The History of The Internet Computer In 10 Steps
Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” This post aims to put the Internet Computer in historical context for those that want more depth, by taking you from inception, to where we are today, in 10 steps.
This post is part of a bigger post — Red Pill, Blue Pill — The Hidden History Of The Internet Computer, And Why It Will Win.
The following post contains technical context you need to understand the project, reports from the trenches, including sometimes controversial accounts of the battles we have fought, and then provides information about game-changing developments in the wings, which will take us into the future.
If you just want to understand the technical background, and skip the full journey, and read sections 1, 2 and 8. Reading 10 is also useful if you want a summary of incoming changes. Then proceed to “Why It Will Win.”
Every section is preceded by a TL;DR section designed to give you the low down in a few words for those that wish to scan through quickly.
- The World Computer Mission
- Smart Contracts Are “Magic Internet Software”
- The Challenges of Evangelizing Technical Heresies
- String Labs And DFINITY’s 2017 ICO
- Amazing Hires, And The First Test Network
- Now We Biltzscaled R&D And Operations
- Overcoming Frustrations With The Rate of Progress
- DFINITY’s Final Push To Launch
- Launch, Attacks, Survival, And More Progress
- Game-changing Developments
1. The World Computer Mission
TL;DR — I was working to find ways to create real “world computer” blockchains, which could host humanity’s online systems and services fully on their networks, in revolutionary new ways, as an alternative to traditional IT such as cloud services — essentially reinventing compute.
The word “Dfinity” is a portmanteau of the words “decentralized” and “infinity” that I began using for my personal blockchain research in early 2015. By then, I had already been working to advance blockchain technology for some time.
Traditional blockchain networks playing the role of smart contract platforms could only host tiny amounts of compute and data. Even today, in 2024, the very most optimized proof-of-stake blockchains around, which bill themselves as fast and scalable, remain unable to match a Raspberry Pi computer. It is usually impractical to have them store even a single photo taken with a phone.
By contrast, humanity’s online systems and services are hosted by fifty million or more powerful server machines — and every year, more than ten million new server machines are shipped worldwide. This infrastructure is currently helping capture and process more than 100 zettabytes of data.
But despite the relative limitations of blockchains, I could see that smart contract software provided game-changing benefits with respect to computation and data storage, for example being inherently secure, so that it does not need the protection of cybersecurity measures like firewalls and anti-malware. Why, I asked, couldn’t blockchains be reimagined as our next compute platform?
Like many in our industry, I’d originally been drawn to blockchain by Satoshi’s revolutionary thinking and the wonder of Bitcoin. I wanted to develop threads of his thinking to fix traditional IT — having gained an thorough understanding of its shortcomings after spending many years as an engineering entrepreneur, which I became after having written my first software at 10 years old.
By the time I was pursuing Dfinity research, I was an early member of the Ethereum community, and had heard the wonderful expression “world computer.”
The concept had transfixed me, because technical insights, gained through experience working with cryptography and distributed computing, led me to believe it would be possible to create a world computer blockchain that could scale and run efficiently. This could host whole online systems and services, fully on-chain, in addition to the tokens, NFTs and DeFi found on traditional blockchains. It could also be combined with traditional blockchains to enable their services to achieve “full stack decentralization.”
A plan formed to take blockchain directly from one extreme — networks with less compte capacity than a Raspberry Pi — to the other — networks with unlimited compute capacity that could eventually compete with traditional IT and its legion of server machines (which today, are often repackaged in the form of cloud services).
One popular way to approach scaling blockchains, has been to look for ways to add more capacity to traditional blockchains incrementally, rather like the Ethereum community is doing today with its Layer-2 rollup networks. However, this can only take you so far, and to avoid getting stuck with the technical challenges involved with updating technology to perform tasks it was never designed for, I aimed to go straight to a built-for-purpose solution — a third generation blockchain.
Using advanced computer science, I worked to reimagine blockchain from the ground up, so that, for example, it could even host a social network. Everything needed to be reimagined, and nothing much could be carried over from traditional blockchain technology. Many things had to be different. For example, hosted smart contract software needed to be able to process HTTP requests, so that it could serve interactive web experiences directly to users, since otherwise a reliance on traditional IT would remain. And smart contracts had to pay for their own computation, so they could stay in the background and users could interact without wallets.
