Originally published on CloudTales , where the article also has an audio version.

Every year or two, someone asks me whether a project should “go on the blockchain”. Sometimes it is a bank, sometimes a public body, and once it was a loyalty programme. The question always arrives with a lot of enthusiasm and very few requirements.

In financial services we no longer have to guess the answer. Banks, exchanges and central banks ran the experiment at scale for ten years, with real budgets. This post turns those results into a short checklist. Then it shows what I build when the honest answer is “no”: a tamper-evident ledger table on Azure SQL that you can try for free in about fifteen minutes.

The checklist

These are the questions I ask, in this order:

Most requests stop at the first or second box. The rest usually end at the last one: the client does not need a shared ledger at all.…