Picture a city that runs on invisible wires. Freight lorries roll out of automated depots, aircraft queue on smart runways, and tills scan goods before the shopper even reaches the exit. Now imagine one privileged account being hijacked and those wires starting to fray. The recent four–day assault by the Scattered Spider group showed exactly how quickly a single set of credentials can set off a chain reaction across retail, logistics and transport.
That incident, along with a sharp uptick in warnings from the FBI about aviation and connected operational technology, has forced investors to reassess the assumptions they once made about risk. As 5G-enabled infrastructure scales and the Internet of Things seeps into every depot and terminal, the attack surface is exploding faster than most firms can respond. Against this backdrop, venture capital is flowing into start-ups that place trust at the centre of their design, and they are doing so by leaning on decentralised architectures.
The trust deficit in critical infrastructure
Most connected systems still rely on central points of authority: credential vaults, orchestration servers, cloud consoles. Attackers have learned to aim straight at those choke-points. Breach one, and the dominoes fall. The trust model that served early cloud adopters is struggling to keep up with borderless supply chains and autonomous logistics.
VCs see a widening gap between the assurance enterprises need and the protection that traditional perimeter-centric tools can offer. It is a gap that decentralised technology promises to close.
Decentralisation as a security primitive
Blockchain is often pitched as a solution searching for a problem. In industrial settings, however, its intrinsic qualities – immutability, distributed consensus and cryptographic audit – map neatly to the need for tamper-evident logs and machine-to-machine trust. Combine that with verifiable credentials, peer-to-peer data meshes and zero-knowledge proofs, and you have an environment in which a single compromised node has limited blast radius.
Early adopters are layering these primitives beneath logistics platforms, maintenance sensors and passenger-facing services. The result is a move from “trust but verify” to “verify, then trust”.
The investor lens
Why does this matter to venture capital? Three reasons stand out:
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Risk arbitrage
Insurance premiums for critical infrastructure have soared. Technologies that lower breach probability and regulatory penalties have a clear economic story. -
Regulatory headroom
Frameworks such as the EU’s DORA and the UK’s incoming regulations on digital supply-chain resilience push liability onto operators. Solutions that demonstrate provable control inheritance and forensic transparency are becoming compliance shortcuts. -
Market timing
5G private networks, satellite backhaul and edge compute are converging right now. Platforms that bake trust into those layers are positioned to win multi-decade contracts before incumbents can re-architect.
Impact beyond the hype
VC-backed firms are already piloting distributed identity wallets for crew authentication, asset tokenisation for aircraft maintenance records, and smart-contract escrow for freight hand-offs. Early data suggests:
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Reduced incident response time
Shared ledgers cut forensic reconstruction by days, because provenance is built in. -
Lower vendor lock-in
Open protocols make swapping suppliers less painful, pushing integrators toward higher service quality. -
Community-driven standards
Projects often grow in public repos, encouraging peer review and faster patch cycles.
What to watch next
Expect capital to shift from generic blockchain platforms toward domain-specific stacks that solve narrow, high-value problems: secure data-sharing for rail signalling, decentralised PKI for drone corridors, and privacy-preserving analytics for passenger flow optimisation. Keep an eye on start-ups that treat governance as code and integrate hardware roots of trust right at the silicon layer.
Decentralisation is not a silver bullet, and the hype cycle will claim its share of casualties. Yet for investors chasing resilience rather than buzzwords, trust-first architectures offer tangible, defensible value. As smart infrastructure cements itself in every corner of modern life, the winning technologies will be the ones that make compromise harder, detection faster and recovery cheaper.
If you would like to delve deeper, the latest episode of the SECURE | CYBER CONNECT podcast explores how decentralised models are reshaping security economics. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/c5e2EW0ErnE?si=VjJinQAaWWUYjHPx
Need help navigating the talent side of decentralised security? Get in touch and let us connect you with the people who build tomorrow’s trust anchors.
