Head of Legal

The 4 biggest blockchain strengths are also its weakness

• Permissionless nature leads to fragmentation of meaning

• Decentralization leads to too many standards

• Immutability leads to exponential data + query infrastructure complexity

• Neutrality means that no one is accountable for interpretations

Blockchain data is public. It is not usable at institutional scale. Despite being open, blockchain data is fragmented, hard to interpret, and painful to maintain. Even a simple question like “Who are the largest Ethereum token holders over time?” can require running nodes, ingesting full chain history, decoding contracts, cleaning edge cases, and writing complex SQL.

Blockchains are optimized for writes, not reads.

They are built for consensus and execution, not searchability, standardization, or financial interpretation.