On 24 October 2026, tokenised US Treasury products, fund shares issued as tokens on blockchains, were worth about $14.6 billion, according to the tracker rwa.xyz. Four years earlier, almost to the month, Maersk and IBM announced they would switch off TradeLens, a blockchain platform for shipping documents, because it had not reached “the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work”, as Maersk’s Rotem Hershko told Supply Chain Dive. Same family of technology, opposite fates.
So what is blockchain used for, once you set cryptocurrencies aside? The honest answer in 2026 is shorter than the lists of 2018. Two kinds of use are measured and growing: money (stablecoins, tokenised funds, settlement between banks) and a handful of shared registers where rival firms need one record none of them controls. Much of the rest, from food tracing to voting, was announced loudly and then shrank, closed, or turned out to use a blockchain only as a timestamp stuck on an ordinary database.
This lesson sorts the two, with dates and figures, and ends with a short test you can apply to any “blockchain for X” claim. It assumes you know what a ledger and a block are: if not, start with our lesson on what a blockchain is. Most corporate projects below run on permissioned networks, a distinction explained in public vs private blockchains. Nothing here is investment advice.
What is blockchain used for? Money comes first
Follow the volume and you land in finance every time. That is not an accident. A ledger that several parties can update, and that none of them can quietly rewrite, is exactly what a payment system needs, and money is purely digital already: no warehouse worker has to type in the right data for the record to be true.
Stablecoins, the first mass use
Stablecoins are tokens that track a currency, almost always the US dollar. DefiLlama counted about $304.3 billion of dollar-pegged tokens in circulation on 24 October 2026, of which roughly $182.4 billion was Tether’s USDT and $71.8 billion Circle’s USDC. Euro tokens are a rounding error next to that: around 846 million euros in total, with Circle’s EURC at about 507 million and Société Générale-Forge’s EURCV at about 189 million, on the same DefiLlama dashboard.
Stablecoins are used for trading on exchanges, for moving dollars across borders without a correspondent bank, and more and more by card networks behind the scenes. Visa said on 8 September 2026 that its stablecoin settlement had passed a $20 billion annualised run rate in its fiscal second quarter, more than 15 times a year earlier, with over 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes live, The Block reported. That figure measures what Visa settles with its partners in stablecoins, not on-chain traffic, and it is small next to Visa’s card business. How the tokens work, and who backs them, is covered in our guide to stablecoins.
DeFi: lending and trading without a bank in the middle
wallet.">Decentralised finance (DeFi) uses smart contracts to run lending pools and exchanges that anyone with a wallet can use. The largest lending protocol, Aave, held about $17.8 billion of deposits across its versions on 24 October 2026, with about $12.2 billion lent out, according to DefiLlama. Compound, one of the first such protocols, held about $1.5 billion.
The honest part is the trend. Total staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">value locked in DeFi stood near $90 billion on 23 October 2026, down from about $146.9 billion on 24 October 2025, a fall of roughly 39% in a year, per the DefiLlama figures. Part of that is falling token prices, part is money leaving after hacks and failed projects. DeFi is real and used daily, but it is mostly used by people already holding crypto. The mechanics, risks and vocabulary sit in our DeFi explainer, so this lesson does not repeat them.
Payments and remittances: Stellar, the XRP Ledger and Lightning
Sending money home is expensive. In its June 2024 report the World Bank put the global average cost of sending $200 at 6.65% in the second quarter of 2024, with banks the most expensive channel at 13.40% and digital services at 5.29%, according to Remittance Prices Worldwide. The G20 and the UN development goals aim for 3%.
Three networks were built around that gap. Stellar is a payment blockchain used to issue and move stablecoins such as USDC between payment firms, which then pay out in local cash or bank deposits. The XRP Ledger, backed by Ripple, does a similar job for banks and payment companies, and Ripple’s own dollar stablecoin RLUSD had about $2.5 billion in circulation on 24 October 2026 (DefiLlama). Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is the third: a layer of payment channels on top of Bitcoin for small, fast payments. Its public part counted 16,242 nodes and about 3,795 BTC of capacity in the latest snapshot of the mempool.space statistics, dated 30 August 2026 and still the latest on 24 October. Capacity is money parked in channels, not payments made, so it says little about use.
