Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

Literally no. No one is using it and no one has come up with a use.

Wouldn't any company using blockchain technology be a blockchain project?

Sure, but if every blockchain project is just "building something for the blockchain" then where is the actual value?

Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work or stake.

NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.

As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics.

Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques.

So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff.

If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted).

But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia.

To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet).

Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?