. Proposed solutions like Layer 2 scaling solutions (e.g., rollups) and Layer 1 modifications (e.g., sharding) aim to address this.49 However, these solutions introduce their own complexities and potential trade-offs, such as increased centralization risks or security vulnerabilities, and are still in various stages of development and adoption.50

4.3 The “Decentralization Illusion”: Governance, Power Concentration, and Plutocracy

As detailed in Section 3.3, the claim that DAOs enable democratic governance is one of the most pervasive and misleading narratives in the “crypto for good” space. The reality is that token-based governance systems have consistently failed to produce decentralized or equitable outcomes. Instead, they create a new form of financialized power structure that is inherently plutocratic.33

The evidence is overwhelming: governance is dominated by whales; voter turnout is abysmal; and core development teams and large venture capital investors often retain effective control, rendering the notion of community governance a facade.35 The failure of early experiments like “The DAO” due to a code exploit and the hostile takeover of BuildFinance DAO demonstrate the fragility and vulnerability of these systems.34 Any claim that rests on the premise of a DAO being a “decentralized and democratic” entity must be treated with extreme skepticism, as the evidence points to a persistent “decentralization illusion”.45

4.4 The Digital Divide and the “Last Mile” Problem

Finally, many “crypto for good” projects suffer from a profound blindness to the practical realities of their target users. The effective use of these technologies requires a suite of prerequisites: a modern smartphone, reliable and affordable internet access, and a significant level of digital and financial literacy to safely navigate wallets, keys, and transactions.19

These requirements create a formidable barrier for the very “underserved” and “marginalized” communities that are often the stated beneficiaries, threatening to exacerbate the existing digital divide rather than bridge it.29 Compounding this is the “last mile” or “on/off-ramp” problem. For crypto to have real-world utility, it must be convertible to and from local currency and usable for everyday needs. This interface with the traditional world reintroduces the very intermediaries, costs, regulations, and frictions that decentralized technology was supposed to eliminate, creating a critical point of failure for many financial inclusion initiatives.

Section 5: Conclusion and Strategic Recommendations

5.1 Synthesis of Findings: Separating Signal from Noise

A systematic analysis of “crypto for good” claims reveals a landscape dominated by hype and misunderstanding of the technology’s fundamental limitations. The majority of widely-touted use cases fall into the categories of Bunk or Inefficient. Claims of democratic governance through DAOs are Bunk, as their plutocratic “one token, one vote” structure is antithetical to democratic principles and leads to power concentration. A vast array of other claims, most notably in supply chain provenance and broad financial inclusion, are Inefficient. They propose technically complex and immature blockchain-based solutions for problems that can be, and often are, addressed more effectively and cheaply by conventional centralized systems. The failure to solve the Oracle Problem and the practical barriers of the digital divide and on/off-ramp friction render these solutions inferior in most real-world contexts.

However, the analysis is not a wholesale dismissal. A narrow but important set of applications emerges as potentially Legitimate, where the unique, core properties of blockchain technology offer a genuinely superior approach.

5.2 Profile of a Legitimate “Crypto for Good” Application

The most promising and defensible “crypto for good” applications tend to share a distinct set of characteristics. They are typically found in domains where one or more of the following conditions hold true:

• Censorship resistance is the primary requirement. The ability to transfer value across borders to politically sensitive causes or activists in authoritarian regimes, bypassing state-controlled financial systems, is a uniquely powerful capability.3
• The failure of traditional infrastructure is the core problem. In acute crises like war or state collapse, where banking systems are offline or untrustworthy, direct cash transfers via crypto wallets can be a vital humanitarian tool.10
• The coordination of mutually distrusting actors is essential. While rare, scenarios that require multiple parties who do not trust each other to maintain a shared, consistent record without a central administrator can benefit from a decentralized ledger.
• The digital nature of the asset is paramount. The most compelling use case identified is self-sovereign identity. Here, the goal is to create a purely digital, user-controlled asset (an identity) that is, by design, not tethered to any single institution, offering a new paradigm for privacy and individual empowerment.1

5.3 Strategic Recommendations for the Technology Strategist

For philanthropic foundations and social impact investors, navigating this space requires a strategy that is skeptical of grand narratives and focused on the technology’s core, defensible strengths.

• Recommendation 1: Invest in the Primitives, Not Just the Applications. Many projects fail because they build applications on top of unsolved foundational problems. A more effective strategy is to fund the development of the underlying primitives themselves. Rather than funding another supply chain pilot that ignores the Oracle Problem, support initiatives developing secure, decentralized oracle solutions tailored for specific social impact sectors (e.g., verifying climate data for carbon markets). Instead of launching another plutocratic DAO, fund research into novel, plutocracy-resistant governance mechanisms like quadratic voting or reputation-based systems.33
• Recommendation 2: Prioritize “Last Mile” Infrastructure. The most significant barriers to adoption are often not on the blockchain but at its edges—the interface with the real world. Acknowledge that the on/off-ramps, user experience, and digital literacy gaps are where most projects fail. A high-impact strategy would focus on funding initiatives that bridge the digital divide, develop user-friendly wallet interfaces for low-literacy populations, and create viable, low-cost pathways between the crypto and traditional economies in underserved regions.
• Recommendation 3: Apply a Strict “Necessity Test.” Before considering any blockchain-based proposal, apply a simple but powerful heuristic: “Is a decentralized, immutable, trustless ledger absolutely necessary to solve this problem, or could a well-designed centralized database or fintech application achieve a similar or better outcome?” For the vast majority of proposals, the answer is the latter, which immediately classifies the blockchain solution as Inefficient. This test helps focus resources on the rare but valuable cases where decentralization is a critical, non-negotiable feature of the solution.
• Recommendation 4: Adopt a Portfolio Approach Focused on Niche Legitimacy. Acknowledge that there is no single “killer app” for social good in the crypto space. The most prudent approach is to build a portfolio of targeted, niche interventions where blockchain’s unique properties provide a clear, order-of-magnitude improvement over the status quo. This means focusing on the narrow set of legitimate use cases—humanitarian aid in crisis zones, censorship-resistant funding, and the long-term development of self-sovereign identity—where the technology’s strengths directly address the core of the problem.