What none of these can remove is the expensive part at each end: turning cash into tokens, checking the sender’s identity, and paying out in a currency the family can spend. Payment firms that use a blockchain cut the middle leg. Anyone promising free, instant transfers for everyone is selling the middle leg as the whole trip.
Tokenised assets: Treasury funds and BlackRock’s BUIDL
Tokenisation means issuing a share of a fund, a bond or a deposit as a token, so it can move on a blockchain at any hour and settle in minutes. The clearest success so far is short-term US government debt. BlackRock launched its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, BUIDL, on Ethereum on 20 March 2024, with Securitize as placement agent and a $5 million initial minimum, according to BlackRock’s launch release. It is often called the largest tokenised fund. As of October 2026 it is not.
| Product (issuer) | Value on 24 October 2026 |
|---|---|
| USDY (Ondo Finance) | $2.37 billion |
| USYC (Circle) | $2.37 billion |
| BUIDL (BlackRock) | $2.17 billion |
| iBENJI (Franklin Templeton) | $1.71 billion |
| JLTXX (J.P. Morgan) | $0.79 billion |
| All tokenised US Treasuries | $14.64 billion |
Source: rwa.xyz, Treasuries dashboard, as of 24 October 2026. Figures move daily and other trackers give different numbers for the same funds.
Big asset managers keep adding chains: J.P. Morgan moved its two tokenised money market funds to Solana in October 2026, still for qualified US investors only. In the US, a tokenised fund share is still a security, under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules, and most of these products are closed to ordinary savers. The token changes the plumbing, not the legal nature of what you hold. $14.6 billion is also tiny next to the US Treasury market itself.
Which companies really use blockchain, with dated figures
Ask what blockchain is used for inside companies in 2026, and the answers with numbers attached are banks, payment networks and market infrastructure. Most run permissioned systems, or use public chains with tight controls on who may hold the tokens.
| Company or institution | What it does on a blockchain | Dated figure or milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| J.P. Morgan (Kinexys) | Payments and deposit tokens for institutional clients | Over $7 billion average daily volume, over $3 trillion since inception (bank data, 2025) | J.P. Morgan |
| Visa | Settles with partners in stablecoins | Over $20 billion annualised run rate (announced 8 September 2026) | The Block |
| Mastercard | Bought stablecoin payments firm BVNK | Deal of up to $1.8 billion, completed 3 August 2026 | The Block |
| Eurosystem (ECB and national central banks) | Pontes: settles tokenised assets in central bank money | Launched 21 September 2026 with 13 market participants and 4 DLT operators | ECB |
| BlackRock | BUIDL tokenised Treasury fund | About $2.17 billion (24 October 2026) | rwa.xyz |
| Intesa Sanpaolo and CDP (Italy) | 25 million euro digital bond on Polygon | Issued and settled 18 July 2024, matured 18 November 2024 | Intesa Sanpaolo |
J.P. Morgan publishes the largest figures. Its Kinexys unit moves dollars between the bank’s own institutional clients around the clock, and its deposit token JPMD has run on Coinbase’s Base network since November 2025. On 19 October 2026 the bank said the token, also called JPM Coin, had gone live on Ethereum mainnet too, again for approved institutional clients only. The token represents existing bank deposits, which is why it is not a stablecoin.
The European Central Bank chose a different path. Its Pontes service, launched on 21 September 2026, links blockchain platforms to the Eurosystem’s own settlement system so that a tokenised bond can be paid for in central bank money. The first users named in the ECB press release include Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, KfW and the European Investment Bank, with Clearstream among the four platform operators. Longer hours and more features are due by 2028. It is wholesale only: savers cannot open a Pontes account, and it is a separate project from the digital euro.
Market plumbing is moving too. The US securities depository DTCC said its tokenization service would start with 25 securities in October 2026, on its private Besu network and on Canton. In Italy, Intesa Sanpaolo bought the whole of a 25 million euro digital bond issued by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti on Polygon in July 2024, settled the same day in central bank money through Banca d’Italia’s TIPS Hash Link, the bank said in a press release. It was a test of the law, not a market: one issuer, one buyer, four months.
