After years of inflated promises, the useful question is not whether blockchain works but under what specific conditions it works better than the alternatives available to you.
Multiple parties with competing interests need shared records
The Australian Securities Exchange spent AU$250 million attempting to replace CHESS with a distributed ledger before abandoning the project in 2022. The failure was instructive. The use case was sound in principle, but the implementation underestimated integration complexity by years.
Where it does work: trade finance consortiums where four or more banks need a single version of a bill of lading without one bank controlling the master record. The shared custody of truth is the actual value proposition.
Audit trails need to be tamper-evident without relying on a single custodian
Carbon credit registries, pharmaceutical supply chains, and land title systems in jurisdictions with weak institutional trust all share this requirement. The blockchain layer does not replace legal enforceability, but it makes falsification significantly harder to conceal.
Programmable settlement conditions reduce counterparty risk
Delivery-versus-payment mechanisms using smart contracts on permissioned networks have reduced settlement failures in pilot programs at ASX-listed fund managers. The mechanism works when both asset legs can be represented on-chain simultaneously.
The pattern across these three conditions is the same: blockchain earns its complexity cost when the coordination problem involves multiple distrusting parties and no neutral intermediary they all accept. Outside that structure, a well-designed database is almost always the better choice.