The birth of Ethereum introduced the concept of smart contracts to the cryptocurrency world for the first time and with it, decentralized applications (dApps), the applications that operate automatically without the top-down oversight by any one company or individual.
But what dApps brought to the table in terms of innovation was initially balanced by a plethora of speculative use cases which could be described as opportunistically hopeful at best and cynical at worst.
Readers may remember the explosion of ICOs in 2017 which came bearing promises of dApps aimed at a range of disparate industries, few of which ever came to fruition. Among these were projects that aimed to tokenize the global dental industry (Dentacoin); a venture devised to pay people to tend to the graves of dead relatives (TombCare), and one devoted, quite simply, to garlic bread (Garlicoin).