Frederik Gregaard, CEO, Cardano Foundation. Navigating blockchain’s impact on global finance & governance.
Over 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day globally. Roughly 80% are grown by 25 million smallholder farmers, mostly in the Global South. Commercial roasters and instant coffee brands claim to trace their beans as proof of origin, ethical sourcing and single-estate quality. Follow the trail, and it is rare to find the exact source of the bean that has been picked, washed, dried, roasted, ground and distilled into your morning ritual.
Blockchain had an answer: a shared, tamper-evident ledger tracing a product in real time. From a farmer in Kenya to the early morning riser, blockchain was the fix. But the narrative didn’t stick, and the pivot went to finance. Both times, a nail in search of a hammer—because blockchain was never really a solution to a specific problem. It’s closer to roads or water pipes: infrastructure whose value only becomes obvious when it’s missing.
The Premise Of Blockchain
The Bitcoin white paper, published in 2008 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, solved a problem that had nothing to do with money. Two strangers transacting with each other had always required a third party to make it work—a bank, a notary, a platform. The white paper removed that requirement, replacing it with a transparent public record that nobody owns and anybody can verify. Calling the result financial technology undersells it considerably. Any record held by an intermediary who can be slow, corrupt or simply hard to reach is a barrier to participation. That’s the barrier blockchain quietly lowers.
Delivering Traceability
Blockchain remains one of the strongest enterprise choices for implementing EU passport obligations, which mandate verifiable, accessible and tamper-proof data. Rolling out sector by sector under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), physical goods entering the EU will soon need a fully operational digital product passport (DPP).
These DPP submissions are prioritizing resource-intensive products, like electric vehicle batteries and textiles, to mitigate waste in the supply chain. That does not mean other industries have to wait for the benefits.
On the private, non-crypto blockchain BanQu, 2.5 million households are connected across 58 countries, building verified digital financial histories in real time. In Zambia, for instance, farmers sell cassava to Zambian Breweries (owned by multinational beverage company AB InBev), which brews it into lager. That trade used to run on cash and paper receipts, so farmers had no record of what they had sold and no way to contest a payment that came up short. On BanQu, every purchase is logged and the farmer receives an SMS confirming the sale. Across the program, which also runs in Uganda and India, smallholders previously exposed to payment disputes have earned more than $1.5 million in direct income and now hold a verified financial history they can take to a bank.
More than 3,000 Zambian beekeepers and farmers also use Palmyra, a traceability platform used to verify proof of origin. This gives producers income transparency and direct buyer access in an immutable, verifiable manner that guarantees compliance with global sustainability and market standards like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). And the best part is, none of it requires an implicit understanding of how blockchain works—much like you don’t need to understand the transmission control and internet protocols that allow you to send an email. (Full disclosure: Palmyra is built on the Cardano blockchain and my company is the Cardano Foundation.)
Identity: The Next Frontier Of Financial Inclusion
Supply chains show what happens when you make exchange verifiable. Identity shows what happens when you do the same for people. In an era where personal data flows freely through systems its owners rarely control, the ability to hold and present your own credentials, without surrendering them to an institution, changes what financial inclusion actually means in practice.
The EU Digital Identity Wallet, part of the eIDAS 2.0 framework, is designed to give citizens control over their digital credentials by December 2026. The UN World Food Programme demonstrates the model at scale through Building Blocks, its blockchain-based system for delivering aid. This supports 4 million refugees monthly, processing $555 million in transfers and saving $3.5 million in bank fees.
Scaling these identity frameworks can unlock financial access for the 1.4 billion unbanked globally while directly slashing transaction costs. But the real challenge is giving people more control without making their lives more complex. We have spent 15 years focused on how crypto blockchains fit into financial markets, but we often overlook how non-crypto blockchains can be used to organize, secure and display information within those markets.
Ultimately, the true value of blockchain won’t be measured in the market caps of a million different cryptocurrencies. It will lie in the economic dignity restored to millions of overlooked lives, their vital contribution now directly visible in the value chain. Not wealth out of thin air, but real and tangible inclusion.
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