Anyone into cryptography? Like how to generate a PGP key, or even ssh-keygen ED25199? At least some? Anything involving crypto these days are all based around 1 critical discovery: assymetric crypto
And while, sure without encryption we would not ever had commerce over the internet; and encryption ability to enable commerce on the internet is accumulative and so as time went on cryptography has enabled the sale of more and more things.
But the signatures are where the real magic is found, especially because you can keep the signature in several complex networks to enable impossible to break proof that the check if text was generated by an associated private key.
You get interesting properties doing recursive nesting.
Any innovation in cryptography will come out of functionality of signatures and their ability to verify data. Multi-signatures are a very basic example of utilizing recursive embedding mentioned above to package the signatures in a consistent set 3 packages for an escrow; and how they are packaged allows some level of programmatic control over authority, this functionality is empowered by a blockchain because then you get a reliable result for time; but in the real world timelockfunctionality was added to enable attempting to programmatically control cryptography in this way to "close the program" in a sense.