The Internet Computer went live on May 10, 2021, and since then, the network has upgraded itself hundreds of times, processed over 3 billion blocks, integrated with the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, enabled artificial intelligence to run as a contract on a blockchain for the first time in history, and broke so much new ground in the tech industry that it seems impossible that it has only been around for three years.
The result of years of R&D effort by some of the smartest and most creative minds in the world, the Internet Computer aims to make the blockchain singularity a reality, meaning that human services and operations will be reimagined and built on the blockchain.
The world in which the Internet Computer was born has changed, but the goals remain the same, and the communityâs feedback and suggestions played an integral role in creating and shaping this version of the ICP roadmap.
The new and updated roadmap lists nine key focus areas where the DFINITY Foundation will focus its efforts and deploy resources, which are: 1) Compute Platform, 2) Decentralized AI, 3) Chain Convergence, 4) Privacy, 5) Platform Decentralization, 6) Identity, 7) Digital Assets, 8) Governance and Token Economics, and 9) Developer Experience.
Early community members will remember the metal-named milestones that led to Genesis. The milestones in this roadmap are named after fusion technology, reflecting the ingenuity and bold ambition of fusion technology. Each focus area will have one or more milestones, and dedicated teams will work on these milestones simultaneously, ensuring continuous improvement and progress.
In addition to milestones, the roadmap also outlines future features that have not yet been refined into milestones. While some of these features may still take several quarters or years to implement, they show the impressive ambition and vision of the Internet Computer.
Each focus area is key to the success of the Internet Computer, and each milestone marks a major breakthrough and opens up new opportunities for the blockchain community. This roadmap applies not only to the ICP community, but also to the entire blockchain industry.
The Internet Computer can bring true decentralization, connect blockchains, grow communities, and solve the trust problem in AI. Join us on our journey.
milestone
1. ICP as a computing platform
Smart contracts are an excellent way to build software, enabling secure, tamper-proof, resilient and unstoppable applications. ICP's vision is that most of the world's software will be replaced by smart contracts. The goal of the "Computing Platform" theme is to remove any limitations of smart contracts and enable the world's software to run on ICP.
Tokamak Milestones
The first milestone in this area, called Tokamak, focuses on reducing latency, which is key to providing a great user experience and achieving mass adoption. Tokamak achieves this by focusing on the networking and consensus layers.
Specifically, by fully leveraging the QUIC-based transport layer, it will maximize the block rate of each subnet. This milestone will also introduce a new synchronous ingress submission endpoint to avoid wasting latency in polling whether a message has been fully processed. It will also make border node routing to replicas latency-aware.
Stellarator Milestones
The second milestone in this area, called Stellarator, is centered around processing large amounts of data and will introduce a new storage layer that will enable subnet blockchains to host over 1TB of container smart contract memory.
Additionally, by further increasing the amount of memory each container can use, smart contracts can upload and process larger amounts of data. Stellarator will also include key improvements to the ICP consensus layer, increasing throughput by reaching consensus on message hashes and more efficiently utilizing the bandwidth of the node machines powering ICP.
2. Decentralized AI
DeAI involves running AI training and inference as on-chain smart contracts, which solves the trust problem of AI and allows users to verify the inputs of the models they use, reducing the need to blindly trust them.
However, AI training and inference are highly resource-intensive, and the limited computing power of traditional blockchain networks often cannot meet the requirements. In contrast, ICP's advanced design successfully combines the security of smart contracts with the powerful computing needs of AI.
Cyclotron Milestones
Cyclotron enables full on-chain inference of larger models in container smart contracts through performance improvements to the WebAssembly runtime and inference engine. WebAssembly improvements include significant improvements in floating-point performance and support for single-instruction multiple-data that improves parallelism. commands, as well as 64-bit memory to support larger data sets. Together, these changes will enable fully on-chain inference for larger sets of artificial intelligence models.
