1. Project introduction

Founded in Switzerland, the DFINITY Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinventing the Internet to host super-powerful and secure computers.

The "Internet Computer" headed by DFINITY adopts new technologies and new architectures such as WASM. It has the characteristics of anti-tampering, fast speed, and the scale can reach billions of users around the world. At the same time, it supports the independent construction of software, which is expected to reverse the status quo of technology giants monopolizing the Internet.

"Internet Computer" (Internet Computer, ICP) is the core product of the DFINITY Foundation. It is an open-source general computing platform and Layer1 blockchain project that aims to solve some of the major challenges facing the traditional Internet today, such as poor system security, monopoly of Internet services, and abuse of personal user data. With ICP, any application and service can be built.

At the same time, DFINITY has introduced a blockchain nerve center system into the governance mechanism, which can protect users from attacks, help restart damaged systems, dynamically optimize network security and efficiency, upgrade protocols and reduce platform abuse.

It can be said that DFINITY is a solid Internet technology company. Established for many years, every basic product is made with heart, just to realize the vision of the ultimate "Internet computer". Its highlight moment is during the launch of the mainnet in May 2021, and the project is currently in a stable development stage.

Two project vision

DFINITY is a combination of Decentralized Infinity, which represents the project's vision of infinite decentralization.

Today's Internet builds a very large network by connecting billions of computers, but it does not decentralize "computing and data storage" in the network. With the rapid development of cloud computing, it can be said that it is more centralized than in the past.

At first, Dominic Williams, the founder of DFINITY, just wanted to build a blockchain platform with better performance than Ethereum, but with the gradual advancement of development, people's understanding of the Internet gradually deepened, and DFINITY also re-established the "Internet computer" . It has a grand vision, hoping to bring a seamlessly shared world, provide a safe and never-downtime "container" for "autonomous software", and provide power for a new generation of IT systems and Internet services.

Three major features and advantage

The core project of DFINITY, Internet Computer Protocol, referred to as ICP. Founder Dominic Williams juxtaposed ICP with the traditional Internet, saying that ICP is the world's first blockchain that runs at network speed, can be infinitely expanded, and can carry any number of smart contracts to calculate and store any amount of data.

Its characteristics can be summarized as convenient deployment, decentralization, and disaster recovery backup. The current 8 core advantages of DFINITY include:

1) Inverse gas model

When using DFINITY-based applications, users do not need to pay Gas to interact with smart contracts, users only need to enjoy the service.

2) Reach smart contracts at network speed

Interaction delay is an important indicator to measure whether a system is available. DFINITY has achieved amazing results in querying milliseconds and updating seconds.

3) A blockchain capable of running web pages

Users can directly access smart contracts on DFINITY through browsers or mobile applications, without going through any centralized web pages and servers, let alone touching command line code.

4) Decentralized internet identity

On DFINITY, users can quickly create a decentralized ID in seconds through face scanning or fingerprint recognition, no longer need to manage user names and passwords, and do not need to touch incomprehensible private keys and mnemonic words to easily control their own ID.

5) Low-cost seamless expansion

ICP can achieve seamless silky expansion, not only can automatically generate new subnets according to network load conditions, but also does not need to stop your service during the expansion process. For users and developers, the scaling process is indifferent.

6) Chain-Key technology

Chain-Key is the core technology behind ICP, which creates a unique 48-byte public key for DFINITY's blockchain, so any device, even a smart watch, can personally verify DFINITY's chain.


7) Self-evolving governance system

DFINITY runs a decentralized token governance system called Network Nervous System NNS, which is a governance system that can help the DFINITY network achieve self-evolution.

8) Stabilized gas

Gas consumed in the DFINITY blockchain is called Cycles, which are exchanged by consuming ICP. The cycle is stable under the algorithm adjustment, anchoring 1 SDR (comprehensive multi-national legal currency calculation, SDR can be regarded as a stable unit).

Four computing and storage

As one of the representatives of distributed storage, ICP's computing and storage capabilities have attracted much attention.

The ICP application architecture starts from the bottom layer: P2P layer (collect and distribute data) → consensus layer (organize messages, write blocks after verification) → message routing layer (transmit information to destination) → application execution layer (through WASM security sand Box Environment Computing).

