Table of contents
Project Description
Project Vision
Features and Benefits
Compute and Storage
Development History
Team background
Financing information
development results
economic model
industry analysis
Risks and Opportunities
1 Project Introduction
Founded in Switzerland, the DFINITY Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to reshaping the Internet to host ultra-powerful and secure computers.
The "Internet Computer" led by DFINITY adopts new technologies and architectures such as WASM. It is tamper-proof, fast, and can reach billions of users around the world. It also supports independent construction of software and is expected to reverse the current situation of technology giants monopolizing the Internet. .
"Internet Computer" (ICP) is the core product of the DFINITY Foundation. It is an open source general computing platform and a Layer1 blockchain project. It aims to solve some of the major challenges faced by today's traditional Internet, such as poor system security, Internet services are monopolized, personal user data is abused, etc. With the help of 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 broken systems, dynamically optimize network security and efficiency, upgrade protocols, and mitigate platform abuse.
It can be said that DFINITY is a real Internet technology company. It has been established for many years and is carefully developing every basic product just to realize the vision of the ultimate "Internet computer". Its highlight moment will be during the launch of the mainnet in May 2021. Currently, The project is in a stable development stage.
2 Project Vision
DFINITY is a combination of Decentralized Infinity, which represents the project’s vision of infinite decentralization.
Today's Internet has built a very large network by connecting billions of computers, but it has not dispersed the "computing and data storage" in the network. With the rapid development of cloud computing, it can be said to be more centralized than in the past.
At first, Dominic Williams, the founder of DFINITY, just wanted to build a blockchain platform with more optimized performance than Ethereum. However, as development gradually progressed and the awareness of the Internet gradually deepened, DFINITY also re-established the concept of "Internet Computer" We have a grand vision and hope to bring a world of seamless sharing, provide a safe and never-downtime "container" for "autonomous software", and provide power for a new generation of IT systems and Internet services.
Three features and advantages
DFINITY core project Internet Computer Protocol, abbreviated as ICP, founder Dominic Williams juxtaposes ICP with the traditional Internet, calling ICP the world's first blockchain that runs at network speed, can be expanded without limit, and can carry any number of Smart contracts calculate and store any amount of data.
Its characteristics can be summarized as easy deployment, decentralization, and disaster recovery. The current eight core advantages of DFINITY include:
1) Reverse Gas model
When users use applications based on DFINITY, they do not need to pay Gas to interact with smart contracts. Users only need to enjoy the service.
2) Complete smart contracts at network speed
The latency of interaction is an important indicator of whether a system is available. DFINITY has achieved amazing results of querying in milliseconds and updating in seconds.
3) Blockchain that can run web pages
Users can directly access smart contracts on DFINITY through a browser or mobile app 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 a few seconds through facial scanning or fingerprint recognition. They no longer need to manage usernames and passwords, and do not need to come into contact with difficult-to-understand private keys and mnemonic phrases. You can easily control your own ID.
5) Low-cost and seamless expansion
ICP can achieve seamless and smooth expansion. It can not only automatically generate new subnets according to network load conditions, but also does not need to stop your services during the expansion process. For users and developers, the expansion process is invisible. of.
6) Chain-Key Technology
Chain-Key is the core technology behind ICP. It creates a unique public key of only 48 bytes for DFINITY’s blockchain, so any device, even a smart watch, can personally verify the DFINITY chain.
7) Self-evolving governance system
DFINITY operates and manages a decentralized token governance system called the Network Nervous System NNS, which is a governance system that can help the DFINITY network achieve self-evolution.
8) Stable Gas
The Gas consumed in the DFINITY blockchain is called Cycles, which is converted by consuming ICP. Cycles are stable under algorithm regulation and anchored to 1 SDR (SDR can be regarded as a stable unit calculated based on the comprehensive multi-national legal currency).
4. 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: P2P layer (collecting and distributing data) → Consensus layer (organizing messages and writing blocks after verification) → Message routing layer (transmitting information to the destination) → Application execution layer (through the WASM secure sandbox environment Calculation).
During the development phase, DFINITY's developer tools will abstract each level and copy it to developers to create a local version to facilitate development.
