Yeah at it's core a blockchain based cryptocurrency is a consensus system and decentralised resource market where the resource in question is space in the blocks within some time bound and verifiable proof of the time and state they were accepted in.

That core feature of "providing a total ordering for state changes and events with formal trust bounds" turns out to have a lot of potential uses.

Now of course truly providing correct timestamps or really any clock mechanism in a trustless way turns out to be massively difficult. And not just in a blockchain but really in any decentralised/distributed system. It's a famously unsolved problem.

There's some research[1] on how to go about providing a "global time"/"global clock" for cryptocurrencies without external trust assumptions but it's extraordinarily academic and most if not all systems just assume trusted time within some bound and hope for the best.

1. Permissionless Clock Synchronization with Public Setup - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220