In the development stage, DFINITY's developer tools will abstract each level and copy it to the developer's local version for easy development.

The application state of ICP is stored in memory, managed and confirmed through the consensus stage. Developers don't have to worry about data loss or where the data is stored.

In order to ensure the stability and fluency of ICP applications, the threshold for becoming a DFINITY data center node is very high. ICP node server needs 16 32GB memory.

Compared with the configuration requirements of 4GB memory and 290GB SSD for the Ethereum verification node, it is already quite exaggerated. Of course, in terms of storage, the more exaggerated is Filecoin, which requires 1TB memory and 16TB SSD configuration.

Compared with Filecoin, ICP does not focus on storage, but Serverless (serverless computing, a model of cloud computing). The data stored could be regular application data, application state, and application code itself, so there is no need to exaggerate storage requirements.

Five development history

2015 DFINITY aims to solve the flaws of the Ethereum network.

2016.10 The DFINITY Foundation was established.

2017.02.14 DFINITY received USD 4.2 million in seed round financing.

2018.02.07 DFINITY completed a US$61 million strategic round of financing led by A16Z and Polychain Capital.

2018.08.28 DFINITY venture capital round financing totaled US$102 million, led by A16Z and Polychain Capital.

2019.11 DFINITY launched the Copper (copper) version of the test network, released the programming language Motoko and the software development kit Canister SDK.

2020.01 DFINITY announced the launch of the Bronze Testnet at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos.

2020.10 DFINITY launched the testnet Sodium (sodium) version and the network nervous system NNS.

2021.01.06 The first phase of DFINITY mainnet Mercury Alpha was officially released, which means that Internet computers will become part of the public Internet, and ICP will serve as a supplementary Internet protocol to TCP/IP.

2021.05.07 DFINITY announced the launch of the main network, and the DFINITY Foundation launched the Internet Computer. This major milestone means that the public Internet can now function as a decentralized global computer, marked by the release of the source code of all Internet computers into the public domain.

2021.05.11 DFINITY launched the token ICP.

2022.01.28 The DFINITY Foundation released a new roadmap for "Internet Computers".

2023.04.19 Dominic Williams, founder of DFINITY Foundation, said that Internet Computer Hub may be stationed in Hong Kong Cyberport.

Six team background

Dominic Williams: Founder, President and Chief Scientist of DFINITY Foundation and ICP Project, founded DFINITY in 2015, has a background of technology entrepreneurs, distributed system engineers and theorists, has outstanding performance in the field of distributed computing and cryptography theory, has made outstanding contributions.

Gian Bochsler: Entrepreneur, fund manager and board member with extensive experience in the blockchain space.

Josh Drake: Main contributor to ICP, COO of DFINITY Foundation, worked at Coinbase before joining DFINITY.

Jan Camenisch: CTO of the DFINITY Foundation, has published more than 120 widely cited papers in the field of privacy and cryptography, and worked as a principal researcher at IBM for 19 years.

Samuel Burri: Vice President of Engineering at DFINITY, for the past 8 years he has led a global team that builds and maintains Schindler elevator control software.

Lomesh Dutta: Vice President of Business Growth at DFINITY with over 17 years of experience building and scaling startups.

Saskia Lenkeit: Head of HR at DFINITY, previously worked at Google for 7 years as an HR business partner, supporting over 900 software engineers in Zurich, Switzerland.

Paul Meeusen: Vice President of Finance at DFINITY, is an experienced entrepreneur, finance and risk manager.

Riccardo Coli: Chief of Staff at DFINITY, with over 15 years of experience changing the way companies interact with markets, customers and employees.

Other members include world-leading cryptographers, mathematicians and senior engineers. At present, there are 270+ team members, 1600+ papers published and 250+ patents.

Seven financing information

DFINITY has raised approximately $195 million in total over three funding rounds:

On February 14, 2017, the seed round financing was 4.2 million US dollars, and the token price was about 0.0362 US dollars, accounting for 24.72%.

On February 7, 2018, the strategic round of financing raised a total of US$61 million from A16Z and Polychain Capital, accounting for 6.85% of the initial token distribution on the mainnet launch, and the financing cost was US$1.8978 per token.

