Blockchains are just decentralized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are a cool trick (look at git!). But the cost of decentralizing them, Bitcoin-style, has been massive carbon emissions. And the gain from decentralizing them? It's usually pretty tiny. I mean, I guess zero-trust decentralization makes it impossible to recover your coins if they're stolen or lost by an exchange, but that doesn't exactly seem like a huge advantage. /s
In most of the financial blockchain pitches I've heard, you could replace proof-of-work via a time-stamping service run by a trusted clearing house. Just have someone like DTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_Company keep track of the HEAD of git repository, and you'd be 95% of the way there. They already handle 100s of trillions of dollars of transactions a year with much less risk and drama than the average crypto exchange.