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This is obviously a trivial point, but the word blockchain seems to have lost its definite article.

eg (from the linked article): "Last month, Symbiont, which plans to use blockchain to make ..."

"Other firms investigating finance-related uses of blockchain ..."

exactly. Wall Street is enamored with distributed databases, i.e. "shared replicated ledgers". Not the specific bitcoin blockchain or cryptocurrency.

Blockchain as a term has become a bit like Kleenex. It's just a generic term to describe a distributed database