On August 28, 2018, the largest round of financing venture capital round raised a total of 102 million US dollars, accounting for 4.75% of the initial token distribution on the main network, and the financing cost was 4.5765 US dollars per token. A16Z and Polychain Capital led the investment, SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, Amino Capital, KR1, and DFINITY community members followed.

Eight Development Achievement

Six major achievements since the launch of the ICP mainne

① Motoko smart contract language

Motoko is a new smart contract programming language designed to seamlessly support the programming model of Internet computers and make it easier to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the blockchain.

Motoko is strongly typed, actor-based, and has built-in support for orthogonal persistence and asynchronous messaging, productivity and security features, including automatic memory management, generics, type inference, pattern matching, and arbitrary and fixed-precision arithmetic.

Messaging transparently uses Internet Computer's Candid Interface Definition Language and wire formats for typed, high-level, and cross-language interoperability.

② Chain key technology

Chain-Key is the core technology behind ICP. It is DFINITY's subnet extension and key management technology, which can ensure the security and availability of the network. Therefore, any device, even a smartwatch, can personally verify the DFINITY chain.

In contrast, when verifying traditional blockchains such as ETH, since each block is signed by a different node, devices need to synchronize hundreds of gigabytes of signed data. In DFINITY, all nodes sign a block together. Therefore, the device only needs to save a 48-byte unique public key to verify each block.

The easy-to-verify feature of Chain-Key also makes DFINITY naturally suitable for cross-chain operations. We can even store DFINITY's blockchain public key in the ETH smart contract to directly verify cross-chain transactions.

③ NNS: ICP blockchain governance

The Network Nervous System (NNS) is an open algorithmic system that manages the ICP blockchain. Its most notable innovations include upgrading the ICP protocol and software running on nodes, adding new node suppliers, adding nodes to the blockchain network, creating new subnet blockchains to increase capacity, and anyone can Tokens participate in NNS.

④ Non-interactive distributed key generation

The set of nodes running a subnetwork will evolve as nodes can join or leave their respective subnetworks, and as nodes are constantly changing, the development of threshold signatures hinders the ability of nodes to register and distribute new public keys.

As a solution, DFINITY introduces Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation (NI-DKG), which simplifies key management by using static public keys to refer to the same subnet.

NI-DKG provides active safety. This shared protocol is well suited for asynchronous environments, enabling fast block times and unlimited scalability. Each old signer only needs to broadcast a message to the new signer.

To ensure security, DFINITY uses a number of concepts, including non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and encryption with forward secrecy.

⑤ Internet identity

In order to access and interact with applications running on computers on the Internet, users typically need to be authenticated, and one of the most common methods of authenticating on an ICP is Internet Identity.

Internet Identity is an ICP-backed blockchain authentication framework where users first create identity "anchor points" and assign those devices compatible cryptographic devices, such as fingerprint sensors on laptops, facial recognition systems on mobile phones, or portable HSMs, Users can register and verify DApps running on ICP using any device assigned to the anchor.

This provides a high degree of convenience, users can authenticate to DApps in a very simple manner without directly managing or handling keys themselves.

⑥ ICP Consensus Protocol

Internet Computer Consensus (ICC), as the underlying protocol of DFINITY, can support the Byzantine fault tolerance mechanism of Internet computers (BFT, which refers to the ability of a computing system to withstand arbitrary failures of certain components while still working normally).

The ICC protocol is a leader protocol based on the assumption of partial synchronization and full integration with the blockchain. Leaders can be changed in each round. The protocol is very simple and effective. If the leader fails in any round (the probability is less than one-third), the protocol will replace the leader and solve the problem in time in this round without delaying to the next round.

Compared with other protocols, the ICC protocol has the following advantages

The ICC protocol has no complex or unspecified subprotocols.

The ICC protocol makes the task of reliably propagating blocks to parties an integral part of the protocol, rather than leaving it to other unspecified sub-protocols.

The ICC protocol is optimistically responsive, meaning that when the leader is honest, the protocol will proceed at the speed of actual network latency, not some upper bound on network latency. In addition to the six major ICP achievements, the DFINITY ecosystem has also incubated many high-quality projects.

