I have no such need for a large decentralized network responsible for handling my money as I have access to regulated (albeit not enough) financial institutions in the US and USD.
IPFS/BitTorrent/Matrix is cool though. Can any of this research help in those areas?
The networking technology from IPFS/etc will likely be helpful. Something a little different about Ethereum shards is that it needs stronger guarantees on data availability. On the other hand it's less ambitious in terms of total storage capacity.
I tend to get heavily downvoted here whenever I suggest that Ethereum might be useful for something, so I tend to keep my comments strictly technical. But I'll take a chance and say that Uniswap, for example, is a pretty interesting financial innovation with no equivalent in legacy finance. And just the other day, the International Emissions Trading Association published a statement saying:
> Digital tools hold the potential to revolutionise monitoring, reporting and verification, and they offer new means for highly secure, transparent and globally accessible registry infrastructure. There are also innovations in asset formation, such as issuing carbon credits in the form of digital credits or native tokens secured on a public blockchain.
IPFS/BitTorrent/Matrix is cool though. Can any of this research help in those areas?