In the annals of technological progress, certain moments stand as turning points when innovation has reached critical mass, catalyzing explosive growth and global adoption. These “Cambrian explosions” fundamentally reshape the way we live and work. Artificial intelligence has had its Cambrian moment. After decades of slow evolution, breakthroughs, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), have propelled AI from niche applications to transformative technology. Blockchain, in contrast, remains in limbo. It has yet to experience its Cambrian explosion. What has stopped it from reaching this transformative inflection point? The answer lies in its inability to overcome critical technical barriers, particularly in storage, preventing Web3 from fulfilling its potential as the successor to Web2. Web3 was envisioned as a decentralized upgrade to Web2, offering all its capabilities — plus a lot more — within a user-owned, trustless framework. The dream was to create decentralized versions of popular Web2 apps such as Airbnb, Wikipedia and X, with data privacy, content ownership and permissionless access at their core while enabling new kinds of applications impossible in centralized systems.

Full opinion : AI has experienced its Cambrian explosion, while blockchain technology remains in limbo.