Blockchain Beyond Crypto: 7 Real Business Opportunities for Startups

For years, blockchain was associated almost exclusively with the crypto world. But while the public debate revolved around cryptocurrencies, something far more interesting began happening in the background. Large companies in sectors such as logistics, food, automotive, and finance began using blockchain to solve very specific problems.

The Volvo Cars battery passport was developed by a British startup. The FDA-approved pharmaceutical traceability network was built around a San Francisco startup. And an Israeli startup is helping to digitize part of the documentation for global maritime trade.

The pattern repeats itself over and over. Large corporations have the problem, the budget, and the regulatory pressure. Startups are building the solutions. And that is where the real business begins.

Beyond cryptocurrencies, blockchain is consolidating itself as enterprise infrastructure for traceability, payments, digital identity, and asset tokenization. These are 7 areas where specialized startups are already building real business alongside corporations and regulators.

For years, the conversation about blockchain revolved around two wrong questions: is it going to change everything? and is it just crypto? But neither of these questions helps identify real opportunities.

The right question is far more concrete: in what situations do multiple companies need to share information, but none of them want another to control all the data?

When that problem arises, a business opportunity tends to emerge. And typically, the winner is not the one experiencing the problem, but the one who builds the shared infrastructure everyone needs.

In 2018, Walmart required its leafy green suppliers to use IBM Food Trust, a blockchain platform built on Hyperledger Fabric.

The goal was very concrete: reducing the time needed to trace the origin of a contaminated product. Previously, tracing the origin of a mango could take nearly a week. With blockchain, the process was reduced to just 2.2 seconds.

The figure was published by the World Economic Forum in 2019 and later supported by specialized academic publications.

What matters is not just the technology. Walmart did not develop the solution in-house; it turned to IBM, which in turn built the platform on open infrastructure.

That model repeats itself constantly in enterprise blockchain. The corporation has the problem, and another company builds the technology layer that allows all the actors involved to coordinate.

In June 2024, Volvo Cars launched the first digital battery passport for its EX90 model, three years before European regulation makes it mandatory.

The technology was not developed in-house at Volvo, but by Circulor, a British startup specializing in industrial traceability with which the company has been working since 2019.

According to IEEE Spectrum, Circulor already works with more than half of the world’s battery manufacturers by production volume and has collected tens of billions of data points related to supply chains.

What matters is that the European regulation on digital passports will not stop at batteries. It will also affect sectors such as textiles, electronics, and construction.

The FDA launched a pilot program in 2019 to evaluate interoperable pharmaceutical traceability systems under the Drug Supply Chain Security Act.

One of the selected projects was MediLedger, a blockchain network initially driven by the startup Chronicled, based in San Francisco. The pilot involved 24 companies, including some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical distributors and laboratories.

Here, the incentive is not marketing or innovation for appearances. The problem is far more serious: counterfeiting, regulatory compliance, and patient safety.

And that is precisely why no single actor wants another to centralize all the sensitive information in the supply chain.

The bill of lading — the document that certifies ownership of a maritime cargo — is still largely used in paper form across much of global trade.

In 2023, the Digital Container Shipping Association announced that its major carriers — including Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd — committed to achieving 100% electronic bills of lading by 2030.

The organization estimates that digitalization could save billions of dollars in operational costs and significantly accelerate international trade. 

MSC, the world’s largest shipping line by capacity, already runs part of its document infrastructure on the blockchain platform developed by the Israeli startup WaveBL. The UK’s approval of the Electronic Trade Documents Act also removed one of the main legal barriers to adopting this type of digital documentation.

J.P. Morgan has been operating Kinexys, its blockchain platform for institutional payments, since 2020. According to figures published by the bank itself, the network has already processed more than $1.5 trillion in transactions and mueve more than $2 billion daily. Its clients include Siemens, BMW Group, and BlackRock.

What matters here is not only the volume, but the shift in perception. Blockchain has stopped being seen as a technology experiment and has become operational financial infrastructure.

This context opens space for startups developing financial automation tools, liquidity management, or real-time settlement on these networks.

BlackRock launched BUIDL in 2024, a tokenized money market fund on blockchain that quickly became one of the largest institutional products of its kind.

By May 2025, the fund was already managing more than $2.5 billion in assets. That same year, Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to investors that virtually any financial asset could eventually be tokenized.

The trend is not limited to investment funds. The DTCC, the entity that clears the majority of securities traded in the United States, recently announced the launch of a tokenized securities platform for 2026.

Every time a new layer of financial infrastructure emerges, there are opportunities for companies specializing in interoperability, regulatory compliance, and automation.

One of the largest hidden costs in global B2B is repeatedly going through identity verification, KYC, and due diligence processes for every new business relationship.

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) is developing the vLEI, a verifiable organizational identity system that allows the identity of a company to be automatically certified without relying on manual processes.

The model is particularly interesting because it does not depend on a single centralized actor: different authorized issuers can participate in the network. 

This type of infrastructure tends to create very hard-to-displace opportunities for startups specializing in digital identity and regulatory compliance.

None of these projects sell “decentralization” as their main argument. They all sell something concrete: less friction, less time, fewer disputes between organizations that need to collaborate without fully sharing trust. And all 7 emerged because regulation, competitive pressure, or operational risk made the problem impossible to ignore.

The startups that win in blockchain are not necessarily the ones that talk most about the technology. They are the ones that understand the inter-organizational coordination problem better than anyone in their sector, and get there before regulation turns the opportunity into an obligation.

That pattern remains open in areas such as logistics, energy, sustainability, and corporate identity. At South Summit 2026, under the AI Convergence framework, these opportunities point toward a broader idea: the strongest positions rarely emerge from a new technology. They normally come from solving old frictions that nobody had managed to resolve before. 

If you want to map where those frictions are in the European startup ecosystem today, the Entrepreneurship Map 2025 — developed with IE University based on the analysis of more than 4,500 applications — is the most rigorous starting point we have.

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