What is Internet Computer (ICP)? Project Overview

DFINITY (Decentralize Infinity) is another system name coined by the creator Dominic Williams.

The founders call the project an “Internet computer,” which should surpass the Ethereum blockchain, solve many of its problems, as well as become a competitor to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services. This environment should provide many corporate and personal applications, social networks, managers, search browsers, etc. 

Dominic Williams is a graduate of King's College London with a background in practical distributive computing. In 2012, he created an innovative horizontal scaling MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game, which became popular among millions of users.

In 2013, Williams became interested in blockchain and the creation of a “world computer.” The basic architecture of DFINITY was written in 2015, and in October 2016, the DFINITY Foundation was registered in Switzerland, which currently has more than 280 employees from all over the world. The main offices are located in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Zurich. Some workers moved from the big companies Alphabet, Uber, Google, and Amazon.

The first crowd sale of tokens took place in February 2017, and raised 3.9 million Swiss francs. A year later, an additional $61 million was raised from venture capital funds Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.

In August 2018, the largest investment round took place, resulting in the DFINITY Foundation raising $102 million. The list of the mentioned investors was added with SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, and Multicoin Capital funds. The average ICP price was $4.2, and 8 million tokens were distributed to early adopters and the community.

Internet Computer is based on the SDK software and the new Motoko programming language. DFINITY specifically created this language to ensure easy development of websites, corporate systems, and Internet services. It also supports Rust and C programming languages, although developers say this segment can expand as needed.

The main technology of Internet Computer is Open Internet Service. This code is embedded in the blockchain and allows the service to work autonomously without access to the main network, relying on user support.

The network itself has several attributes that help the blockchain work:

▪ Canisters – the name of the computing units. Contains information about transactions and user interactions;

▪ Cycles – computing resources that canisters consume to work. Reflects the cost of the developer's physical hardware, rack space, energy, storage device, and bandwidth. In other words, cycles are the internal “money” and energy of the Internet Computer.

▪ Neurons are part of the Blockchain Nervous System (BNS), which is the prototype of the modern DAO. With the help of neurons, project management, voting, and control are carried out.

ICP is the native token of the Internet Computer blockchain. The coin is used to pay fees on the network and also acts as collateral for staking and a voting unit in the DAO.

The launch of the coin in the main network took place on May 7, 2021. At this point, the genesis block was created, and ICP coins began to be generated. The token entered all the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, and at the time of listing, the price exceeded $2,000, which immediately elevated ICP to the TOP-10 crypto projects by market capitalization.

Since then, due to early investor lockdowns and pressure on the price, the asset has sank 99%. ICP has a current value of $4.4 and a market capitalization of $1.2 billion.

In the period of 2021-2022, many dApps were built on Internet Computer, including decentralized exchanges, several environments for synchronizing smart contracts with the BTC blockchain, dozens of NFT and GameFI projects, a number of social networks, and launchpads.

Developers and crypto enthusiasts can participate in the grant program and receive funding to launch their own projects within DFINITY. The prize fund ranges from $5,000 to $250,000, depending on the complexity of the project.

▪ Whitepaper of the project is scheduled for 20 years ahead;

▪ On the Internet Computer, you can create “parallel blockchains” – Subnets. These networks can integrate with other blockchains, increasing their own performance.

▪ According to the developers, the Internet Computer blockchain is capable of carrying out up to 500,000 transactions per second.

▪ The cost of storing data in Internet Computer smart contracts is $5 per GB per year, while on Solana, this figure is $110,000, and on Ethereum, it exceeds $70 million (according to internetcomputer.org).