Do crypto applications need strict global consensus from a technical standpoint, even though they target a worldwide audience?
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Do crypto applications need strict global consensus from a technical standpoint, even though they target a worldwide audience?
If strict global consensus is not required, there are plenty of technologies beyond public blockchains that can help.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: polynya
Translation: TechFlow
In the wave of the digital era, blockchain technology has become an undeniable force.
Among them, public-chain-based crypto applications often operate globally—but this raises a thought-provoking question:
Does your crypto application really need strict global consensus—requiring all nodes worldwide to agree on every state?
polynya wrote an article deeply exploring how this technology drives global consensus and reshapes our understanding of money, organizational structures, and even social governance. TechFlow has translated the full text.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve written extensively about blockchain applications, particularly strict global consensus. While this topic has a niche audience, it’s not popular—I haven’t seen many people mention or discuss it. Yet I’ve now published over a dozen blog posts on it because I firmly believe this is the most important topic in crypto today. Infrastructure and scalability challenges have largely been solved—with new technologies like validity proofs and data availability sampling, we’re entering an era of near-infinite "TPS." The real question is: what will this exponential scale actually be used for? To answer that, understanding strict global consensus is essential.
It's hard to find motivation to write about these pragmatic aspects of global consensus, as the audience is small, and 99% of the crypto space remains obsessed with infrastructure and speculation. But when I saw that the flowchart asking “Are you building something that benefits from global consensus?”—essentially the theme of most of my 2022–23 blog posts—had reached 300,000 views, I found renewed inspiration to write again.
There’s nothing here that I haven’t discussed before, but it might help those who saw the flowchart and are wondering whether their application truly needs global consensus.
I’m not Vitalik, and while I have my own perspective on this issue, it may differ from his. For clarity, I refer to it as “strict global consensus.” You can achieve rough global consensus, but Ethereum (or public blockchains in general) cannot assist in achieving that. Ethereum itself is the best example—the network runs on thousands of nodes and is developed by over a dozen different client teams. They subjectively reach a rough global consensus on what Ethereum actually is. Ethereum itself cannot help enforce that process.
“Strict” also reflects the fact that public blockchains can only handle objectivity. Thus, “strict global consensus” can be defined as: requiring everyone running the network globally to strictly agree on a set of objective outputs (a set of numbers).
Therefore, here are some examples that do *not* require strict global consensus:
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Data storage: This is a broad field with many use cases, but in almost all cases, you don’t need everyone in the world to agree on the data. There are numerous ways to store data—from self-hosting via tapes and hard drives, to choosing among thousands of storage providers, to distributed options like IPFS or BitTorrent. In fact, blockchains themselves prune data and rely on solutions like BitTorrent to remember the pruned data.
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Any form of governance: Governance is highly subjective and complex. Public blockchains can help in certain limited ways, but attempting to force complex, subjective variables into restrictive, objective outputs is dangerous.
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Legal systems and contracts: Similarly, law is highly complex, subjective, and an evolving discipline. Beyond the simplest and most trivial contracts, blockchains offer little help.
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In fact, almost everything does *not* require strict global consensus. Strict global consensus is a very specific capability, and there are few meaningful use cases for it.
Now, here are areas where you *might* need strict global consensus:
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Objective money: Fifteen years on, public blockchains are maturing, and this remains the dominant use case—for good reason. An alternative store of value accessible globally and controlled by a decentralized set of node operators absolutely requires strict global consensus. Of course, forms of "objective money" or value vary, and are also leveraged by other narratives like DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs. It should be noted, however, that subjective money (such as credit) cannot be implemented on public blockchains.
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Objective identity: First, I must emphasize that most identity is subjective. Despite efforts like verifiable credentials, ultimately identity and reputation are complex, multifaceted variables—just as humans are. That said, you can implement limited forms of identity on public blockchains: objective identities such as ENS or POAP.
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Evading regulation, filling regulatory gaps: For most applications, public blockchains are wasteful. However, there are certain use cases that are either illegal or exist in regulatory gray areas. Today, USDT and USDC rank among the top use cases in crypto beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum—and both are effectively centralized. Public blockchains can fill these regulatory gaps. However, it’s important to note that these gaps are not permanent; a well-designed democratic dollar CBDC could easily replace this use case, doing so more efficiently and in a decentralized manner. Similarly, cross-border payments in certain countries fall into this category—in fact, conditions have already improved in some regions. Then there are Ponzi-like activities, ranging from transparent gambling to deceptive scams. I believe that since the Pandora’s box has been opened, regulations targeting meme coins and NFTs will eventually emerge, shifting such activity off public blockchains and onto CEXs—where most trading already occurs anyway.
Of course, real magic happens when you combine the above elements. Farcaster is a great example—it uses public blockchains for objective money and objective identity, but handles everything else off-chain. This might be where innovation truly lies. But to achieve such innovation, we must deeply understand what strict global consensus can actually deliver.
As Vitalik has said, if strict global consensus isn’t needed, there’s a wealth of technology beyond public blockchains that can help.
Finally, there will be applications deployed on public blockchains that don’t actually need strict global consensus or public blockchains at all—but may make sense for chasing incentives or Ponzi dynamics. That’s fine. My focus, however, is on applications with long-term, sustainable use cases—those with genuine product-market fit that can leverage the unique properties of public blockchains.
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