As I saw things, world computer blockchains would extend the functionality of the internet, so that as well as connecting everyone and everything, the internet would also play the role of a public backend compute platform, upon which online systems and services could be built using reimagined “smart contract” software.
Smart contract software runs without the need for cybersecurity protections, and it’s unstoppable. It can also run autonomously under the control of DAOs, providing a way to give internet communities control of the services they used. The potential was obvious.
I wanted cypherspace — the extension of cyberspace created by decentralized networks powered by cryptography — to play the role of a public cloud with game-changing features.
Compute is a core foundation of modern societies. Reinventing backend compute on blockchain would be incredibly impactful — and so I decided to dedicate myself to the task.
I would aim to eventually make blockchain the default choice for building online systems and services, and set a “blockchain singularity” in motion.
2. Smart Contracts Are “Magic Internet Software”
TL;DR — Software powers almost everything in the modern world, and smart contracts are a new kind of software that deliver game-changing advantages. These range from removing reliance on the fallible protections of cybersecurity, to creating new kinds of internet services, and empowering users and entrepreneurs and developers around the world…
When I switched to working full time in blockchain, I had already gained broad experience and computer science skills. My guess is that I had written millions of lines of code, working across anything and everything, and this gave me a crucial insight: smart contracts are in fact a completely new kind of software.
Seeing beyond the limitations of early smart contract software of the type that runs on traditional blockchains, I could see that the innate advantages of smart contract software will inevitably eventually make it the backend software of choice for nearly everything.
Andreessen Horowitz, the well-known venture capitalist, has a motto that “software is eating the world,” and I began to say that “smart contracts will eat (traditional backend) software.”
Anyone can understand the advantages — you don’t have to be a techie or software engineer. Here they are:
They’re unstoppable: Whereas normal software programs can simply crash, losing all their data held in the computer’s memory, then needing to be restarted, smart contracts are guaranteed to always run, and their data is guaranteed to be available. Whereas software programs run on computers that can crash and need rebooting, again wiping memory, smart contracts run on “blockchain computers” that never stop. Systems and services built from smart contracts are vastly more resilient.
They’re tamperproof. This is another way of saying they are hackproof, in the sense they are guaranteed to always run their written code (i.e. logic), aginst their correct state (i.e. data). They don’t need the protection of firewalls to prevent hackers finding backdoors though which they can come in and subvert them, nor anti-malware, for example to prevent them getting encrypted by ransomware. They don’t need the protection of cybersecurity systems. Systems and services built from smart contracts are vastly more secure, as well as resilient.
They’re autonomous: Software running on your computer, runs under your control, as you can switch it off, modify its logic, and change its data. Software running on Amazon Web Services, runs under their control in a similar way, and under the control of whoever has the username and password of the account involved. This means we have to trust whoever runs that software, who is a kind of “intermediary.” By contrast, smart contract software can exist in a mode where nobody can modify its logic or data, or switch it off. They can also be placed under the control of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) — providing a means to hand control of online systems and services to internet communities, taking the web3 paradigm much further.
They’re serverless: To build an online system or service using traditional IT, we have to combine “platform software” like web servers, databases, load balancers, application servers, and much more, which usually runs on different server computers. Things get complex, sapping productivity, and it’s hard to make them resilient (they are also insecure, as mentioned above). By contrast, smart contract software resides within a seamless “serverless” environment, where there’s just code and data. The complexity is greatly diminished, and developers can focus on what matters, greatly increasing their productivity, and reducing TTM (Time To Market).
They’re composable: Inside the serverless environment where smart contratcts reside, permissions allowing, a smart contract can directly call into the logic of another smart contract, making them highly composable, even when they are developed by different people. The power of composability in action can be seen on the Ethereum blockchain. All manner of DeFi smart contracts and services, written by different people, directly interact, creating larger services.
