Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-creator, and Bitcoin Magazine editor expressed his views on the non-financial applications for blockchain technology on Twitter. 

Buterin expressed an increasing interest in applying blockchain technology to other sectors.

Vitalik Buterin has expressed an increased interest in using blockchain technology outside of the finance industry. He believes that while other sectors have been sluggish to adopt it, he can “see the usefulness of blockchains in many situations.”

“We should be open to the possibility that distributed ledger technology may help us achieve ‘extremely significant objectives like trust and censorship resistance,’” he added.

In the paper, he argues that “blockchains as data stores” may be quite significant in the long run and that he expects them to be utilized for “cheap and dependable data retrieval.”

Another possibility described was open-source metrics, which are still in their infancy and would enable diversity and decentralization to be tracked: “An ideal voting mechanism would take diversity into account, giving greater weight to initiatives that aren’t just backed by the most coins or humans, but are also supported by the most distinct viewpoints.”

“This is a powerful and frightening idea, therefore I’ll deal with it.” Buterin continues. “However, the argument that we should replace our current legal system with an automated one is just as worrying.”

Ethereum 2.0 is still on the way, and with it, the planned network shift to proof-of-stake. The upgrade has been delayed several times and now has a successful launch on Ethereum’s Ropsten test network. The project’s operators have stated that they aim to deploy the upgrade to the mainnet by August 2022.