Update: New Universal Blockchains Buckle Under Real-world Demands 2026

General-purpose blockchains can’t solve industry disputes over construction changes or equipment usage. Specialized layer 1s are optimized for stateless audit trails and regulatory compliance.

​Across verticals, the same pattern shows up again and again, and it has nothing to do with decentralization. Businesses rush toward blockchain solutions to solve their daily operational nightmares — only to discover that Ethereum and Solana can’t actually address them.

​Consider a construction foreman who approved a last-minute design change over a quick phone call, only to get sued six months later when the customer says they never agreed to it. Or consider an equipment leasing company that watches its revenue share evaporate because clients dispute sensor data showing machine usage — data that could have been tampered with before reaching the blockchain.

​We watch this pattern repeat across industries, with disputes being the primary pain point driving adoption. In asset leasing, for instance, disputes arise over how assets are used, what they’re earning and whether sensor-collected data has been altered. In construction, disputes often arise from frequent and urgent changes to pre-approved building plans, which can create confusion and lead to expensive lawsuits later on.

General-purpose blockchains have reached their limits in solving real-world problems. In almost every industry where decentralized networks could be useful, there are clear technical mismatches between what general-purpose chains offer and what specific verticals actually need. Therefore, founders are increasingly building their own specialized layer 1s instead.

In construction and similar industries, disputes are frequent and expensive. An onchain audit trail of “who said what when” can anchor the handshake agreements that happen via informal texts and calls, greatly minimizing the potential for lawsuits.

Audit trails — basically, signed messages — are stateless by nature. Each message added to the network has no effect on previous or subsequent messages. These aren’t financial transactions with balances to track, no double-spend problems to solve and no cryptographic identities to verify. The only properties that really matter are immutability and ordering to establish an ironclad sequence of events.

It matters because appending stateless messages to a blockchain doesn’t need the full verification machinery that Ethereum provides. No need to verify complex cryptographic signatures and s

Source: CoinTelegraph