Use case unblocking

Where is Ethereum most needed today?

Years
2025–
Client
Ethereum Foundation
Venues
Edge City, Schelling Point
Collaborators
Ian Lee, Pablo, Sofía Cossar, Lovisa Björna, Andrej Berlin

Ethereum's early years were full of ambitious attempts to disintermediate real-world systems through smart contracts. While many of these ideas were over-idealistic, others were sound but simply came too early, held back by the immaturity of both the technology and the regulatory environment. As both mature, it's worth revisiting which ideas still hold up, understanding what prevented them from working before, and identifying what pieces are still missing today. I joined the Ethereum Foundation to do this systematically, running a pilot to identify frontier applications of Ethereum and help catalyze their development.

Design Sprints

In November 2025 we led a two-week residency at Edge City Patagonia with technologists, local industry and public officials. It combined a deep dive on Argentina's institutional landscape with an IDEO-style product design sprint, where we prototyped solutions and shared them back with the local actors who had surfaced the corresponding problems.

SSRNParticipatory Unblocking of Blockchain Use Cases: Lessons from the Argentina Onchain ResidencyThe findings of the Argentina Onchain Residency: a two-week field experiment that brought public, private and civil society actors together with blockchain builders, and a replicable method for problem-first adoption.Read →
Collage of the residency: conversations at a mixer, a huddle of participants over a notebook, a panel with a microphone, someone drinking mate at a laptop, and the group photo in front of the venue.

In February 2026 we ran a compressed version of the IDEO-style sprint at Ethereum SF, focused around onchain primitives that can power better alternatives to common consumer products.

Post by Tina Zhen of Flashbots on meeting the Use Case Lab team at the three-day design thinking and user research workshop at Ethereum House SF.
Cofounder | Flashbots
Post by Redwan Meslem of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance on coming to ETH SF at the Use Case Lab's invitation, with photos of the event.
Executive Director | Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

Mapping

The Use Case Explorer indexes these applications by the people they would serve, so every idea has to begin from someone's real problem. It is an open index; anyone can add one by pull request.

The Use Case Explorer's persona map: eighteen personas, from farmer and patient to journalist and merchant, linked to the ideas that would serve them.
A want in the Use Case Explorer: a manufacturer who wants buyers to tell their product apart from knock-offs, with three related use cases beneath it.
A use case in the Use Case Explorer: parametric weather insurance for farmers, with its problem, solution sketch and reason for Ethereum.

Unblocking

My work has focused on unblocking prioritized use cases such as energy and data markets, land registries, IoT, and insurance through:

  • Pilots: Matching crypto expertise with enterprises and institutions that hold deep domain expertise to catalyze new product solutions.
  • Founder support & standards: Working directly with founders to orient products around real user problems and develop standards that can advance their verticals.
  • Academic RFPs: Working with the EF's Academic Secretariat to fund a cohort of PhD candidates to validate specific use-case hypotheses.

This work reports directly to the Foundation's executive leadership, where it has informed strategic priorities both within the EF and across the organizations it supports.

Schelling Point, 2025