They’re borderless: When you run software on your laptop, its location is your location. When you interact with the software of online services by using them, the software involved is located in the data center hosting its servers. In both cases, the software has a geography and jurisdiction, which means local regulations come into play, and having a physical location makes them vulnerable. This is not ideal for an increasingly globalized world. Smart contracts, however, don’t have a geography: they are hosted in cypherspace, and live on a globally distributed decentralized network.
They process tokens: In principle, you could create tokens on a ledger created by a traditional database running on a cloud — but nobody would be interested, since they would be controlled by the operator. However, smart contract properties like autonomy, allow ledgers to be created that don’t have controllers, just like Bitcoin. This makes it possible to create new kinds of economic frameworks and incentive systems in cypherspace, and to bootstrap web3 economies.
These advantages mean that smart contracts will be used much more broadly, as the default backend compute platform, eventually driving a “blockchain singularity.” This was what I wanted to do.
Smart contracts, and world computer blockchains, reinvent compute, and are not a niche play. Modern societies are organized and run by computers, and the software they run, in enterprise, social and other spheres. The benefits will be felt right the way up the societal stack.
Tamperproof software is technical magical.
For example, as I write, the global cost of cyber crime is forecast to top 10 trillion dollars in 2025, and cybersecurity challenges have become an issue of our time on a par with war and climate change. Anyone can see that it would be far better if that lost value was being recycled back into the global economy, or directed towards solving poverty in the developing world. We need to remove reliance on the fallible protections of firewalls, intrusion detection, and anti-malware — especially since AI will soon make the cybersecurity problem far worse.
We depend on the software our IT infrastructure runs, but there is a constant threat of service interruption, data corruption, data loss, data theft, data being encrypted by ransomware, and in the web3 industry, the loss of digital assets. This problem can be fixed.
In 2015, I saw that world computer networks could host systems and services that did not require the protection of fallible cybersecurity systems, which would be game-changing on an epic level — and today, numerous internet services run on the Internet Computer, without any cybersecurity protection, while hosting tokens inside, proving the point.
Autonomous software is more technical magic.
Services built using autonomous software can run without the kind of “intermediaries” Satoshi taught us should be removed. Sometimes we need to create shared business rails that everybody can trust won’t be modified or corrupted. Sometimes we need to create a system or service that runs transparently under the exclusive control of an internet community, delivering on web3’s promise of transparency and ownership.
In the future, many internet services, ranging through financial exchanges and frameworks, social networks, metaverses, games, general social media, the P2P economy, the creator economy, AIs, consortium-based systems, and much more, will run as “open internet services” under community control, via DAOs. Their tokenization will create powerful incentives and network effects, and those participating in the DAO will become part of industrious virtual teams. A new internet model is emerging.
Back in 2015, I could see that world computer blockchains, hosting smart contract software with the limits removed, would provide a seminal advance.
3. The Challenges of Evangelizing Technical Heresies
TL;DR — I spent 2014 working with theoretical computer science to make blockchains more scalable. My early work made me a mainstay on crypto’s technical scene, but the complexity of the ideas involved, and a widespread misunderstanding that that blockchain networks can never scale, initially made evangelizing the possibilities of infinite world computer networks challenging…
Back in 2014, I was the first person seriously trying to repurpose techniques from the field of classical “Byzantine Fault Tolerant” consensus and distributed computing to the blockchain setting. I was also the first to work on things like sharding techniques, driving blockchains using random beacons, and the application of consensus groups.
Eventually I created a paper describing a blockchain called “Pebble” in October 2014. It was designed to power pan-game virtual goods economies, and automated recurring payments that could remove advertising from social media. This meant it had to be able to scale its transaction throughput, essentially without limit.
The paper was distributed to industry insiders of the time, including people like Vitalik Buterin and Nick Szabo, but never finished or published. Some effort was made to gather support for the project, but the concept and science was long before its time, and then I got more interested in world computer blockchain and moved on.
During this era, I was also researching ways to scale proof-of-work networks, which I hoped would help blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. You can see me here giving a talk at a San Francisco Bitcoin Devs meeting back in May 2015. I also presented at academic gatherings, such as the Stanford University’s Security Seminar.