The application status of ICP is stored in memory, and is managed and confirmed through the consensus phase. Developers do not have to worry about data loss or where the data is stored. This shows that ICP is similar to centralized cloud platforms and has the capacity to do so. Disaster backup and other operations.
In order to ensure the stability and smoothness of ICP applications, the threshold for becoming a DFINITY data center node is very high. We can see that the ICP node server requires 16 32GB memory.
Compared with the configuration requirements of 4GB memory and 290GB SSD for Ethereum verification nodes, it is quite exaggerated. Of course, for storage, even more exaggerated is Filecoin, which requires a configuration of 1TB memory and 16TB SSD.
Compared with Filecoin, ICP does not focus on storage, but on Serverless (serverless computing, a model of cloud computing). The stored data may be regular application data, application status and application code itself, so it does not need to be so Exaggerated storage requirements.
5 Development History
2015 DFINITY was conceived to solve the shortcomings of the Ethereum network.
2016.10 DFINITY Foundation was established.
2017.02.14 DFINITY raised US$4.2 million in seed round.
2018.02.07 DFINITY completed a US$61 million strategic round of financing led by A16Z and Polychain Capital.
2018.08.28 DFINITY’s venture capital round raised a total of US$102 million, led by A16Z and Polychain Capital.
2019.11 DFINITY launched the Copper (copper) version of the test network, and released the programming language Motoko and the software development toolkit Canister SDK.
2020.01 DFINITY announced the launch of the Bronze version of the test network at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos.
2020.07 DFINITY launches the Tungsten (tungsten) version of the test network and the demo of CanCan, TikTok’s open alternative software.
2020.10 DFINITY launches the Sodium (sodium) version of the test network and the network nervous system NNS.
2021.01.06 The first phase of Alpha of DFINITY mainnet Mercury is officially released, which means that Internet computers will become part of the public Internet, using ICP as a supplementary Internet protocol to TCP/IP.
2021.05.07 DFINITY announced the launch of the mainnet, and the DFINITY Foundation launched the Internet computer. This major milestone means that the public Internet can now serve as a decentralized global computer, which is marked by the fact that the source code of all Internet computers has been released into the public domain.
2021.05.11 DFINITY launches token ICP.
2022.01.28 DFINITY Foundation released a new roadmap for “Internet Computer”.
2023.04.19 Dominic Williams, founder of the DFINITY Foundation, said that the Internet Computer Hub may settle in the Hong Kong Cyberport.
6. Team background
Dominic Williams: Founder, president and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation and ICP project. He established DFINITY in 2015. He has a background as a technology entrepreneur, distributed systems engineer and theorist, and is outstanding in the fields of distributed computing and cryptography theory. , made outstanding contributions.
Gian Bochsler: Entrepreneur, fund manager and board member with extensive experience in blockchain.
Josh Drake: ICP main contributor, COO of DFINITY Foundation, worked at Coinbase before joining DFINITY.
Jan Camenisch: Chief Technology Officer of the DFINITY Foundation. He has published more than 120 widely cited papers in the field of privacy and cryptography. He served as a principal researcher at IBM for 19 years.
Samuel Burri: Vice President of Engineering at DFINITY, where 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 spent 7 years as an HR Business Partner at Google, 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, DFINITY, with more than 15 years of experience transforming the way companies interact with markets, customers and employees.
Other members include the world's leading cryptographers, mathematicians and senior engineers. The team currently has 270+ members and has published a total of 1,600+ publications and 250+ patents.
7. Financing information
DFINITY has gone through three rounds of fundraising in total, raising approximately US$195 million:
On February 14, 2017, the seed round raised US$4.2 million, and the token price was approximately US$0.0362, accounting for 24.72%;
On February 7, 2018, a strategic round of financing raised a total of US$61 million from A16Z and Polychain Capital, accounting for 6.85% of the initial token allocation of the mainnet line. The fundraising cost was US$1.8978 per token;
On August 28, 2018, the venture capital round was the largest, raising a total of US$102 million, accounting for 4.75% of the initial token allocation of the mainnet line. The fundraising cost was US$4.5765 per token, consisting of A16Z and Polychain Capital led the investment, with participation from SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, Amino Capital and KR1, as well as members of the DFINITY community.
