The future of blockchain is much bigger than just finance, according to industry experts.
Speaking on TheStreet Roundtable, Tom Ngo, Executive Lead at Metis, and Kelly Kellam, Director at BitLab Academy, laid out a vision for blockchain’s next wave of adoption.
From ‘Stupid Monkeys’ to Medical Records Kellam, addressing blockchain skeptics, pointed out how early-stage NFT hype was just the beginning.
“Everybody laughed at NFTs a couple of years ago—these Bored Ape crazy little stupid monkey-looking graphics,” he said. “That was just a proof of concept. Now why am I bringing this up? Because crypto isn’t just crypto, it’s the blockchain.”
According to Kellam, the future isn’t about speculative trading—it’s about efficiency and transparency in everyday systems.
“Your medical records as NFTs — that’s a very likely thing. Your licenses, legal documents, vehicle registrations — all that’s going to be on the blockchain,” he said.
He added that even government accountability could be revolutionized.
“Is there gold in Fort Knox? All this stuff can be transparently tracked on the blockchain at an exponentially lower cost,” Kellam noted.
AI and Blockchain Are Merging Ngo highlighted another emerging sector—artificial intelligence.
“There’s a huge convergence between blockchain and AI,” he said. “Because now we’re discussing how truthful is this data? Blockchain was built to provide transparency, accountability, and be immutable.”
He predicted that AI-powered user interfaces will help simplify decentralized finance (DeFi), making it more accessible.
“We’ll start seeing UI, UX, and applications that implement AI agents to simplify these DeFi transactions,” he said. “It sounds like mumbo jumbo now, but in the future, users won’t even have to think about it.”