Back in the day, people were very interested in my technical schemes and solutions, and plenty attended by talks, but they were ahead of their time — although my early work helped me see the future, and served as training that would help me direct the development of the Internet Computer. It was a magical time in crypto, where many people like me were obsessed by the technical possibilities.
That’s the world that the Internet Computer project comes from.
4. The Formation of the DFINITY Foundation
TL;DR—The DFINITY Foundation was created in October 2016.
New team members joined the DFINITY project. The first was Timo Hanke, a German mathematician and cryptographer, who was famous from the Bitcoin space, having devised the AsicBoost system that optimized mining.
The DFINITY Foundation was formed in Zug, Switzerland, in October 2016, as a not-for-profit organization, with two Swiss co-founders, who contributed the initial capital required for formation.
With Timo I wrote a white paper describing my preferred novel blockchain consensus scheme, which combined “Threshold Relay” and “Probabilistic Slot Consensus,” a later version of which you can see here, and I published blog posts regarding a concept for a “Blockchain Nervous System” DAO that would control the blockchain, and make it the first to run completely autonomously using fully-automated permissionless decentralized governance.
Today, the Internet Computer remains the only blockchain to run with fully-automated DAO governance and true autonomy.
A framework was developed to raise funds for the project from the public, which we ran February 2017, to allow people to contribute, called the “Seed” round.
5. Amazing Hires, And The First Test Network
TL;DR — We started to make more amazing hires, and produced the first test network.
The purpose of the DFINITY Foundation is primarily to perform R&D. We set about aggressively hiring, with an aim to build a real world computer blockchain as fast as possible. Our stated mission was to build the DFINITY Foundation into a “NASA for decentralization.”
By the end of 2017, the growth of our technical team was fast outpacing that of other projects.
But we had a hidden advantage — our authenticity, technical depth, and the nature of our mission, which delivers clearly articulated and game-changing value to humanity, meant we could attract the very brightest, bravest and most driven people.
The industry was becoming a wilder and wilder Wild West, with ICOs scamming people right left and center, but the DFINITY team was able to attract very serious people, of the kind that remain rare in the industry even today.
We hired several early and senior Googlers, with incredible technical skills, and I also able to lean on my contacts from my early days in blockchain. By the end of 2017, we had built our first testnet, which supported smart contracts written in a cut-down version of the Haskell programming language.
The optimism in the air was palpable, as you can see in this early demonstration from 2017.
6. Now We Biltzscaled R&D And Operations
TL;DR — Crucial early hires were made at the Zürich HQ, leveraging proximity to IBM Europe and Google Switzerland, laying the groundwork for it to run almost two thirds of DFINITY’s global R&D operations today.
Now that we were actually building a real world computer, more and more people were hearing about our project, with many beginning to wonder whether the “impossible” might be achieved after all.
By now we weren’t building the “DFINITY blockchain,” but the “Internet Computer.” We wanted the network’s name to describe its functionality and purpose, instead of being a brand, rather like the name “Bitcoin.”
The purpose of DFINITY is to help extend the public internet, so that as well as connecting everybody and everything, it can play the role of a public compute platform, and the new name reflected that.
From 2018, we disappeared into a multi-year period of intense R&D, leaving the blockchain industry to grow and develop while we were away. There was little else to be done, since the Internet Computer demands more technical sophistication than traditional blockchain.
Things went on while we were gone. Industry investors committed more capital to other Layer 1 projects during that time — which arguably created some alignment issues later.
The Internet Computer project and the open internet paradigm we were pursuing continued to draw in many brilliant and wonderful people, helping us become the organization that we are today.
In 2018, we hired Jan Camenisch for our Zürich HQ, a famous cryptographer leading crypto research at IBM Europe (located just outside Zürich), who is now our CTO. Jan was quickly joined by a large proportion of IBM’s other well-known and supremely capable cryptographers, and their compelling presence allowed us to hire some of the brightest and best away from Google Switzerland, located in central Zürich (which is Google’s second largest campus after Mountain View in California, where they employ more than 5,000 highly technical “Zooglers” who have more than 80 different nationalities). We were further helped by proximity to Zurich ETH, a fantastic technical university.