Outside finance, the most cited corporate user is Walmart. With IBM it ran pilots on Hyperledger Fabric from October 2016, tracing mangoes in the US and pork in China, and later said the time needed to trace the origin of mangoes fell from seven days to 2.2 seconds, according to a case study published by the Linux Foundation. In September 2018 Walmart told its leafy greens suppliers that they would have to trace their produce on the IBM system, with full traceability back to the farm due by September 2019. Those are the company’s own figures, from 2016 to 2019, and most of the speed came from digitising paper records. We could not confirm how the system is used today. The same goes for IBM’s Food Trust network, launched in 2018, which Carrefour joined in its early years according to reports at the time: we found no recent public figures, so treat both as documented pilots, not current successes.
Blockchain projects that failed: TradeLens, ASX CHESS, Voatz
Failures teach more than launches. Three of them, all well documented, show where blockchain does not help.
TradeLens, launched by Maersk and IBM in 2018, digitised the paperwork of container shipping. The software worked. The industry did not come on board: rival carriers had little appetite for putting their data on a platform led by a competitor, and Maersk itself admitted the collaboration had failed. When the two companies announced the closure on 29 November 2022, Maersk’s Hershko added that “the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved”, and the platform went offline by the end of the first quarter of 2023 (Supply Chain Dive). A shared ledger only helps if the parties agree to share it.
In Australia, the stock exchange ASX spent about five years replacing CHESS, its clearing and settlement system, with a blockchain-based design from Digital Asset, announced in 2017. In November 2022 it stopped the project after an independent review by Accenture and wrote off A$245 to 255 million before tax, The Block reported. The chairman pointed to technology, governance and delivery problems, and the exchange has since moved to a design without a blockchain, according to reports in 2024.
Voting is the third case. Voatz, a mobile voting app that said it used a permissioned blockchain, was used in West Virginia’s 2018 midterm elections and in Denver, Oregon and Utah. In February 2020 researchers at MIT published an analysis finding that a hacked phone or server could alter votes and that the app did not appear to check votes against its blockchain at all, MIT News reported. Voatz disputed the findings. The broader point made by election security researchers is that a blockchain records what it is given: if the phone or the app is compromised, it faithfully stores a wrong vote.
Blockchain use cases beyond finance, one by one
The uses below each get their own lesson later in this path. Here is what is verified for each, in one paragraph.
Supply chain
The useful idea is a shared log of who handled a batch, when, and where, readable by every company along the way. The hard part is data entry: a ledger cannot tell whether the label on the crate is true, the old “garbage in, garbage out” problem that engineers call the oracle problem. TradeLens closed and Walmart’s figures date from 2016 to 2019, which is why a later lesson looks at what supply chain tracking still uses blockchain for.
Identity and diplomas
The European Union runs EBSI, the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, a network of nodes operated by member states and the Commission, whose first use cases were diplomas, document notarisation, digital identity and data sharing, according to the Commission’s EBSI page. Do not confuse it with the European Digital Identity Wallet that member states must offer by the end of 2026 under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183: that wallet is not built on a blockchain. A later lesson covers digital identity.
Voting
Beyond small trials like Voatz, we found no national election run on a blockchain. The researchers’ main worry is the voter’s device, which no ledger protects. Blockchain voting gets its own lesson later.
Health
Estonia’s eHealth Foundation announced in March 2016 that it would add Guardtime’s KSI technology to the database holding over a million patient records, according to Guardtime and the government’s e-Estonia site. KSI is a system that links hashes of records so that any later change shows up. The medical files themselves stay in a normal database: the chain is an integrity check, not a store of patient data, and while Guardtime markets KSI as a blockchain, it has no mining and no coin. Health records are the subject of a later lesson.
Land registries
Georgia’s National Agency of Public Registry announced a project with Bitfury in April 2016 to write a hash of each land transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain. The official register did not move: the chain holds a tamper-evident receipt, according to a 2020 review by the think tank New America. Sweden’s land registry, Lantmäteriet, tested property sales on a private blockchain with the start-up ChromaWay, from a first demonstration in 2016 to further tests in 2017 and 2018. We found no report that it went beyond the test stage. Land registries get a later lesson of their own.
Intellectual property and music
A blockchain can prove that a file existed at a given moment, by recording its hash with a timestamp. Italy gave that legal weight in 2019, as explained in the notary section below. It cannot prove who created the file. The music industry tried selling records as tokens: Kings of Leon released their album When You See Yourself as NFTs in March 2021 and raised “upwards of $2 million”, a band representative told Billboard, as relayed by iHeart. Buyers got digital art and a special vinyl edition: a collectible sale, not a new way to register who owns a song. A later lesson covers intellectual property.
