This week, airlines and many other companies worldwide are still cleaning up the mess created by a bug in a single software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

An error in the code pushed to many of the world’s largest companies last Friday caused several industries to nearly grind to a halt. The dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” forced airlines to cancel flights, disrupted critical healthcare organizations and took numerous services offline. Many are still struggling to fully come back online.

This may be a taste of what’s to come.

We’ve seen significant consolidation in tech and other key sectors in recent years. Centralization and consolidation can make certain parts of the way we live, interact and do business more convenient and efficient. It also leads to more spectacular and larger-scale failures with far-reaching collateral damage like we saw on Friday.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The antidote to centralized points of failure is decentralization

For the past 15 years, innovators have been building decentralized solutions leveraging what many believe is the antidote to the increasingly centralized world: blockchain.

When adopted at scale, decentralized infrastructure tends to not just maximize efficiency and convenience, but revolutionize how we live and work. The internet itself is a prime example.

Blockchain is still heavily associated with Bitcoin and its first use case as a new form of digital money, or cryptocurrency. While building alternatives to the still-too-centralized global banking system is important, there is a groundswell of interest and enthusiasm in so-called “tech crypto” uses (as opposed to “money crypto”). Tech crypto offers new services and alternatives to the current Big Tech oligopoly that has so much control and influence over our data and our lives.

Nine years of Ethereum and non-stop innovation ahead

The Ethereum blockchain itself is one such alternative, as it seeks to become a global computer combining the capabilities of both Big Tech and the Big Banks, while operating in a radically more transparent and equitable way than either industry would ever dream.

If our networks operate within or with the assistance of such decentralized frameworks, we might avoid frequent global headaches like we’ve seen over the past week, because decentralized systems are more robust.

Since its launch on July 30, 2015, for nine years, the massively decentralized Ethereum network has operated non-stop processing transactions and packaging them into blocks according to the publicly accessible open source specifications. And take for example a project we’re working on within Consensys.

Progressive decentralization at Consensys

Our Infura team is bringing together a number of other teams that also work at the intersection of the blockchain and legacy web to create the Decentralized Infrastructure Network, or DIN. DIN provides what we call “failover protection” for blockchains including Mantle, Optimism, Polygon, Blast, zkSync, Arbitrum, Avalanche and soon, Linea and Ethereum (both currently served by Infura). If an enterprise or user’s access to one of these chains goes down due to failure of an infrastructure provider, it automatically “fails over” to another DIN provider without compromising the safety, security and efficiency of any one network. Access is no longer centralized through a single provider. And DIN’s roadmap involves ongoing progressive decentralization. This removes traditional bottleneck issues that centralized services have not only failed to address, but perpetuated through their consolidation. Catastrophic errors can easily spread with little recourse for a quick fix.

It’s simple to see how decentralization in this context prevents the massive collateral damage we saw from a single company’s mistake last week.

Increasingly, our ecosystem of blockchain and crypto and web3 builders is providing robust, secure and decentralized new alternatives and solutions for everything from real estate transactions to, yes, cybersecurity.

There is a better way, and it’s already available to build on.

This article was originally published here.