Jan once had a beard:
But now doesn’t. (Perhaps reflecting the amount of work has had to do!)
From this point on, it becomes impossible to name the amazing people that joined, because there were so many. The production of the Internet Computer resulted from a massive team effort.
By launch, we were around 200 people, scaling after launch to almost 300 people, with most in engineering, cryptography and computer science research.
7. Overcoming Frustrations With The Rate of Progress
TL;DR — Owing to the scale of the technical challenges DFINITY had taken on, network launch took some years longer than predicted! We were perhaps the most famously delayed project. However, the project has the will and resources to overcome formidable obstacles, including technical obstacles.
By now DFINITY was could be called Switzerland’s largest tech endeavor. Yet, depsite bitzscaling R&D, by 2019/20 it was apparent delivering the promised technology was taking far longer than expected.
A tech maxim comes to mind: “Never mistake a clear view for a near thing.” While we could clearly see that world computer blockchains could be built, everything had to be developed from scratch, since they necessarily have to work very differently to traditional blockchains, and the complexity involved was interminable. It would be a massive effort, but the work involved was unavoidable.
The challenge involved not just huge amounts of work, but the development of organizational structures and processes within DFINITY to handle the unique nature of the work involved. We had to find ways to effectively mesh different disciplines, through blue sky research, cryptography, and engineering, to testing and product.
Furthermore, the Internet Computer would be a sovereign decentralized network hosted by standardized “node machines,” dedicated to the task, which would be run by independent “node providers” from independent data centers around the world. This involved some hardware work, but more importantly, bootstrapping an initial community to run the network. (The Internet Computer is very different to today’s proof-of-stake networks that run on Big Tech’s cloud services.)
While we were chipping away at the coal face, the blockchain industry continued to explode around us.
Internally, frustrated people often pointed out that we already made sufficient advances to launch a totally game-changing public blockchain into a rampant market that would fast become a leader. Why wouldn’t we just do that?
The challenge was that if we compromised and launched something less, it might be almost impossible to reach our goals in production.
The frustrations were compounded by the atmosphere at the time. Everyone knew blockchain was going to be something very, very big, and Klondike Fever and opportunism were spreading like wildfire, and the effects were felt inside the organization, but we dealt with it.
We were staying the course, and tracking on target, when COVID hit. I had read an early article in the South China Morning Post on my travels that rang alarm bells, and told the global team we would all have to wear masks — people thought I was a crazy, but the pandemic unfolded a few weeks after anyway, and in the event we would all have to work remotely.
The DFINITY team greatly valued in person meetings and contact, and COVID further complicated matters, but we continued working towards out goal.
Nothing would stop us, but how could we accelerate?
8. DFINITY’s Final Push To Launch
TL;DR —We introduced a system of “Genesis Gates” to drive a final push into production. The network we would launch would fulfill our promises.
We had been working through a succession of project milestones named after the elements.
The milestones were Copper, Bronze, Tungsten, and Sodium, culminating with Mercury, which was when the Internet Computer testnet would transition into a production network through Genesis, which would make its native ICP tokens transferrable and available for use in decentralized governance.
By the fall of 2020, we were well into the COVID pandemic, with the team working remotely, and despite our best efforts, we hadn’t made Mercury. We had to up our game further, and internally we upped the ante, with crazy work hours.
There was tremendous pressure, but we tied up loose ends.
We would be launching the following:
- A blockchain network that could scale-out as needed to host the world’s systems and services on-chain, in the revolutionary mode of “full stack decentralization.”
- A new software framework, which allowed developers to build almost any online system or service that was tamperproof and unstoppable, which could devolve control to advanced DAOs as required, using advanced reimagined smart contract software, which is capable of unleashing much greater developer productivity. (Because the Internet Computer uses the WebAssembly virtual machine, in principle almost any programming language could be used.)
- The Internet Identity authentication framework, which would allow end users to create secure sessions with smart contract software in their web browsers, removing the need for users to use crypto wallets to create every transaction manually— now they could happen transparently in the background.
