Blockchains, alongside other technologies, provide a digital global computer capable of executing a known set of rules Trustlessly: verifiably correct, with an auditable canonical history, and accessible to the world. They can be made programmable, oftentimes in the form of Smart Contracts, but in principle they can execute arbitrary computation. They have already delivered successfully on their foremost promise: the technology is sound enough that people are willing to trust trillions of dollars of their assets in it1, in the form of tokens and DeFi. Various forms of digital money exist today, in the form of blockchain tokens, with all sorts of applications built around these tokens. Yet, they have had limited adoption beyond financial applications, which is the frontier of the technology now.
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Evident by the market capitalization of Bitcoin. ↩