Seed Fundraising Roundup and Next Steps
It’s exciting times for the DFINITY project and the whole Ethereum ecosystem.
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DFINITY Stiftung’s Seed Round fundraising collected way more than expected closing at approximately 4M CHF (Swiss francs) in value — 4X more than the soft cap target. A significant part of our reserves will be held in crypto, so expect some fluctuation, but we have more than enough to meet the objectives of the Seed Round phase.
For those who missed out, the autonomous smart contracts running the fundraising will also later be running a Main Round. The system is fully automatic and DFINITY Stiftung can only delay the round by up to 270 days, with it otherwise occurring 4 months after the seed completed. We expect that a DFINITY test network will be running before this event.
The success of the Seed Round demonstrates the vibrancy and grass roots nature of our decentralization technology community. DFINITY has never received press although it has introduced numerous innovations and prolifically presented works at technical conferences over the years, but that mattered little. Our more technical and sometimes heretical direction did not stop us.
DFINITY’s release schedule is named after metals. Currently we have Copper, Zinc, Tungsten and Lithium, but right now we’re mainly focused on Copper. We want the Copper client to support a test net before the contracts run the Main Round.
Copper involves two key technologies: Threshold Relay (and dependent Probabilistic Slot Protocol blockchain) and the Blockchain Nervous System. These represent only part of the innovations in the DFINITY stable, but deliver dramatic progress and a new direction. We expect Threshold Relay to provide finality (speed) 50X faster than Ethereum today, reducing it to well under 10 seconds from around 10 minutes. It will also provide similar increases in computational capacity by removing the Poisson distribution of Proof-of-Work systems (which reduces the time miners can spend validating transactions in blocks). Moreover, the Blockchain Nervous System and the “AI is Law” paradigm creates an exciting new branch in blockchain’s evolutionary tree.
As discussed in other posts, the “AI is Law” paradigm introduced by the Blockchain Nervous System makes DFINITY a very different beast to Ethereum and allows it to be a non-competitive sister network that expands the reach of the EVM. We hope that the fruits of the cryptography and protocol research performed under the auspices of the DFINITY project can be applied within Ethereum wherever useful, either directly or by informing aspects of the design of Casper. In light of this, systems such as Threshold Relay provide extraordinary promise for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
Nonetheless, DFINITY does have a more driven focus on performance and using scale-out techniques than Ethereum since the project was originally formed to establish how decentralized virtual computers might host open versions of mass market services such as Uber and even Web search. Therefore there are many additional techniques such as Validation Towers, Validation Trees and USCIDs (Unique State Copy IDs) that specifically relate to our scale-out architectures. However, these will not make it into Copper. Our task with Copper is simple: avoid feature creep, and release a client that greatly increases the speed and capacity of the virtual computer produced and plus a functioning Blockchain Nervous System. We want to do this as quickly as possible and in a few months not years.
Luckily good progress has already been made on Threshold Relay and Blockchain Nervous System technologies. We have stable implementations of the low level cryptography and higher level protocol simulations for Threshold Relay and have created Blockchain Nervous System PoCs where, for example, special versions of the EVM supporting the extra privileged instructions it requires have been created. The greatest delays in our progress towards Copper will likely be work that must be performed on the Ethereum clients to allow them to support our techniques cleanly. There are many considerations involved, ranging from the quality of existing code to licensing issues. We are still actively analyzing these, but we may end up with two teams working in parallel, one refactoring and improving an existing Ethereum client, and another creating a fresh client with better licensing — both tracking the shortest path to Copper and ensuring an optimal modular client is eventually available.
The other prong of our development work involves accelerating the development of crucial components we share with Ethereum such as the EVM and smart contract development tools such as Solidity and Truffle. This is really a parallel branch of development that will not impede development of the DFINITY client and we have already been busy talking to world class talent from major independent projects that intersect with the future of Ethereum. Expect us to make exciting announcements soon :) DFINITY should accelerate the development of Ethereum, and this symbiosis is one of the great mutual advantages of our positioning.
Finally, as you might have gathered, DFINITY Stiftung is looking for additional developers. Our immediate priority is to build out with senior and guru level engineers who can assist with our work on low-level cryptography code, complex client and network architectures and other such things, and we encourage anyone who thinks they are suitable to make contact as soon as they can. You might be a CS PhD with a strong theoretical background, or a self taught hacker who has written large amounts of complex code for the hell of it or something else entirely — please talk to us about the opportunity to work on some of the most exciting and impactful systems in tech with solid remuneration. There will also be other opportunities, from systems administration to GUI development and design. If you are interested in working on DFINITY technologies, please contact us.
That’s it from me for a short while! I’m in Oxford (UK) after attending EDCON in Paris, shortly to return to California, other team members are today hosting a booth at the Stanford University job fair for CS PhDs, and still others are in China and of course Switzerland. Most of our time right now is focused on expanding the team and finalizing technical planning regarding the client. These things are keeping us busy, but we will be making the public Slack channel easier to join (soon) and also pushing news and technical material out more regularly. I also remind people that they can get in touch with DFINITY Stiftung using hello@dfinity.org.
On behalf of DFINTY Stiftung, thanks again for all your support. I’m really looking forward to presenting progress :)