- A network that was autonomous, adaptive and self-evolving, because it ran under the control of the Network Nervous System, an advanced permissionless DAO integrated into its protocols. This allowed the network to do things like dynamically configure its internal subnets to scale, and upgrade itself without interruption — and it adopted more than 145 protocol upgrades in the first year, evolving the network at an unprecedented rate.
- A truly sovereign network, which ran on dedicated hardware, so that Big Tech would not be an intermediary, continuing the tradition begun by Bitcoin.
The Internet Computer by now represented an immense technical achievement, not just for the crypto industry, but for the field of computer science generally.
9. Launch, Attacks, Survival, And More Progress
TL;DR — The launch was set of May 10, 2021, 6PM CET.
May 10, 2021, 6PM CET, a software update was pushed to the Internet Computer’s nodes, which caused its ICP tokens to begin unlocking, allowing the Network Nervous System to begin functioning, decentralizing control, and pushing the network into a beta production mode.
To celebrate, an online launch event was held shortly before. The Internet Computer was on its way!
Behind the scenes, there were some early technical issues, and stressed researchers and engineers working through many nights, but the network stayed online. It is an incredible testimony to all those who worked to make it possible.
Much has been said of the shock market capitalization that the network had at launch — its ICP tokens were priced at $500, making all the tokens (including those locked) worth around $230 billion dollars.
The price of ICP was not something we could control, wanted to control, and not part of our mission. What mattered to us was delivering the technology we promised, and playing our role bringing a new public network into being, hosted by an independent community of node providers, and hosting a free and independent ecosystem.
That said, what is particularly frustrating, is that in the years since, it looks like the high initial price was set on FTX, using an instrument called ICP-PERP, which they created just four days before launch. Evidence has been presented that market manipulators set the price high so that it would thereafter crash. The purpose seems to have been disrupting the project, and laying the groundwork to promote the idea of a “rug pull.”
Some of the story that unfolded can be found on Crypto Leaks (https://cryptoleaks.info), an investigative journalism website.
Shady actors worried about the Internet Computer knew that criticizing DFINITY’s research and development operation, and the capabilities of the Internet Computer, would be a losing game.
What they could do, was smear the organization and its leaders by promoting baseless claims and creating a blizzard of disinformation, creating a social media frenzy.
Soon after launch, we faced defamation by an odd organization that was incorporated just two months before, in the form of a “report,” which crafted false evidence to baselessly claim the project was a “rug pull” and scam. The organization involved then disappeared again from view for a year and a half, while its leaders (who are linked to an organization linked to the Effective Altruism scene that has been accused of being cult-like) moved into an upscale mansion in London, England, and went on spending sprees.
The baseless report would have been ignored, but for co-publication by The New York Times, which was inexplicable at the time.
Crypto Leaks has since presented evidence that in fact the report was parlayed to The Times by non other than Sam Bankman-Fried himself, who was donating massive amounts of stolen money to political causes they were aligned with, and whom they promoted.
We then faced a class action lawsuit, which regurgitated the baseless claims of the report. It turned out that the law firm involved was funded with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens given to them by the leader of another blockchain. They had consulted with him personally before working on two class actions. (After exposure by Crypto Leaks, the law firm was removed from its cases, including ours, by American judges who had access to depositions, and has since imploded.)
In the years leading up to launch, certain titans had gained broad influence, and their investments and money had created a a kind of clique, which would work to disrupt us — not just at launch, but in the years following. For example, we recently discovered that our industry’s leading research organization, in which certain titans were investors, and whose leader wished to run for congress (while one titan eagerly funded political influence), was widely advising their clients in America and beyond to stay away from the Internet Computer project, because of the said legal attacks.
As time goes on, more and more people are learning to see the failure of some parties to cover the project, and various disinformation efforts, for what they really are — the efforts of cliques trying to protect vested interests, which are misguided, because the Internet Computer delivers broad value to the blockchain industry as a whole.
