Decentralisation is, in some cases, a property of blockchains that is critical to the permissionless nature and, in other cases, pursued for its own merit. In many cases, especially when putting applications on top of a blockchain, some aspects of decentralisation are not required although they do not hurt the cause.

Crypto Finance's Head of Research, Dr. Lewin Boehnke, tries to walk this fine line and make sense of both successful and failed cases of building centralised applications on a decentralised platform.