Public sector
Governments mostly use blockchains as integrity proofs or as registers shared between agencies, not as currencies. EBSI, Estonia and Georgia are the examples above. China has set a national goal too: its digital plan for 2026 to 2030 wants a national blockchain network “basically built” by 2030, while keeping cryptocurrencies banned. Public sector uses are the subject of a later lesson.
Why a blockchain cannot replace a notary
Can a blockchain replace a notary? No, not under the law of any country covered here, and not for property. The question comes up because a blockchain does part of what a notary does: it fixes a date and makes a record hard to alter. But that is a small part of the job.
In civil law countries such as France and Italy, a notary is a public officer. A property sale must be recorded in an authentic deed (acte authentique in France, atto pubblico in Italy) drawn up by a notary, who checks the identity and capacity of the parties, the legal status of the property and its mortgages, gives advice to both sides, collects taxes and can refuse to sign an illegal contract. The deed is full proof of its date, and what the notary personally checked can only be challenged through a special forgery procedure in court. In France it is also enforceable like a court judgment, and it can already be drawn up and signed electronically, with a qualified signature, as the notaries’ own site explains. None of this can be done by code, and a smart contract cannot be held liable when it gets something wrong.
Italy went further than most in writing blockchains into law. Article 8-ter of decree-law 135/2018, converted by Law 12/2019, says that storing a document on a distributed ledger has the legal effect of an electronic timestamp under the EU’s eIDAS regulation, and that smart contracts meet the requirement of written form once the parties are identified electronically, according to the text on Normattiva. Written form is the ordinary form of a contract, not the notarial deed: the law helps for contracts any two people can sign, not for those that require a notary. The technical rules were due from the digital agency AgID within 90 days; we could not confirm that they were ever adopted.
In the US the comparison barely applies. A notary public mainly witnesses signatures, while title companies and county recorders handle the land side, so blockchain pilots there aim at county records rather than at notaries. What a blockchain can offer a notary anywhere is narrower: a timestamp proof for documents, a register of tokenised securities, or payment held in a smart contract until the deed is signed. The legal act stays with a person.
How to judge a “blockchain for X” claim in five questions
Most announcements can be sorted in a few minutes; the last lesson of this path asks the same question in more depth. Ask these, in order:
- Who writes to the ledger? If a single company decides what goes in, a database run by that company does the same job for less.
- Do the parties distrust each other? Blockchains earn their cost when rivals, or firms in different countries, need one record that none of them owns. TradeLens failed partly because rivals would not join a platform led by one of them.
- Where does the data come from? If a person or a sensor types it in, the ledger only proves that someone said it, not that it is true.
- What is actually on chain? Often it is only a hash or a timestamp, with the real records in a normal system. That can be useful, but it is not “running on blockchain”.
- Is there a dated, measured figure? Volume settled, assets held, users served, with a date and a source. Pilots and memoranda of understanding are not use.
Apply the five questions to the examples above and the pattern is clear. Stablecoins, Kinexys and Pontes pass: several parties, digital assets, measured volumes. TradeLens failed the second, Voatz the third, and most land and health projects sit at the fourth.
What these uses mean for US and UK readers
For a US reader, the most direct contact with these uses is through dollar stablecoins and tokenised funds. Payment stablecoins now have a federal framework, the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025; it takes effect on 18 January 2027 at the latest, or earlier if regulators finish their rules, according to the Texas Department of Banking. Tokenised fund shares remain securities, overseen by the SEC, and the CFTC watches the derivatives built on tokens. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority supervises crypto firms. Taxes follow the general rules for crypto assets set by the IRS and HMRC, covered in our lesson on crypto tax basics.
In Europe, the MiCA regulation sets the rules for stablecoins issued or offered in the EU, explained in our MiCA guide. That is why euro tokens from regulated banks such as Société Générale exist at all, even if their supply stays small.
The next lessons of this path take the uses one at a time, starting with supply chains. If you want a one-line answer to what blockchain is used for in 2026, it is settling money and assets between institutions. For any other claim, run the five questions above and look for a dated figure.