8. Development results
1) ICP has six major achievements since its mainnet was launched.
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 blockchain.
Motoko is strongly typed, actor-based, and has built-in support for orthogonal persistence and asynchronous messaging. Productivity and security features include automatic memory management, generics, type inference, pattern matching, and arbitrary- and fixed-precision algorithms. .
Messaging transparently adopts the Internet Computer's Candid interface definition language and wire formats to enable typed, high-level, and cross-language interoperability.
②Chain-Key technology
Chain-Key is the core technology behind ICP. It is the technology used by DFINITY to realize subnet expansion and key management. It can ensure the security and availability of the network, so any device, even a smart watch, can personally verify the DFINITY chain.
In contrast, when verifying traditional blockchains such as ETH, because each block is signed by a different node, the device needs to synchronize hundreds of GB of signature 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 extremely easy verification feature of Chain-Key also makes DFINITY naturally suitable for cross-chain operations. We can even save DFINITY’s blockchain public key in an ETH smart contract to directly verify cross-chain transactions.
③ NNS: ICP blockchain governance
The Network Neural System (NNS) is an open algorithm system that manages the ICP blockchain. Its most significant innovations include upgrading the ICP protocol and software running on nodes, adding new node suppliers, and adding nodes to the blockchain network. As well as creating new subnet blockchains to increase capacity, anyone can participate in NNS through ICP tokens.
④ Non-interactive distributed key generation
The set of nodes running a subnet will evolve as nodes can join or exit their respective subnets, and as nodes continue to change, 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) to simplify key management by using static public keys to reference the same subnet.
NI-DKG provides active security. This sharing 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 leverages 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 Internet computers, users often need to authenticate. One of the most common methods of authentication on ICP is Internet Identity.
Internet Identity is a blockchain authentication framework supported by ICP. Users start by creating identity "anchors" and assigning compatible cryptographic devices to these devices, such as a fingerprint sensor on a laptop, a facial recognition system on a mobile phone, or a portable HSM, Users can register and verify DApps running on ICP using any device assigned to an anchor.
This provides a high degree of convenience, as users can authenticate to DApps in a very simple way without having to directly manage or handle keys themselves.
⑥ ICP Consensus Protocol
Internet Computer Consensus (ICC), as the underlying protocol of DFINITY, can support the Internet Computer Byzantine Fault Tolerance (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 fully integrated with the blockchain. The leader may be replaced in each round. This protocol is very simple and effective. If there is a leader error in any round (probability less than one-third), the protocol will change the leader and solve the problem in time in this round without delaying it to the next round.
The ICC protocol has the following advantages compared with other protocols:
The ICC protocol has no complex sub-protocols or unspecified sub-protocols;
The ICC protocol makes the task of reliably disseminating blocks to all parties an integral part of the protocol, rather than leaving it to other unspecified sub-protocols;
The ICC protocol is optimistically responsive, which means that when the leader is honest, the protocol will proceed at the speed of the actual network latency, rather than at some upper limit on the network latency.
In addition to the six major ICP-based achievements, the DFINITY ecosystem has also incubated many high-quality projects.
2) There are currently more than 100 applications deployed on the ICP ecosystem
According to the official website, there are currently 104 products in the ecosystem, including 21 social products, 21 NFT products, 51 infrastructure products, 14 DeFi products, 11 wallet products, 5 Yuanverse products, 15 chain game products and 1 DAO product, there are some worth mentioning.
① Distrikt (number of users 110,000+)
According to the platform introduction, Distrikt will be a cross between LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium, but a decentralized, democratic sharing platform where user data is protected by Internet Identity.
② OpenChat (number of users 80,000+)
OpenChat is the first decentralized encrypted communication application on DFINITY. According to OpenChat software engineer Hamish Peebles, although OpenChat is very similar in function to WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc., the ownership belongs to the user and the code is publicly available. Users will be allocated tokens and have the final say on the application.
③ DSCVR (number of users 175,000+)
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, which can be regarded as an operation "Bitcoin" on the internet computer.
