On April 6, 2024, the much-anticipated Web3 Carnival opened at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. DFINITY, as the number one sponsor of the conference, its founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams delivered a speech entitled "AI that is a smart contract: why and how", discussing how AI operates on blockchain networks and bringing the Internet Computer (IC) led by DFINITY back into the public eye.
Dominic Williams said: "Traditional blockchains, such as Ethereum, complete calculations within a block, while the Internet Computer can extend calculations to multiple blocks and can serve interactive Web3 experiences, which is very important for artificial intelligence."
In fact, shortly before the conference, Dominic Williams had posted a video on Twitter demonstrating a fully decentralized AI LLM running as a smart contract on an Internet computer.
DFINITY is using smart contracts on the Internet Computer and AI to form a new matrix, allowing everyone to see the possibility of AI becoming the heartbeat of Web3 and the blockchain world.
basic introduction
DFINITY, IC, and ICP
The DFINITY Foundation is a Swiss non-profit organization founded by Dominic Williams in 2016. The team includes world-leading cryptographers, mathematicians and senior engineers, such as the inventor of BLS technology, the inventor of Bitcoin ASICBoost, multi-party computing and cryptography researchers from Yale University and the European EPFL Distributed Computing Center. DFINITY's vision is to create a decentralized Internet ecosystem and break the monopoly of existing large technology companies on online services and data.
IC is developed, promoted and maintained by DFINITY. It is a public network designed to expand the functionality of the global Internet and make it a world computer. Through innovative blockchain technology, IC can provide unlimited scalability and high-speed transaction processing capabilities, and can process HTTP requests to support large-scale decentralized applications, from social media platforms, open source project hosting services to various enterprise-level applications. In theory, any existing Internet service can be rebuilt into a decentralized version on IC.
IC has two native tokens, ICP is responsible for voting governance, and Cycle is responsible for Gas costs. IC implements a "reverse Gas" model. Users do not need to pay any Cycle when interacting with the chain. Smart contract developers can convert ICP into Cycle to prepay the Gas costs of their smart contracts. Cycle is anchored to a set of legal currencies to ensure that the Gas costs prepaid by developers remain relatively stable. This model is similar to the mechanism of Web2. Users access application services for free, and developers bear the operation and maintenance costs of application services.
IC Architecture Overview
The smart contract on IC is called Canister, which is a unit that binds Wasm program code and data storage. Anyone can deploy Canister on IC.
IC shards Canister into multiple instances. Each instance is called a subnet and has its own set of decentralized nodes. It runs the consensus algorithm between them and builds its own blockchain. Each subnet runs in parallel with other subnets. A Canister on a subnet can communicate with another Canister on a different subnet by sending messages, and users can also send messages to Canister.
The following picture shows a message on the IC:
1. The message is sent to an RPC node;
2. The RPC node routes the message to the subnet hosting the target Canister;
3. The subnet’s consensus algorithm adds the message to the latest block in the subnet’s blockchain.
4. The message is added to the input queue of the target Canister;
5. Canister executes the message.
Subnets can have different sizes, or replication factors, which determine the cost of running Canister on that subnet, and also affect the time and safety of finalization.
Chain-Key Technology
Chain-Key technology is one of the core technologies of IC, which consists of cryptographic technologies such as threshold signature, non-interactive distributed key generation, and zero-knowledge proof.
Each subnet has a fixed public key. The corresponding private key is not stored on a single node or available on any node. Instead, it is split into multiple secret shares and distributed across all nodes using threshold cryptography. Nodes can use these secret shares to collectively sign messages to users and other subnets.
This feature not only means that verification of states and results becomes extremely simple for users, but also there is no need to keep blocks in the blockchain available forever, breaking the scalability bottleneck. In fact, IC will actively collect junk old blocks to save storage usage.
Smart contracts can have their own keys and can sign transactions for other blockchains (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum), enabling trustless interaction with other blockchains. In fact, IC has already integrated Bitcoin based on Chain-Key technology, and integration of Ethereum is also on the agenda.
