The blockchain development world is often overshadowed by the cryptocurrency markets. We are used to seeing headline news about Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, and many other tokens that active traders love because of their heavy trading volumes and high volatility. If we look past these news stories about digital currencies, we will find that there is a whole world of blockchain development projects that are not related to tokens, and which have significant potential in terms of how we may conduct certain business transactions in the near future.

In November 2021, the City of Philadelphia announced an initiative to spark blockchain technology at the municipal level. According to Mark Wheeler, the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Brotherly Love, blockchain projects could offer interesting value proposition situations to benefit residents of Philadelphia, which is why he launched a new city government website explaining his intentions. Within the website, visitors can read the original Bitcoin white paper along with a series of ideas on how blockchain integration could improve municipal functions. The Ethereum white paper is also posted therein, and this one is more interesting because the ETH blockchain was never meant to be mainly focused on currency tokens; it is supposed to be a groundbreaking project that can harness the power of smart contracts, public ledgers, and distributed computing on peer-to-peer networks.

The Ethereum blockchain was created by a team of young programmers who were not bound to any particular project or industry. Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin were students at the same university; both were very interested in Bitcoin as they were growing up, but later found themselves faced with a gap between what they thought the community was doing and what they thought the community should be doing. They also found out that the Bitcoin community was not united around their ideas, which is why they began creating the Ethereum platform which was solely focused on public ledgers and smart contracts; this was a very abstract, theoretical concept on developing practical applications that can be used on day to day basis. In other words, the City of Philadelphia will likely look at the ETH blockchain as a solution for projects such as parking enforcement and issuance of building permits.