Chainlink. Ignore the community. Look at the work of those involved and the things they are building.

Chainlink only makes sense in a blockchain-centric world. If you get rid of blockchain then you don't need chainlink....

Skiff Drive and Skiff Mail [0] and their use of ENS [1] and other naming systems is interesting. Endaoment is also another useful web3 project. [2]

[0] https://skiff.com/

[1] https://ens.domains/

[2] https://endaoment.org/

Skiff is exactly the type of service that uses crypto and chains for no reason.

Its essentially gmail/docs alternative that e2e encrypts the content and saves them on their servers. Services like protonmail have been working like that forever.

I am not saying its not a good product just that it doesnt require blockchain at all. They slap it on there to use it and get hype but thats all.

You could look at Chia. I don't think the base project with the typical token scheme is worth anything, but the way it uses disk space for mining is kind of neat.

The general idea is that you precompute a bunch of proofs and store them on disk. Challenges are issued and if you have a matching proof, you can claim the token for that challenge.

The part that I find interesting isn't the tokens. It's the concept that an algorithm can prove you've committed some disk space to the network. The reason I find it interesting is because, for small amounts of disk space, the incremental cost of participation is $0. If I plot proofs on unused disk space and only try to match proofs when my computer is on anyway, it basically costs me nothing.

Compare that to someone trying to farm (aka mine) on an industrial scale and they have a real, non-zero cost starting with the first byte of storage they buy. I find it interesting because it's different than normal economies of scale where a large operator eventually outperforms all the small operators (economically).

Unmatched, but valid proofs, are a byproduct of mining the tokens and those are what proves you have some idle capacity. Since normal PC owners pretty much have to buy excess capacity for something like a hard disk, participating in a system like that doesn't have much downside. It's that byproduct that I think is interesting.

I'm not sure if there are any pragmatic use cases, since the 500GB of free space a normal user has might not exceed the value of pretending to be a real person, but being able to say "I have $50 of idle capacity and I can prove it" could be a novel way to combat large scale networks of bots and bad actors.

chia is a terrible idea. investment wise, and also tech. Great theory, but a miss in execution.

- ex chia farmer

this comment does nothing for me, it's like saying the internet is a terrible idea and then no explanation why you think so.

I'm still missing where this model achieves anything relatable to the real world beyond "less destructive than BitCoin", which honestly is a pretty compelling value proposition.

part of the reality is that it's an open question. interesting things may pan out, or may not, as with other innovation / R&D efforts

Proving you’ve committed disk space is every bit as wasteful as PoW, it gives a financial incentive to manufacture more, pushing up the associated waste and prices for people wanting to actually use storage.

It’s a horrible set of ideas.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a smattering of some of the bigger projects doing neat things.

The graph protocol - decentralized blockchain indexing feeding a network of graphQL servers hosting the data powering dapps https://thegraph.com/en/

Chainlink - decentralized on-chain oracles for basically any piece of data from the real world - https://chain.link/

MakerDAO - creator of the first “soft pegged” stablecoin, it is a series of smart contracts that allow people to lock up crypto as collateral and mint DAI, uses a number of neat and novel mechanisms to keep peg by adjusting interest rates and incentivizing economic behavior https://makerdao.com/en/

Compound - a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with no centralized authority handling liquidations/collateral pricing/etc. https://compound.finance/

Uniswap - a decentralized exchange for swapping assets in a trustless way, has neat features like flash loans where you can borrow a large amount of money (millions of dollars) for the length of one transaction, as long as the money is returned with a fee. This allows anyone to do things like capture arbitrage opportunities, liquidate large positions, or whatever else can be done in one transaction. https://uniswap.org/faq

A lot of these are DAOs using smart contracts to propose and vote on binding proposals on chain and adjust parameters within the protocol or paying contributors and whatnot. You can see an example here https://compound.finance/governance

Beyond that there’s other blockchains focused on specific use cases like GameFi, bridges connecting together different blockchains and moving liquidity between them in a mostly seamless way, massive research attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs (which have a lot of potential implications in the real world), and multi-sig contracts for only doing things when a quorum of key holders come together and signal their intent.