Today, it has been over 3 years since the mainnet launch, DFINITY has been deeply involved in several key technological areas, fully promoting its grand blueprint. Our main views on ICP are as follows:
1. Strong underlying technical support. The technical performance of ICP may not be directly reflected in its price, but its TPS is six times that of the second-place Solana, truly achieving a blockchain that 'runs at internet speed' with almost limitless scalability. Perhaps due to DFINITY team's low-key and pragmatic style, ICP lacks much of the flamboyance of Web3 projects, focusing on honing core technologies and steadily advancing towards the ideal of an 'Internet Computer.' Indeed, ICP's price was manipulated when it first launched, but this is not something DFINITY can or wants to control. Their mission has always been to deliver the promised technology.
2. Extremely cost-effective storage costs. Storing 1GB of data on Ethereum for a year costs about $240 million, while Solana, touted as the 'Ethereum killer,' costs $840,000. In contrast, it only costs $5 on ICP, and the Cycles priced in stablecoins avoid the cost concerns of price fluctuations, making it the king of cost-effectiveness in blockchain storage.
3. Innovative NNS governance mechanism. The 'Neuron' governance mechanism of ICP links voting rights and rewards to the amount and duration of staking. Many users have chosen an 8-year dissolution period (about 60%), showing long-term confidence in ICP, which has formed a stable and loyal ecosystem support user base. However, more importantly, ICP's NNS system promotes the vision of a larger blueprint for the third generation of DAO and 'open internet services.' Founder Dominic Williams believes that future newly established companies will exist more in the form of DAOs rather than traditional companies, as this brings advantages of automated management, enhanced transparency, and direct execution of rules, aligning more with a technological future.
4. Leading a new era of decentralized AI. The Cyclotron, just released in July this year, has increased ICP's computing power by an order of magnitude (about 10 times), approaching the level of native CPU performance, making it the only blockchain with a working instance of smart contracts that can fully execute facial recognition on-chain. For example, DecideAI announced at the end of August that it has fully deployed its GPT-2 LLM through the ICP blockchain. This is the first step towards running large AI models entirely on-chain, with the next goal of breaking through CPU performance limits.
5. 100% on-chain storage and computation: In addition to achieving 100% on-chain storage of static data similar to Filecoin and Arweave, ICP is the only one capable of fully realizing dynamic data processing on-chain, including large-scale computations, especially in the field of AI for training large language models. This is unique in the blockchain realm, providing developers with a new dimension of innovative possibilities.
6. The superpower of 'Chain Fusion' technology. Just as the development of the internet aimed to connect different networks, blockchain technology also needs a savior to connect them, and Chain Fusion was born for this purpose. For example, smart contracts on ICP can now execute transactions based on events occurring in the Ethereum or Bitcoin networks, paving the way for previously unachievable decentralized financial services. Additionally, AI operates as a smart contract on the ICP blockchain, and Chain Fusion releases these capabilities to other blockchains through integration. Looking ahead, Chain Fusion will continue to develop, bringing better seamless integration to different blockchain environments, enhancing transaction speed, security, and user interface.
7. User-friendly account abstraction and privacy protection. ICP has the user account model closest to Web2, where users only need to register an account once without needing a wallet. This account can easily log in to any ICP ecosystem application using fingerprint or facial recognition. Additionally, the same ICP account presents different IDs to the outside world when interacting with different applications, ensuring user privacy.
8. Network security. The ICP network currently has thousands of nodes globally, with more than half being 24/7 fully active nodes. These nodes form the NNS of ICP, maintaining the security of the entire network. The security of each ecosystem's dApp is maintained by the subnet that structures its smart contracts. Subnets can consist of fixed or randomly assigned groups of nodes. In the impossible triangle of blockchain, ICP provides projects and applications with maximum flexibility, achieving the best balance between scalability and decentralization.
9. Developer-friendly support system. DFINITY provides an ideal growth platform for Web3 developers, with incentive programs like ICP Hub and accelerators, as well as community resources and technical support, encouraging developers to innovate boldly and build diverse applications.
The narrative of financial investment has shown signs of fatigue; the market will ultimately return to its essence and begin to focus on the underlying infrastructure services of the internet. The ultimate vision of ICP is to host software for the entire world, and the final trend in software development is towards AI. This means that in order for ICP to realize its vision, it must keep pace with these changes, and a better way to achieve this goal is through AI decentralization. By choosing the important path of combining AI narratives and having already achieved on-chain inference of AI models with millions of parameters, ICP has taken the first step towards this grand goal of 5. We believe this is a path worth pursuing, and once this muddy path is taken, it will become broader and smoother. Will DFINITY, or the ICP network, get closer to its 20-year roadmap? We are full of expectations for the future.
