For example, the Philippines announced in January 2026 that it will track its national budget on the Polygon blockchain for transparency and accountability. Singapore’s Project Guardian is building infrastructure for tokenised assets, which will enable financial institutions to decrease the time and cost of settling transactions such as cross-border payments, secondary trading, collateralised borrowing, and asset issuance.

On the other hand, even industry proponents admit that meaningful use cases are still frequently eclipsed by the prevalence of scams and illicit financial flows. In turn, in a market dominated by speculation, investment capital has often flowed toward projects with the most hype rather than those that create…