9. Economic Model
With the development of DFINITY, the early token name DFN was also renamed ICP.
ICP is the native token of DFINITY and the governance token of the Internet Computer project. The issuance date is July 1, 2019, and 469,213,710 were issued directly after going online.
1) Assignment
The first batch of holders is approximately more than 50,000, including airdrop participants, team contributors (120 full-time staff, and more than 30 contributors) and investment partners.
9.5% Early Contributors, allocated to teams that participated in early contributions and investments before the foundation was established;
24.72% of 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% is allocated to investors in the pre-sale round;
1.25% community airdrop, preferably allocated to community members who have long-term support for the project;
52.93% Foundation Grants, Teams and Partners, tokens held or used by the Foundation to achieve its competitive goals (to fund R&D and operations, offices, technology acquisitions, community programs, employee incentives, partner incentives and others 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 be locked to turn on neurons, and the other is to be converted into fuel for Cycles to drive the operation of the container. Simply put, 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 receive rewards for participating in governance. As compensation for the data center running the public ledger, or the reward for generating blocks, it is also paid with ICP.
In addition, ICP can also be used as a payment fee. In the ICP ecosystem, running smart contracts (or containers) requires a fee Cycle. The difference from Ethereum is that the ICP fee is a fixed price and will basically not change at any time. fluctuates with the price of ICP tokens.
Cycles are stable under algorithmic adjustment and anchored to 1 SDR (SDR can be regarded as a stable unit after comprehensive multi-national legal currency calculation).
3) Stablecoin
In addition to ICP, there are two other Tokens designed in DFINITY, namely Cycles and Stablecoins. Stablecoins will not be realized in the short term. The purpose of setting up multiple Tokens is to maintain currency stability.
The exchange ratio between ICP and Cycles is one-way and the ratio is not fixed, so Cycles can be maintained in a stable value range. If the exchange ratio between Cycles and ICP is adjusted immediately, then 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 the stablecoin is a problem, because the ICP used by the payment end is destroyed. If the stablecoin comes from the foundation's reserves, then the entire system is no longer sustainable. .
If the payment part is also changed to 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 solution was launched, the value input of the system came from the scenario where container owners purchased and destroyed ICP, thus increasing the usage scope and popularity of ICP. The value of ICP will expand with the usage of the computing network, so in DFINITY Stablecoin solutions will not be used in the initial stage.
The stablecoin solution 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 in the later stages of DFINITY development.
10 Industry Analysis
The Internet Computer is a unique project. Today's Internet systems and services are run from private infrastructure. ICP's Chain-Key technology changes all this. It allows the possession of a public key, allowing any device, including smart watches and mobile phones, to authenticate to the Internet. Authenticity of computer artifacts.
This is impossible with traditional blockchains, ICP can implement transactions in 5-10 seconds and has almost unlimited scalability, which is a big improvement compared to Ethereum.
As a blockchain technology company, DFINITY is also at the forefront of the industry. On April 18, 2023, DFINITY was selected into Hurun Report's "2023 Global Unicorn List" with a corporate valuation of 65.5 billion yuan, ranking 60th. It can be seen that DFINITY’s strength cannot be underestimated.
11 Opportunities and Risks
1) Opportunity
For enterprises, deploying on Internet computer ICP can save costs. For users, using Internet computer ICP is close to the Internet experience, while identity information is protected.
At present, applications deployed on ICP are more biased towards the traditional Internet rather than DeFi. Whether blockchain applications that completely imitate Internet applications can become a hit is worthy of attention.
As an Internet computer, the development of distributed commerce will become an opportunity for DFINITY and the enterprises and users who deploy applications on DFINITY.
2) Risk
ICP prices have returned to stability after experiencing a surge online. There are different opinions on the extent of ICP price predictions. PricePrediction.net predicts that it will reach 180 by 2030, and DigitalCoinPrice predicts that it will only reach 34 by then.
It is undeniable that ICP’s ambitions are huge, but the era corresponding to this ambition has not yet appeared. Whether ICP is “going too far” or is a concept hype, it remains to be verified by time.
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