Internet Computer (ICP): What is it?

An Internet Computer is a blockchain whose capacity is unlimited and operates at web speed. In addition to Ethereum and Bitcoin, it represents the third major innovation in blockchain-based applications, a smart contract computer that scales computation and data to web speed, stores, and processes data efficiently, and provides powerful software frameworks. Internet Computers make it possible to completely reimagine software – offering a revolutionary new alternative to traditional enterprise systems and websites, as well as tokenized internet services, industry-narrowing platforms, and decentralized financial systems.

 Internet Computer Token: 

Internet Computer’s native token is ICP, formerly known as DFN. As a reward for data centers and to facilitate governance decisions, the token is used as gas for transactions on the blockchain. The total number of tokens circulating at launch was 469,213,710.

It is used for:

• Providing network governance: It is possible to lock ICP tokens so that neurons can vote in network governance to earn rewards.
• Computable cycles production: The ICP offers a source of value that can be stored in cycles; they then serve as the fuel that powers computation. By converting ICP to cycles at a variable rate, the NNS makes sure users are always able to create new cycles for a predictable cost, so acquiring fuel can become predictable.
• Participant Rewards: Various ICPs are minted to reward and incentivize the network’s major players, including (a) those participating in governance, (b) those operating the node machines that host the network, and c) other means of fund-raising.

 Founder:

DFINITY was founded by Dominic Williams, who is also its Chief Scientist. He is not only a crypto theoretician who developed Threshold Relay and Probabilistic Slot Consensus but a serial entrepreneur who pioneered the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities as well. Before String Labs, he served as President and CTO of Mirror Labs, a startup incubator for cryptocurrency, and Founder and CEO of Fight My Monster, a games company that grew to millions of users. His other startups include Airdocs, System7, and Smartdrivez. In Computer Science, I obtained a 1st in-class degree at King’s College London.

The $121 million raised by DFINITY, a cryptocurrency fund, was funded by a number of early Ethereum investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Polychain Capital, Scalar Capital, Electric Capital, ZeroEx, and Aspect Ventures. A token airdrop rewarded ICP utility tokens to more than 50,000 participants in 2018. The Internet Computer alpha mainnet was launched by DFINITY on December 18, 2020. The DFINITY Internet Computer will be publicly available last May 10, 2021, marking the final step toward decentralization. With this major milestone being reached, the Internet Computer is now a decentralized global computer, as all of the source code for the network has been released into the public domain and the ICP utility token has been released allowing tens of thousands of community members to control its operations.

DFINITY Foundation:

 Zurich, Switzerland is home to the DFINITY Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Many of the Foundation’s team members are internationally recognized cryptographers of the highest quality.

As Director of Engineering, Timo Hanke leads the team. He founded AsicBoost to make Bitcoin mining more efficient. Hanke is a mathematician and cryptography professor. Mahnush Movahedi worked as a researcher for Yale for more than 10 years, developing scalable and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for consensus and secure multi-party computations. Formerly of BLS, Ben Lynn generates randomness and achieves security along with speed and scale in public networks with Threshold Relay. DFINITY uses a WebAssembly virtual machine designed by Andreas Rossberg.

Members of DFINITY have published more than 100,000 citations in academic journals and 200 patents. 

DFINITY made headlines in February 2018 after it raised $61 million in a funding round from Andreesen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. 

With the addition of $102 million in August 2018, DFINITY Foundation now has $166.9 million of total funding from sources such as SV Angel, Andreesen Horowitz, Village Global, Aspect Ventures, Amino Capital, and others. 

The goal of DFINITY was to reduce the costs of running cloud-based business applications by introducing an “internet computer”, in direct competition with Amazon’s Cloud Computing Service. May 10th, 2021 marks the public launch of ICP.

 Running the Nodes in the Internet Computer Network:

 A total of 1,300 nodes will operate across 48 data centers – in North America, Europe, and Asia – at Genesis on May 10, 2021. By the end of the year, 123 data centers will control 4,300 nodes, and in a decade thousands of data centers will manage millions of nodes to support the decade-long building out of the Open Internet. In addition, any organization can become a node provider by applying for a Data Center ID (DCID) with the Network Nervous System (NNS), acquiring specialized computer nodes, software installation, and connecting to the Internet Computer network.

How Fast is it? 

The Internet Computer can now work at web speed thanks to Chain Key Technology, which response to queries in milliseconds and updates within 1-2 seconds. A key feature of Genesis is the Internet Computer’s block rate of 2.5 blocks per second (bps). This will increase to 10.3 bps soon after, then 1,000 bps by year’s end. Users of this open Reddit version would be able to browse the forum and see customized views of the content by running queries on nearby nodes in milliseconds, which would provide an excellent user experience. It would take one to two seconds to update a story when a user occasionally posts or provides tokens to an author.

Being Unique:

To enable the Internet Computer to be the world’s computing platform, it will expand the public Internet. Internet today runs on private infrastructure, but current systems and services are connected by the internet. Internet Computers are based on Chain Key Technology, which comprises multiple advanced technologies, including novel consensus algorithms, Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation (NI-DKG), Network Nervous System (NNS), Internet Identity, etc. An Internet computer is organized based on cryptographic protocols called Chain Key Technology. Using a single public key enables the Internet Computer to have a fundamental breakthrough. An enormous advantage of this is the ability to verify the authenticity of artifacts from the Internet Computer with any device, including smartwatches and mobile phones. Traditional blockchains, however, do not allow this.

 It is not enough to have one public key: Chain Key Technology is the engine that allows the Internet Computer to work. The addition of new nodes allows the network to scale infinitely; the ability to replace faulty or crashed nodes without ever stopping; the ability to restart subnets if there are too many failures; and the ability to upgrade the Internet Computer Protocol seamlessly, thus eliminating bugs. R&D at DFINITY has developed an innovative noninteractive key resharing protocol. New signatories only need to broadcast a single message to old signatories. Several concepts of advanced cryptography, including forwarding secrecy and noninteractive zero-knowledge proofs, are applied to this process to ensure its security. Key resharing is an ideal asynchronous solution because it is noninteractive and it preserves keys. The public key of the subnet remains the same throughout the lifetime of the subnet, and the other parties on the Internet Computer will not need to keep track of changing public keys.