Gyrotron Milestones
Gyrotron will allow AI inference and training of large models on-chain. Smart contracts require a way to run compute and memory-intensive calculations on hardware such as GPUs. The main challenge of this milestone is to define deterministic APIs for smart contracts to access and call GPUs. In addition, adding AI-specific subnets and exposing GPUs to smart contract nodes will also be explored.
3. Chain Fusion
ICP enables direct interoperability with all major blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other EVMs, without relying on any trusted intermediaries. ICP smart contracts can read and write to different chains, enabling developers to write smart contracts across multiple chains.
Tritium Milestones
The first chain integration milestone is Tritium. Tritium will allow ICP to interact with Ethereum and EVM smart contracts. To achieve this, this milestone will release the EVM RPC container, making it easy to write ICP smart contracts to interact with the Ethereum mainnet and EVM.
Chain Key Signatures are an important part of Chain Fusion technology, and this milestone will include latency and throughput increases for ICP Chain Key ECDSA functionality. Finally, this Tritium will include ckUSDC, a twin token of USDC on Ethereum, built on Chain Fusion technology.
Deuterium Milestones
ChainFusionâs second milestone is called Deuterium, and itâs all about Bitcoin. While ChainFusion already generally supports Bitcoin, some emerging protocols that extend Bitcoin are not yet fully supported. With Deuterium, ChainFusion will fully support them through two major developments.
First, the chain key signing functionality will be expanded to include Schnorr signatures, which enables containers to make new types of Bitcoin transactions required by these protocols, and second, the Bitcoin integration will be expanded to allow access to all Bitcoin block headers, allowing containers to securely read and verify messages for these emerging Bitcoin protocols.
Helium Milestones
The Helium milestone enables chain convergence on the Solana network, bringing Solana and ICP even closer together, combining the power of both networks so that dapps leveraging the capabilities of both networks look and feel like single-network dapps.
4. Privacy
Container smart contracts can be used to implement privacy-preserving dapps that give users full control over their data. Leveraging encryption protocols, ICP enables developers to build dapps where users store and share encrypted data on-chain. Advanced encryption protocols will eventually allow computation on encrypted data.
Niobium Milestones
The Niobium milestone is about verifiable cryptographic threshold key derivation - called vetKeys. VetKeys enables dapps on ICP to securely encrypt user data and ensure that no unencrypted data reaches the blockchain. All encryption and decryption operations are performed directly on the userâs device.
VetKey also supports other features, such as using threshold cryptography to provide maximum extractable value (MEV) protection in DeFi transactions, or improving the privacy of internet identities.
A developer preview of the vetKeys API has been live since mid-2023, and Niobium will complete its implementation of the protocol and provide containers with access to a secure production version of the API.
5. Decentralization
The security of ICP is based on the elimination of central control points. Users interacting with ICP do not need to rely on any party. In addition to architectural aspects such as edge infrastructure, this also covers operational aspects, complementing the DAO-based ICP governance.
Solenoid Milestones
The Solenoid milestone decentralizes the operation of ICP border nodes. Currently, DFI controlled nodes perform the following functions:
Routes requests to the relevant subnet and caches the results;
Converts between the HTTPS protocol expected by the browser and the ICP protocol used by the container.
Solenoid splits the role of border nodes into two: API border nodes, which act as routers and caches, will be controlled by NNS, just like replica nodes, and HTTP gateways that serve content to browsers can be set up and controlled by anyone, leaving the choice of a trustworthy gateway to the user.
Levitron Milestones
This milestone establishes visibility into the Internet Computer edge infrastructure by making aggregated API border node access logs publicly accessible. This provides developers with valuable insights into their dapp usage patterns and helps generate user statistics, providing critical information about the source of traffic. To ensure the integrity of these logs, this milestone focuses on leveraging Trusted Execution Environments, specifically AMD SEV-SNP.
