But I've heard a lot less about how much of that supposed potential has actually been realised.
Every time I meet someone who has anything to say about anything blockchain-related I ask if they can point to a current, real-world blockchain project that isn't basically a cryptocurrency and has made it past being just a prototype or an idea.
Literally nobody I've asked has been able to come up with anything that meets those criteria.
Can you?
Another is that p2p projects are really hard to get rolling in general. Crypto was supposed to incentivize this, and we saw how that went.
Non-financial use cases would rely on a blockchain's tamper resistance: like timestamp hashes for proof that a video happened at a certain time (only relavant if this video is alleged to be faked), or something like NameCoin which was a tamper-resistant DNS prototype. Some people are trying to implement digital identity with blockchains, and others are trying to build a social layer in such a way where you own your 'social/friend network' and can view it with any ux you choose.
I think basically all of the marketing-hucksters have rotated into AI (IBM is running ads for AI, not blockchains), so the hype is muted compared to 2017 or so.
It's not a terribly interesting answer, but you've asked your question in an uninterested way.
Since there are a lot of good and bad, intrinsic and extrinsic reasons tech does and does not get adopted, I think a better question might be: "Without any BS or deceptive rationalization, what's something that blockchain really would be better at?"
Crypto has no legitimate use case other than speculation and enablement of ransomware and encouragement of financial and economic nihilism.
It's too slow, not stable, not backed by anything ever, not used in the real world and certainly not useful to anyone other than scammers.
Stay away.
It's been awhile since I've followed blockchain tech closely, but with the increasing power of AI tools and the potential for deepfakes, I can see a use case for blockchain in verifying that a photograph is real and not AI-generated.
I also think blockchain is an ideal technology for a world that no longer trusts central authorities. That world seems...increasingly likely to me, so in some sense blockchain's real use case may not have arrived yet. This is not unique or rare; many times in history, a technology's "real use" is not apparent until decades or centuries after its invention. People declaring something dead or useless a decade after its invention are frankly ignorant of how the world actually works.
This, I believe, is being used to verify identities of students in Ethiopian universities.
Maybe reach out to them or look more if they have any notable users willing to share their use case?