Blockchain applications of today are severely limited by the range of use cases they can serve. Each blockchain application can only access the state via public interfaces on the same chain. Without access to the real world data, blockchains cannot be used for prediction markets, insurance, litigation, governance or any other coordination problem that is currently dependent on social institutions and corporations.

This is also known as an oracle problem. While many attempts at solving it have been made, the current solutions are too expensive and brittle to be useful at scale.