Blockchain: Was It All Just Another One Of Those ASX Crazes? And Will The AI Boom Be A Repeat?

The ASX has plenty of crazes or bubbles and blockchain craze of the late 2010s was another. Between 2017 and 2021, scarcely a week passed without a junior ASX company announcing a pivot to distributed ledger technology (DLT), often with little more than a white paper and a rebranded website to show for it. Investors obliged enthusiastically, bidding up anything with “blockchain” in the corporate strategy.

Then artificial intelligence arrived, consumed most of the oxygen in the room, and blockchain quietly receded from the headlines. So what actually became of it all? The answer, it turns out, depends heavily on which layer of the ecosystem you are examining. Some companies went placed, but none of them were the ASX small caps that were subjct to significant hype.

Blockchain: From Hype to Hangover

The peak of the blockchain craze coincided, almost precisely, with the Bitcoin price run of late 2017 and the ICO (initial coin offering) frenzy that accompanied it. Bitcoin nearly hit US$20,000 which was a record at the time but then crashed and didn’t see that level again until late 2020.

Dozens of ASX-listed companies rushed to rebadge operations as blockchain plays. Most delivered nothing of commercial substance. By 2019 the correction was well underway, and the broader crypto winter of 2022 finished off most of the stragglers.

Perhaps the most instructive cautionary tale belongs not to a speculative micro-cap but to the exchange itself. The ASX committed to replacing its post-trade settlement system (CHESS) with a blockchain-based alternative, commissioning the US firm Digital Asset to build it. The project consumed years of development and ultimately resulted in a write-off of more than A$250m before being abandoned in late 2022.

In August 2024, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission sued ASX over the matter, alleging misleading and deceptive conduct in its communications to the market about the project’s readiness. The exchange subsequently engaged India’s Tata Consultancy Services to deliver a conventional software replacement. It was, as one observer noted, a cautionary tale writ large: the technology proved immature for the performance requirements of a major exchange, and the governance around its development was found wanting.

Has Blockchain Gone Anywhere?

The short answer is yes, though not in the way its evangelists predicted. The grand vision of a blockchain-disrupted everything, from land registries to healthcare to global trade finance, has not materialised at scale. What has materialised, more quietly and more durably, is a set of genuinely useful applications concentrated in a narrower range of use cases: digital asset custody, stablecoins, tokenisation of real-world assets, and infrastructure for decentralised finance.

In Q1 2025, blockchain and crypto startups globally raised A$4.8bn (in USD terms), the strongest quarter since late 2022, with capital concentrating into larger rounds rather than broad seed-stage experimentation. That pattern, fewer deals but bigger ones, suggests the market is maturing rather than collapsing. Tokenisation of real-world assets, from real estate to commodities, is attracting significant institutional attention, with the Boston Consulting Group projecting a compound annual growth rate of 53% from 2025 to 2033 as the market expands from approximately US$600bn toward US$18.9tn. These reflect observable deployments by major financial institutions but this is still a highly optimistic assumption – can anything grow so much at the same rate for 8 years?

The relationship between blockchain and AI has also evolved in ways that were not obvious at the outset of the AI boom. As enterprise tools adopt more AI capabilities, a new challenge has emerged around auditing decisions made by machines. Blockchain is being positioned as the audit layer for autonomous AI, anchoring AI activity with tamper-proof logs and offering compliance teams a transparent, verifiable trail of digital intent. In that framing, the two technologies are complementary rather than competitive, which may explain why blockchain investment has held up even as AI has dominated the venture capital narrative.

Later in 2025, focus shifted to the x402 protocol, a decentralised blockchain-based payment standard designed specifically for autonomous AI agents and machine-to-machine transactions, with technology leaders including Google Cloud, AWS, and Anthropic adopting it quickly. The protocol enables real-time, low-cost micropayments for API access, data, and compute, supporting what analysts describe as the emerging machine-centric economy.

The ASX Blockchain Cohort: Who Actually Made It?

Against this backdrop, the question for Australian investors is which ASX-exposed blockchain businesses built something real. The short answer is that the list is short.

DigitalX (ASX: DCC) is the most credible survivor. Originally listed in 2014 as a digital payments company, DigitalX has progressively repositioned itself as a digital asset investment manager and treasury operator. By October 2025, the company reported total treasury holdings of A$98.4m, with significant Bitcoin exposure underpinning its so-called 21 Hundred Bitcoin strategy. It is also Australia’s only ASX-listed crypto fund manager and manages Australia’s first ASX-listed spot Bitcoin ETF.

That is a legitimate and differentiated business, though it is worth noting that DCC’s fortunes remain substantially correlated to Bitcoin’s price cycle rather than to operating cash flow in the conventional sense. The market cap, sitting near A$40m as of mid 2026, reflects both the real progress and the residual volatility discount. It is nonetheless a company that has translated an early positioning in digital assets into a functioning asset management operation, which is more than most of its 2017-era peers can claim.

Power Ledger was, for a period, one of the more compelling blockchain stories to emerge from Australia. It never listed on the ASX despite rumours that it was going to, but still was a ‘home grown’ story. Power Ledger was founded in Perth in 2016 by Dr Jemma Green and John Bulich,and raised global attention for its peer-to-peer renewable energy trading platform, built on a dual blockchain architecture.

Dr Green won Sir Richard Branson’s Extreme Tech Challenge in 2018, along with the EY Fintech Entrepreneur of the Year award. The company has since relocated its legal domicile to Zug, Switzerland (a common move for blockchain firms seeking regulatory clarity) although its annual revenue was reported at approximately A$5.6m in 2025.

That figure is modest for a company with a decade-long runway and global deployments across Australia, Thailand, India, Japan, and the United States, but it does represent a functioning commercial operation. In August 2025, Powerledger announced integration of its renewable energy certificate marketplace, TraceX, with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, suggesting continued commercial momentum in a market where policy tailwinds for clean energy tracking are strengthening.

Most other ASX blockchain names from the 2017-2021 cohort fared considerably worse. Identitii (ASX: ID8) and Kyckr (ASX: KYK), both of which developed blockchain-assisted compliance tools for the financial sector, remained sub-scale operations that struggled to convert plausible use cases into material revenue. NoviqTech (ASX: NVQ) has more recently committed to the blockchain space through investments in Hedera (HBAR) tokens, with total holdings of approximately A$250,000 invested across 2024, positioning itself around ESG compliance and supply chain traceability applications. Whether that constitutes a meaningful business or a positioning exercise remains to be seen.

The Honest Assessment

Blockchain has not gone nowhere. It has, however, gone somewhere considerably more specific and narrow than its 2017 boosters promised. The genuinely durable applications, digital asset custody, stablecoin infrastructure, tokenisation, and on-chain audit trails for AI, are real and growing. The applications that were never viable, such as using a public blockchain to replace a national stock exchange’s clearing engine, have been exposed as such.

For ASX investors, the lesson is that blockchain, like most enabling technologies, produces durable value only when it is solving a problem that existing infrastructure cannot address efficiently. DigitalX has found that niche in digital asset management. Powerledger has found a narrow one in energy certificate trading. The rest, by and large, did not.

The blockchain craze produced a great deal of activity and very few businesses. That, arguably, is the standard outcome of any technology hype cycle, and it does not diminish the genuine utility that the survivors have carved out. Just look at the dot com bubble: There were survivors like Amazon, but also victims like Pets.com and plenty who bought the former also bought the latter.

Whether AI faces a similar reckoning is a question worth asking. The parallels are imperfect but not entirely inapt.