The past, present and future of IC
When it comes to DFINITY and ICP, "peak at opening" is an unavoidable topic. When the IC mainnet was launched on May 10, 2021, the ICP price collapsed. The price of a single ICP fell rapidly from more than 450 USDT (Binance even reached more than 2,000 USDT), a drop of as much as 76%, and the drop widened to 95% within a few weeks.
The rapid drop in price has greatly damaged the reputation of the DFINITY Foundation and has also led to a series of attacks on the IC ecosystem by the crypto community, causing devastating damage to ICP holders and the community built on the network.
There is a view that within a few hours of ICP's listing, it was subject to price manipulation by certain forces (IC's founder Dominic Williams has always believed that it was SBF and FTX who did it). The author does not express any position on this view, but judging from the post-disaster reconstruction work of the IC ecosystem, IC has shown great resilience.
Looking back at IC’s development in 2022 and 2023, IC has implemented threshold ECDSA signatures, smart contract HTTP requests, direct integration with Bitcoin, and accelerated the development of EVM compatibility, Ethereum cross-chain bridges, and DeFi.
But what is most exciting is that IC has truly embraced the AI era. IC's unique ability to support large-scale computing allows artificial intelligence and neural networks to run directly in the on-chain Canister. Not only can machine learning algorithms be run using popular AI/ML frameworks and libraries, but also API calls can be made to external AI application programming interfaces (such as OpenAI) through HTTP requests.
It should be noted that machine learning requires a lot of computing resources to run complex models. General blockchains cannot support AI models running directly inside smart contracts. For example, a DeFi protocol provides users with the function of a profit optimization model, but if you try to run the model on the chain, you must pay high gas fees. In order to solve the problem of high costs, IC provides two key capabilities:
WASM virtual machine: Canister code is compiled into Wasm modules for deployment on IC, supporting standards such as WebAssembly system interface;
Deterministic Time Slicing (DTS): DTS splits the execution of very large messages requiring billions of Wasm instructions into multiple execution rounds.
Not only that, IC is currently adding support for Web3 “AI computing units” to further help AI run in IC’s network, support native Web3 application integration and trustless combination of models and data, and completely open up the imagination of AI + Web3.
Summary: The goal is infinite
IC once relied on its gorgeous team of cryptographers and unique technology to carry the halo of "third-generation blockchain", but now it is building a tall building.
IC also once relied on a huge amount of financing of nearly 200 million US dollars, and was favored by top institutions, and launched a FDV of 230 billion US dollars. This is just like a feast for the guests.
After IC went online, the price of its token collapsed and spiraled down to far below normal levels (as low as 3 USDT). This was the end of its rope.
This world has stories of demise and stories of comeback. I think IC is the latter. The ecosystem on the IC chain is still under construction, especially in the field of AI, where IC has already demonstrated its leading advantages.
There are already many AI projects based on IC, such as Juno-OpenAI:
github.com/peterpeterparker/juno-openai
It demonstrated the use of the Juno platform to integrate OpenAI technology (including DALL·E and GPT-4 Vision Preview) directly into decentralized applications (DApps). Juno-OpenAI queries OpenAI's model through Canister on IC and uses the efficiency and scalability of the Juno platform's serverless functions to achieve the function of generating images based on prompts.
There are many examples like Juno-OpenAI, which show that IC is opening up new areas of possibility for DApp developers in the AI era, exploring how to enrich the functions and services provided by their applications with the help of artificial intelligence and create more interactive, personalized and intelligent DApps.
It can be said that IC has boarded the spaceship of the AI era, walked out of the negative black hole, and its goal is infinity!
Note: This article comes from ZAN Team. ZAN (zan.top) is a Web3 technology brand under Ant Digits, dedicated to Web3 application optimization: reducing costs, enhancing security and improving performance. It provides reliable, stable, secure and customized products and services around the entire life cycle of Web3 applications. Relying on the TrustBase open source and open technology system of AntChain Open Labs, ZAN has unique advantages and innovation capabilities in the Web3 field, and provides comprehensive technical products and services for the blockchain application development of the Web3 community, and Web3 applications of enterprises and developers, including smart contract audit (ZAN Smart Contract Review), identity authentication eKYC (ZAN Identity), transaction risk control technology (ZAN Know Your Transaction) and node service (ZAN Node Service), etc.
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