The ICP ecosystem currently deploys more than 100 application

According to the official website, there are currently 104 products in the ecology, including 21 social products, 21 NFT products, 51 infrastructure products, 14 DeFi products, 11 wallet products, 5 metaverse products, and 15 chain game products , 1 DAO product, here are a few worth mentioning.

① Distrikt (110,000+ users)

According to the platform introduction, Distrikt will be a combination of LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium, but it will be a decentralized and democratic sharing platform, and user data will be protected by Internet Identity.

② OpenChat (100,000+ users)

OpenChat is the first decentralized encrypted communication application on DFINITY. According to Hamish Peebles, a software engineer at OpenChat, although OpenChat is functionally similar to WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc., the ownership belongs to the user and the code is public

③ DSCVR (175,000+ users)

DSCVR is an end-to-end decentralized Web3 social media platform that allows communities to form groups called "portals". These Portals can be accessed through NFT. DSCVR also allows the use of ckBTC for rewards.

Nine Economic Model

With the development of DFINITY, the early token name DFN was also renamed as ICP.

ICP is the native token of DFINITY and the governance token of the Internet Computer Project. The release date is July 1, 2019, and 469,213,710 coins will be issued directly after going online.

1) Allocation

The first batch of holders is about 50,000 people, including airdrop participants, team contributors (120 full-time staff, another 30 contributors) and investment partners.

9.5% early contributors, allocated to the teams involved in early contribution work and investment before the establishment of the foundation.

24.72% seed round investors, allocated to investors who participated in a large number of seed rounds

6.85% strategic investors, allocated to investors participating in the strategic round.

4.75% of pre-sale round investors will be allocated to pre-sale round investors.

1.25% of community airdrops will be given priority to community members who support the project for a long time.

52.93% Foundation grants, teams and partners, tokens held or used by the foundation to achieve its competitive goals (used to fund R&D and operations, offices, technology acquisitions, community programs, employee incentives, partner incentives, and other long-term needs).

2) Usage scenario: governance + payment

In the overview of the economic model officially released by DFINITY, ICP has two main uses, one is to lock and open neurons, and the other is to convert it into fuel for Cycles to drive the container to run. In simple terms, the usage scenarios of ICP are divided into governance and exchange of computing resources.

ICP holders can lock it in the governance system, vote on proposals, and participate in governance to get rewards. As the compensation for the data center to run the public ledger, or the block reward, it is also paid with ICP.

In addition, ICP can also be used as a payment fee. In the ICP ecosystem, running a smart contract (or container) requires a fee cycle. Unlike Ethereum, the ICP fee is a fixed price and basically does not change at any time.

3) Stablecoin

In addition to ICP, two kinds of Tokens are designed in DFINITY, which are Cycles and stable coins. Stablecoins will not be liquidated in the short term. Setting multiple Tokens is based on the idea of ​​maintaining currency stability.

ICP and Cycles are one-way exchanges, and the ratio is not fixed, so Cycles can be maintained within a stable value range. If the conversion ratio of Cycles and ICP is adjusted in real time, Cycles can also be regarded as a stable currency.

In the future, DFINITY plans to introduce a stablecoin reward data center into the system. The source of stablecoins is problematic because the ICP used by the payment side is destroyed. If the stablecoins come from the foundation's reserves, the entire system will no longer be a sustainable system.

If the payment part is also replaced with stable currency, it may form a model in which container owners pay directly to the data center, reducing the value capture ability of ICP.

Before the stablecoin scheme goes online, the value input of the system comes from the scenario where the container owner purchases ICP and destroys it, thus improving the scope and popularity of ICP. The value of ICP will expand with the use of computing networks. Therefore, in the early days of DFINITY, the stable currency solution will not be adopted.

The stable currency scheme can reduce the impact of ICP price fluctuations on the system. After that, the value of ICP can only reflect the governance rights of the network. If the value of ICP is to be maintained, the stablecoin solution can only be implemented after the development of DFINITY is completed.

The Internet computer is a unique project, today's Internet systems and services are run from private infrastructure, ICP's Chain-Key technology has changed all that, it allows to have a public key, allowing any device, including smart watches and mobile phones to verify the Internet authenticity of computer artifacts.

This is impossible for traditional blockchains, ICP can realize transactions within 5-10 seconds, and has almost unlimited scalability, which is a great improvement compared to Ethereum.