In written responses shared with Bitcoin.com News, Bloom asserts that mass adoption of Web3 will not occur without such storage solutions. He believes the technology won’t reach its full potential until this challenge is addressed. Although some blockchains have made strides in improving network or transaction speeds, Bloom argues that storage remains the key hurdle to overcoming the blockchain trilemma.

Bloom meanwhile compares the current state of Web3 to artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1980s, a period of stagnation. He believes, that just as the invention of artificial neural networks (ANNs) sparked rapid growth in AI applications, a similar innovation could trigger an explosion of Web3 applications.

Below are the Xandeum Labs co-founder’s answers to the questions sent.

Bernie Bloom (BB): Thanks for that great question. That is the very reason I started working on this trilemma – I can’t see anyone else focusing on this, and I do believe it’s a huge problem that is preventing web3 from getting wide adoption. We need a storage solution, scalable to exabytes and beyond, that is both random access and is actually built for, with and into smart contracts.

So that we can make that “world computer” – that smart contract blockchains are – whole. The only place to store stuff in smart contracts today are accounts – and these accounts just don’t scale with regard to capacity. They are just the RAM of the world computer. Xandeum is adding the badly needed disk.

BB: Yes I hear that all the time: “Why does Solana need a scaling solution?”. It is true that the blockchain industry has achieved great success in scaling. For TPS, that is. We have Solana, Ethereum L2s, Avalanche, etc. However – none of them is even trying to address the need for a scalable storage layer. We are lacking a crucial component here. There is a major gap in what the blockchain industry has delivered so far.

BB: Yes, absolutely. If Web3 is supposed to take over from Web2, it must have some base technology to support a wide spectrum of apps, just as web2 has. We made blockchain programmable in 2015 – but that is just giving us the CPU and RAM of a huge platform to run apps on. The storage is missing.

BB: One simple example is a decentralized version of Wikipedia. People have been arguing about that in the past few years. While Wikipedia is “open”, meaning “anyone” can access and edit, it is still 100% centralized in the sense that a single organization, and in the of Wikipedia likely a single person, can do anything to the Wikipedia database: Censor you, erase you edit history, even add fake edits under your name. The content moderation policies are also being created and enforced in a centralized way.

There are a lot of voices calling for a decentralized version of Wikipedia. Xandeum is actually building Xandipedia as their first demo app. The Wikipedia database is about 250GB, so it cannot be stored in accounts – we need scalable storage for that. Xandipedia will demo the power of Xandeum to the world. And it’s easy to see: If we can decentralize Wikipedia, we can decentralize Airbnb, Ebay, X, and so much more.

BB: We already have scalable decentralized storage, such as Filecoin, Arweave etc. But – as you are pointing out – these are not smart contract native and in many cases not random access. When I say random access I mean something like a Unix file system, where you can open files for reading or writing, position (seek) to any position within the file, read or (over)write an arbitrary number of bytes, delete files etc. These file system like, random access structures have been proven to enable an unbelievably wide spectrum of apps – while web3 currently seems a bit “crippled” and lacking versatility.

BB: Look, web3 is stuck in a rut. We were in a similar place with AI in the 1980s. Everyone knew AI is going to change the world, but we were just not able to deliver on the promises. All we had was inept expert systems, the Prolog programming language and similar things. Many people lost interest in AI because we just couldn’t deliver. Then, something interesting happened. ANNs, artificial neural networks were invented. That changed everything.

Suddenly, we had the breeding ground to make AI happen, to spark a Cambrian Explosion of thousands of new “species” of AI applications. Sparking that same Cambrian Explosion of new species of web3 apps has always been my north star. I couldn’t be more excited to work on helping get this accomplished. It will help humanity accelerate our journey on becoming more and more self-determined and decentralized.

BB: We are working closely with our legal team, from currently 4 different law firms, to navigate the jungle that’s out there. Much needs to be simplified with regards to regulations. That said, luckily we haven’t found any obstacles that are specific to our product – just the usual suspects for blockchain and data storage in general.

BB: The blockchain storage trilemma, in my opinion, is really the single most important problem to solve in order to enable blockchain technology versatile enough to support a broad spectrum of apps. Let’s build the Xandeum storage layer.