6. Identity
Privacy-preserving, self-sovereign, and user-friendly identity solutions are fundamental building blocks for web3 adoption. Internet Identity provides a strong key-based authentication solution that is easy to register and supports identity attributes while protecting usersâ privacy.
Separatrix Milestones
Sepatrix introduced verifiable credentials and identity attributes. Internet Identity has been the primary authentication solution for ICP since its launch. Prior to the Alcator milestone, users who authenticated to dapps using Internet Identity would be assigned a pseudonymous identifier unique to each dapp without the need for any other attributes such as name, age or place of residence.
Sepatrix introduces a verifiable credential framework that allows users to assign identity attributes to their IIs. Dapps can play the role of attribute issuers, which means they assign a certain attribute to a userâs identity, or as relying parties, which means they use attributes assigned to a userâs identity.
The ready availability of token payments on ICP can create an identity ecosystem where attribute issuers can be rewarded for any potential validation they perform.
7. Digital Assets
DeFi protocols, real-asset tokenization, and other digital asset solutions are powerful drivers of web3 adoption. ICPâs chain fusion capabilities, unparalleled scalability, and ability to provide network assets from the chain open up new digital asset classes. In addition, it makes ICP an attractive platform for building multi-chain custody solutions and wallets.
Toroidal Milestones
The Toroidal milestone is centered around Oisy, a wallet with a unique combination of attributesâit is the first smart contract wallet that is fully accessible via a browser while also being self-custodial, multi-chain, and easy to use.
Oisy uses keys for authentication, making it secure, but does not require seed phrases and passwords. Oisy supports ICP-based dapps through ICRC-21, EVM-based dapps through WalletConnect, and can easily convert between native Ethereum tokens and their ck tokens.
Poloidal Milestones
The Poloidal milestone focuses on Orbit, a comprehensive digital asset framework that provides simple to advanced rules for user digital assets. It was originally tailored for token management and provides strong support for 1-of-M to complex approval strategies for financial transactions.
It also supports secure management of infrastructure, such as container installation and upgrades. Teams and enterprises can confidently handle ICP, ckETH, and compatible tokens using Orbitâs advanced security features, which is critical for those seeking stable and reliable fund management.
8. Governance
ICP has two built-in governance systems. NNS is the DAO that manages the ICP protocol, and the SNS framework is a toolbox for creating DAOs that manage individual dapps. Both are open to everyone to participate and promote decentralized decision-making. Token economics incentivize voting participation and ensure that DAO decisions are in the long-term interests of ICP and the governed dapps.
Plasma Milestones
Plasma advances the decentralization of liquid democracy on ICP, where voters can choose to vote alone or follow experts they believe will make the best decisions. Plasma aims to expand the range of experts to vote independently on proposals that are critical to maintaining the integrity of the ICP network.
9. Developer Experience
Developer experience is a key factor in developer adoption, which includes low-friction container development and operations, expressive smart contract languages, testing frameworks, and a rich set of libraries. In addition to container development, the developer experience also includes inclusive and quality-assured protocol development.
Beryllium Milestones
The Beryllium milestone is heavily influenced by developer requests and feedback.
Beryllium provides substantial simplifications and improvements to the developer lifecycle of containers, especially in its development and operation, with snapshot capabilities, powerful logging infrastructure and improved error handling, as well as insights into container cycles consumption and related event push, bringing containers closer to Web2 services in terms of DevOps.
Since its launch in 2021, the Internet Computer has grown rapidly, demonstrating significant advancements in blockchain technology, and with this updated roadmap, DFINITY is charting a course to ensure the World Computer vision is realized.
A key element to the success of the Internet Computer is the ICP community, and we want to hear from you, please share your feedback on the roadmap, what features are missing, and which milestones would you benefit most from?
You can submit feature requests and vote on them on the DX Feedback Board, or join in the discussion of other feature requests on the forums. We look forward to hearing your ideas and making this another successful year for the Internet Computer:
dx.internetcomputer.org
forum.dfinity.org
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