Berkan Y. Altun, Technology Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and Founder of base1 Capital.
Most innovation programs begin with a familiar question: What new technology should we adopt? In my experience, a more useful question is: What kind of trust problem are we trying to solve?
That distinction matters. A new tool can impress a boardroom and still fail in the field if it adds complexity without changing behavior. Useful innovation reduces friction at a point where people already struggle: proving authenticity, shortening a decision cycle, preserving institutional memory or making a process easier to audit.
A recent public-sector example is worth studying. In a public announcement, Türkiye’s Directorate of Communications introduced cbiletisim.eth, a decentralized web presence connected to IPFS, ENS and public-blockchain archive records. ENS Domains also highlighted the implementation, which is notable because the project is not framed around speculation. It is framed around verification.
The human detail matters too. Buğra Ayan, the department lead behind the implementation, shows an important lesson for business leaders: innovation rarely advances because a technology is fashionable. It advances when someone inside the organization can translate a technical possibility into an operational use case.
The lesson is not to move everything onto decentralized infrastructure. It is to start with the smallest trust gap worth solving. In this case, the trust gap is public verification. Instead of asking people to rely only on a single website, announcement or file location, the architecture creates additional ways to confirm that a publication is connected to the institution and retrieve it through content-addressed infrastructure. IPFS is built around content-addressing and peer-to-peer storage, while the W3C decentralized identifier standard defines identifiers that can resolve to documents describing verification methods and service endpoints.
Define The Verification Problem First
Leaders should avoid approving emerging-technology projects under broad labels such as digital transformation, Web3 or artificial intelligence. Those labels do not define success. A better starting point is a precise operating question: What needs to be easier to prove, preserve, audit or retrieve?
When the problem is clear, technology choices become more disciplined. A team can decide whether it needs a public archive, a private audit trail, a stronger identity layer, better metadata, a tamper-evident log or simply a cleaner internal workflow. Precision reduces the risk of building an expensive demonstration that does not change the work.
Make Trust Usable
Technical credibility is not enough. Users need a simple path. A human-readable name, a clear verification page and plain-language instructions can matter as much as the underlying architecture. If stakeholders cannot understand how to verify a record, the system may be technically elegant but operationally weak.
This principle applies well beyond decentralized web projects. Supply-chain records, investor updates, compliance archives, credentials and internal approvals all benefit when the verification path is simple enough for nontechnical users to follow.
Separate Infrastructure From Speculation
Many organizations still conflate decentralized infrastructure with financial hype. That is a mistake. The business question is not whether a token price moves. It is whether open, verifiable infrastructure can reduce dependence on a single point of failure and improve confidence in shared records.
This separation protects the project. It keeps the discussion focused on governance, resilience, identity, access, continuity and user value. It also helps executives evaluate the work without being distracted by market narratives that have little to do with the operational problem.
Design Maintenance Before Launch
Innovation should not end at announcement. A decentralized presence still needs ownership. Who can update the records? Who can rotate keys? How are mistakes corrected? What happens if a gateway fails? Who explains the system to legal, communications and security teams?
These questions may sound mundane, but they determine whether a pilot becomes infrastructure. The strongest innovation teams treat maintenance, governance and incident response as part of the product, not as afterthoughts.
Measure Behavior, Not Headlines
A pilot is succeeding if it changes how work gets done. Are fewer people asking for manual confirmation? Are records easier to audit? Are stakeholders retrieving the right version faster? Are teams more confident that an archive will remain accessible across channels?
Public recognition can be useful, but adoption is the better signal. Innovation becomes valuable when it reduces ambiguity in daily decisions.
The broader lesson for founders, CIOs and public-sector technology leaders is that innovation should be treated as a capability, not a showcase. The best implementations are often quiet. They reduce manual checks, reduce ambiguous records, reduce dependency on one channel and increase confidence among the people who need to act on information.
As organizations face rising cyber risk, fragmented digital channels and information disorder, the winner is not always the one with the newest platform. It is often the one with the clearest verification model.
Before approving any emerging-technology project, leaders should ask three questions: What can a stakeholder verify independently after this launches? What operational risk is reduced? What behavior changes because the system exists?
If those answers are clear, the project has a chance to become more than a pilot. If they are not, the organization may be mistaking novelty for progress. Real innovation is not the adoption of a new label. It is the creation of a better trust mechanism that survives beyond the announcement.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
