Blockchain may be an essential building block leading the next data-storage revolution, according to Deloitte Chief Futurist Mike Bechtel.

Blockchain has seen a transformative year, finally shaking its crypto associations and proliferating across various industries. In telecom, the technology has been adopted by major carriers like Verizon for dispute settlement with wholesale partners.

Deloitte, in its latest "Tech Trends Report," identified “trustless” systems like blockchain and Web3 as emerging technologies that will drive the final “act” to data storage’s three-part play.

“When you really pull the camera back, the 20th century was about miniaturization. Single computers getting smaller and smaller … the last 10 years was this transitory phase where it was now about virtualization,” Bechtel told SDxCentral.

Then came "the cloud – moving all of your stuff off your desk into a bunch of other people's desks. Well, decentralization, our research suggests, is just the third act,” he continued.

Bechtel believes cloud-native warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks created an essential ease to data sharing – where older “calcified” data warehouses made information much less accessible.

“A lot of that on-premises data’s first step is moving up to these cloud warehouses, so that companies can finally start to say, ‘I'd like to mix this stuff from my firm with that stuff from their firm to create better-together value,’” he explained.

“Step one is moving from [on-premises] to cloud. In turn, with decentralized architectures, ecosystems, and Web3, what that's going to start to offer up is this idea of maybe I don't want to put all my eggs in just one cloud provider's basket. Maybe I can start to spread my data across tens, dozens, thousands, and eventually millions [of providers], and trust cryptography.”

But in this move to decentralize and democratize, the issue of trust becomes paramount. "How can I solve a trust problem, a multi-party, data-management problem, a provenance problem? Blockchain can be very useful for some of these actual gritty needs," Bechtel beckoned.

According to Bechtel, an enterprise is not “encumbered or slowed down” by the nature of a technology, but rather “the degree to which they understand and trust these emerging techs: that's the real governor on the engine as to whether or not they're going to see real value created.”

The sentiment echoed GlobalData’s 2022 finding that 41.4% of surveyed global executives responded either not knowing about blockchain’s substance or attributing it to puffery.

“I've been working in all things newfangled for 25 years … and I've never seen an emerging tech with an image problem like blockchain,” Bechtel said, noting that when it first emerged 13 years ago, it was clouded by “dark actors and a dark web trading dark things. It didn't feel ready for business.”

That seems to be finally changing.

“We're finally starting to see organizations say, it's not about the shiny hammer – it's about the rusty nail,” Bechtel said, noting that need is now the driving force for blockchain adoption and decentralized systems of trust.

Be it preventing and mitigating child labor in Africa, gem authentication, health care patient information, or fraud prevention, Deloitte is finding that blockchain is now bringing the security it first brought to digital currency to a vast number of industries.

“Using all the terms we associate with digital money – immutability, non-fungibility, etc. – they're able to look back and ensure that any given piece of the supply chain is sourced ethically, fairly, and visibly,” Bechtel explained, adding that this will be the natural step to democratize the cloudification of data storage.