Blockstack engineer here.

Regarding financials, I invite you to read our SEC offering circular for details on the source of the money: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1719379/000110465919...

> None of these apps need a blockchain. None of these apps gain any benefit from a blockchain.

The blockchain serves as a "shared source of truth" for everyone's name/public-key/storage-URL bindings. So as long as you trust that the blockchain doesn't get re-orged, you may assume that your Blockstack node will independently calculate the same such bindings as everyone else's node. All other application activity (rightfully) happens off-chain, via commodity Web infrastructure.

EDIT: typo