In the history of technological progress, there are certain moments that mark turning points, when innovation reaches critical mass, leading to explosive growth and global adoption. These moments, known as “Cambrian explosions,” fundamentally reshape the way we live and work.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has already experienced its Cambrian moment. After years of slow evolution, breakthroughs such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) have propelled AI from niche applications to transformative technology.
On the other hand, blockchain is still waiting for its Cambrian explosion. It has yet to reach its transformative inflection point.
So, what has prevented blockchain from reaching this point? The answer lies in its inability to overcome critical technical barriers, particularly in storage. This has hindered Web3 from fully realizing its potential as the successor to Web2.
Web3 was envisioned as a decentralized upgrade to Web2, offering all the capabilities of Web2 within a user-owned, trustless framework. The dream was to create decentralized versions of popular Web2 apps, such as Airbnb, Wikipedia, and others, with data privacy, content ownership, and permissionless access at their core. It also aimed to enable new kinds of applications that were impossible in centralized systems.
However, the reality is quite different. Despite the promise of blockchain, Web3 only supports a fraction of the breadth of Web2 applications. Not a single central Web2 app has been successfully replicated in a decentralized version. There is no decentralized Airbnb, Wikipedia, or blockchain-powered platform.
The inability to scale and replicate these essential Web2 services reveals a sobering truth: blockchain is stuck. It has yet to overcome the barriers holding it back. Until these barriers are overcome, the vision of Web3 as the successor to Web2 will remain unfulfilled.
One critical technical challenge that has hindered blockchain’s evolution is the storage trilemma. To compete with Web2 applications, Web3 needs a data storage system that is scalable, smart contract-native, and capable of random access. However, achieving all three has proven to be difficult.
Web2 applications handle massive amounts of data, such as social media posts, marketplaces, and multimedia libraries. For blockchain to host similar services, it must scale affordably and efficiently. Existing blockchain storage solutions struggle to meet the demands of high-traffic, data-intensive applications.
Without scalable storage, Web3 cannot replicate the seamless experiences users expect from decentralization. Most scalable storage solutions, such as cloud services, rely on centralized infrastructure, undermining privacy, security, and autonomy. For Web3 to fulfill its vision, data storage must remain decentralized without sacrificing performance.
In addition, Web2 apps excel at instant retrieval of specific data, while blockchain uses sequential data access, making it cumbersome for applications that require quick, precise queries. Smart contracts will always be computationally inefficient without random access capabilities, leaving Web3 applications feeling clunky and inadequate compared to their Web2 counterparts.
To crack the storage trilemma, a combination of random access for fast and efficient retrieval of any data piece, coupled with seamless smart contract integration for secure automated data management, is necessary. Solving the storage trilemma is crucial for blockchain applications to realize their full potential.
Blockchain infrastructure is evolving to solve the storage trilemma, creating a system that can seamlessly scale to handle the data-intensive needs of global applications. Once fully developed and deployed across leading crypto networks, this infrastructure will integrate natively into smart contracts, enabling rapid and computationally efficient execution. It will also provide random access, meeting the speed and precision expectations of Web2 applications and bridging the gap between traditional and decentralized technologies.
Achieving this will enable decentralized versions of popular platforms and power a wave of new applications and use cases. Transparent, user-owned marketplaces, privacy-respecting social networks, and tamper-proof knowledge repositories could thrive on this foundation. Moreover, developers will no longer face insurmountable technical barriers, allowing innovation to flourish and users to experience the benefits of data ownership and security.
Blockchain’s potential is undeniable, but its Cambrian explosion depends on solving the storage trilemma. Just as AI needed the breakthrough of ANNs to realize its transformative power, blockchain must overcome its technical limitations to fulfill the vision of Web3. The good news is that this moment will come—it’s just a matter of when. When it does, blockchain will finally live up to its billing as the foundation for a decentralized, user-owned internet.
Bernie Blume is the founder and CEO of Xandeum Labs and a serial entrepreneur. Previously, Bernie launched Antsle, ran Xionet, and managed large software projects at Lufthansa and IBM.
This article is for general information purposes and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views of Cointelegraph.