Programming code is the language Dominic Williams speaks, the language software engineers love, and when he speaks it’s like a waterfall, about the future of blockchain, the importance of algorithms, the potential of artificial intelligence, and his Trojan Horse: the Internet Computer.
As a nerd and computer geek, he believed in the future of the Internet Computer, a decentralized computer that would not require the server farms of a single provider like Amazon or Google.
“We are here to reinvent data processing,” he said: We are the Dfinity Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Zurich, and one of our core projects is called: Utopia, whose main function is to create private networks to benefit from the Internet Computer Protocol.
The concept is explained succinctly: algorithms are computed exclusively in the data cloud, like a computer that only runs on the internet, with no fixed server space in a data center. Dfinity is breaking the oligopoly of cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which rely on renting out server towers in their own data centers.
To keep data on the Internet Computer safe and protected from cyberattacks, computing operations run on blockchain, the name of a technology that organizes a chronological chain of data blocks and is doubly protected by digital keys. The core of the Internet Computer runs in a decentralized and anonymous manner, distributed across many private computers and more than 1,400 data nodes around the world.
Computing, that is, all programs and applications, is saved multiple times and can be clearly assigned, in other words: unauthorized people cannot access it, even if the data record is located on their disk, the software in the Internet computer data cloud can be publicly accessible to everyone or can be just privately defined.
Free from atomic bombs
Highlights: Antivirus programs and cyber defense experts are obsolete, the system is nearly impossible to manipulate and is virtually indestructible, and internet computing protocols are protected from ransomware, data theft, hacker attacks, and even in the real world, terrorist attacks, environmental disasters, and atomic bombs.
All of this can save a lot of money; after all, global IT staff spending will be around $2 trillion by 2024, while cybercrime losses are estimated to be close to $10 trillion.
With the Internet Computer, a large number of IT experts are no longer needed. The management of servers, databases and cloud systems, as well as backup and network security, usually requires more than 10,000 lines of code. Dfinity's Utopia cloud has less than 2,000 lines of code. In terms of IT workload alone, Utopia is five times more productive than other technologies.
The computing engine on the World Wide Web has been the mission of Williams, the brains behind Dfinity, since 2015. The chairman of the foundation has been programming for four decades, graduating with honors from King’s College London, then developing online video games with several players before plunging into the world of cryptocurrencies.
Williams, who immersed himself in the world of blockchain and crypto software in California’s Silicon Valley before setting up camp in Zug’s Crypto Valley, has been working at Dfinity for nearly a decade.
More than half are former Google employees
Switzerland is in a great location: He’s referring to the foundation’s excellent financial conditions, and the world’s second-largest Google campus in Zurich, which has about 5,000 employees, “is a honeypot if you want to hire talent,” Williams said.
More than half of the Dfinity team are ex-Googlers, and that’s not all: “When we started in 2016, just two years later we brought many of IBM’s best cryptographers to Dfinity.” In Zurich, Meta, Amazon, and ETH are also right in front of us as engineering strongholds.
The Dfinity team has developed market-ready products that run in the cloud, such as messaging services OpenChat and Helix Markets for digital financial trading, and Chat GPT’s LLM model, but in the cloud, distributed around the world, and not just on Microsoft servers.
Then there is Docutracks, an encrypted, decentralized document tracking system. The Swiss solution for managing tax data is still in the early stages of development, with states and governments clearly part of the target group.
Highest level protocol
This computer, which exists only on the internet, could catapult Dfinity into the Olympus of big tech, with the most advanced computer protocols now backed by 200 world-renowned scientists and engineers, involving a total of about 100,000 hours of research.
The project has resulted in over 1,600 publications, over 100,000 citations, and over 250 patents, and Dfinity is the largest employer of cryptographers in the DACH region.
With a record like that, Williams wants to prevent just one thing: He doesn’t want to make the same mistake that was made by Deepmind, the London-based company that developed Google AI Gemini for the American giant, the artificial intelligence tool of the future that now runs on nearly every Android phone.
Google acquired Deepmind in 2014 for $500 million. In comparison: Chat GPT developer Open AI is not fully owned by Microsoft and is currently valued at $80-90 billion.
$5 billion
About four years ago, Dfinity raised $200 million in venture capital, including investments from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Polychain Capital, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.
According to Williams, Dfinity was valued at $2 billion in 2020 and remains well-funded, having successfully raised another $120 million last year through a tight-knit online community focused on the Internet Computer.
What’s important now is to ensure rapid financial growth in the future. After all, the market capitalization of the Dfinity protocol is about $5 billion, which is billions of dollars written by the software master.
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