I worked in crypto space for about 2 years ; and even tough we had great use of the crypto-system for our community ; it ended up being a large cost that we could have yielded better with something else - and it was not because specifically "crypto" - but because ultimately the engineering costs of a generic purpose chain are replicated to all child-chains. So you end up with drastic cost for something that would have seemed pretty simple to resolve. Not only that - the hole thing stinks with a lack of engineering methodology - there are so many ways to build a decentralized system and many of these are shadowed by the constraints and what-not blockchain overhead is adding. I'm not saying is *bad for everything* - i'm saying it's difficult to use properly ; and using a "chain as a service" ultimately provokes a lot of cost. For the one that stripe is providing ; I suspect it's a POA with standard implementation which is specifically tailored for building coins - and this is another subject which is very grey as indeed this provides a way to incentivize, construct "exchange contracts" for certain actions etc... - this is an interesting space - but as others are saying it's also very unregulated.

I'm cautious about these

My feeling is many people want to see change but they forget that ultimately economics is what matters.

If you can't make it economically viable, it shouldn't exist. Pure and simple.