You can find more information online, but what’s important, is that the Internet Computer project is so strong, it survived the storm of attacks directed its way, even though in sum they were designed to be existential in nature. Against the wishes of those launching them, the attacks eventually made the project much stronger.
Authenticity, vision, passion and technology won. We were determined that progress would not be deflected and many people involved with the project worked even harder.
Since launch, Internet Computer technology has been developed and made even more powerful, and its ecosystem has grown tremendously.
The project is now poised to deliver more seminal advances for the blockchain industry and the world.
10. Game-changing Developments
TL;DR — The Internet Computer now incorporates more than a thousand person-years of R&D effort, it’s capabilities remain unmatched, and its ecosystem grows more vibrant and stronger every day. Big things are about to happen.
Today, the Internet Computer remains the only network that can host things like social networks built entirely from smart contract software that runs securely on a blockchain network, end-to-end, without traditional IT and cloud, which can even be directly controlled and updated by advanced community DAOs. A prototypical example of what can be achieved is OpenChat, which beat a path many are now following:
Oftentimes, you will hear parties with heavy investments in other blockchains claim their preferred blockchains have larger developer communities. However, the billions in inflows they benefited from before the preceding crypto winter, an alternative truth has been emerging:
The technological benefits the Internet Computer provides become more and more pronounced as time goes on.
At launch, the network incorporated some hundreds of person-years of R&D effort, but now incorporates more than 1000 person-years of effort.
For example, the network has recently incorporated “chain key” technology features, which allow smart contract software on the Internet Computer to extend services built on other chains, which will help them achieve full stack decentralization, by directly processing their tokens, and interacting with their smart contracts — providing trustless multi-chain glue, as well as lighting the way to a DeFi 2.0, including Bitcoin DeFi.
This is just one of many seminal advancements.
Activity on the network, as calculated by smart contract software instructions processed, massively exceeds that on other blockchains because it hosts internet services fully on-chain — it processes the equivalent of three hundred thousand Ethereum transactions a second on many days. I hope by the end of this year, the Internet Computer will be processing substantially more than the equivalent of a billion Ethereum transactions a second. As DeFi 2.0 emerges from new standards recently created, financial flows may increase commensurately.
In production, the Internet Computer network has never gone down, and web3 services built entirely from “canister” smart contract software have demonstrated groundbreaking security and resilience, while the ecosystem continues growing.
The Internet Computer remains one of the few genuinely sovereign blockchain networks — advancing the tradition of Bitcoin, which is powered by dedicated hashing hardware — taking the paradigm into the realm of “cypherspace as cloud.” (The Internet Computer is hosted by decentralized hardware in the form of standardized “node machines,” run by independent operators.)
The project now stands to make amazing new advances, and 2024 is shaping up to be a transformative year. In the next part of this post, “10 Reasons The Internet Computer Will Win,” I outline some of the reasons we are poised for further success.
One important new area is AI. Today, the Internet Computer is the only blockchain network capable of running AI models, such as LLMs, in the form of smart contracts, making them secure and unstoppable, which the project is leaning into. It will be possible to have a chat with a smart contract, it will be possible to have a smart contract verify that a person on video matches a picture on a driving license, it will be possible to trade special-purpose AIs in the form of NFTs, and more. AI will be at the heart of web3 on the Internet Computer — indisputably, the Internet Computer is now a major AI play.
Another important new area is enterprise and government IT. This will be addressed by the UTOPIA project being readied in the wings, which will allow Internet Computer technology to be used to create “sovereign clouds” where you can build highly secure and resilient online systems and services from smart contract software. (A recent USENIX paper explains how Internet Computer technology creates serverless cloud functionality.)
Sovereign UTOPIA clouds will augment the Internet Computer, with which they can integrate, and add more value and network effects I describe in the next part of this post. The TAM (Total Addressable Market) of Internet Computer technology is about to get far broader, and revolutionize enterprise compute.
These are incredibly exciting times, and the Internet Computer is about to deliver more impact.
If you believe in making the world a better place using game-changing third generation blockchain technology, come and join us.
In the next part of this post, 10 Reasons The Internet Computer Will Win, I outline why further advances are inevitable.
