DFINITY 2021: The Rise of the Internet Computer
As the Mercury milestone initializes the decentralization of the Internet Computer’s alpha network, one pivotal year gives way to another.
DFINITY closed out 2020 with a momentous development — we initialized the decentralization of the Internet Computer’s alpha network (aka “mainnet”) on December 18, as per the Mercury milestone, an achievement that enables the Network Nervous System (NNS) to onboard thousands of independent data centers and millions of nodes. Since the launch of mainnet, the Internet Computer has created over 500,000 blocks, and the NNS is in the process of onboarding 896 nodes this quarter, followed by thousands of nodes by end of 2021 and then into the millions by 2030.
The Mercury milestone now puts the Internet Computer on a short path to a final “Genesis” decentralization step, which involves the NNS releasing ICP utility tokens to holders in the form of voting neurons, enabling more than 50,000 ICP utility token holders to begin participation in network governance.
Amid a global pandemic that upended everyday life this year, the DFINITY Foundation has remained focused on developing a revolutionary blockchain created by the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) weaving together the compute capacity of node machines operated en masse by independent data centers around the world. This represents a profound opportunity to restore an open internet and make an entirely new breed of software possible, unleashing a wave of innovation and new user experiences.
We worked toward this vision throughout 2020 by progressively making the Internet Computer a reality. The Internet Computer is the world’s first web-speed, internet-scale public blockchain, which enables smart contracts to securely serve interactive web content directly into the browsers of end users. It supports interoperable software, open internet services that can share irrevocable APIs, and transparent, open governance systems. This will transform how the world builds IT systems, including websites, enterprise systems, mass-market internet services, financial systems, governance and legal systems, and more — setting the stage for mutualized network effects that can effectively reboot the internet.
In July, MIT Technology Review profiled the Internet Computer, heightening the project’s public profile as it emerged from stealth this year.
“The dominance of a few companies, and the ad-tech industry that supports them, has distorted the way we communicate — pulling public discourse into a gravity well of hate speech and misinformation — and upended basic norms of privacy…. DFINITY believes that making the internet a free market again will lead to a boom in innovation like the one we saw in the dot-com days, with startups exploring new ways to make money that don’t rely on indiscriminate processing of personal data.”
— Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review
Initiating Mercury
Mercury is the last of the five milestones leading up to the Internet Computer’s public launch and spinning out as part of the public internet. The NNS, an open algorithmic governance system, will control the network, requiring submission of proposals to upgrade or operate the network. Unlike the Tungsten and Sodium networks, the Mercury mainnet will have greater stability and no longer require periodic network resets for testing purposes.
We will formally begin migrating developers onto the mainnet in January 2021, and more announcements about Mercury will follow in Q1. We’re also preparing to deploy more resources and initiatives to help developer teams create and deploy software on the Internet Computer, whether it’s raising funds, troubleshooting, or building a service that’s capable of scaling to millions of users.
What does this moment mean for entrepreneurs?
Society has grown increasingly aware of the costs and problems associated with the corporatization of the internet. Big data and high-market-cap tech companies offer services that allow users do things more quickly and conveniently — but they also hijack and leverage user data and relationships to maintain the advantage of immense network effects.
For entrepreneurs, the availability of the Internet Computer marks a point in history where we can leverage technology to democratize software development. For far too long, resources for aspiring startups have been confined to a handful of major cities and technological hubs. We believe that 99% of the world’s entrepreneurial talent lives outside Silicon Valley. By fostering new business models and open internet services, we will see founders gain access to the networks, talent, and funding that they need to succeed no matter where in the world they are.
“This is a fast-paced area for innovation, and the earlier you’re in, the earlier you’re learning,” remarked Bettina Warburg at DFINITY’s Tungsten Network Launch event in June during a panel discussion about investing in the open web. “Being able to be early and learn as quickly as possible — what works, what doesn’t, how to best take advantage of this new architecture — I think puts any entrepreneur or developer far ahead of the pack.”
What does this moment mean for developers?
The Internet Computer enables a seamless software ecosystem where different apps and programs communicate and use each other’s APIs. This is made possible by WebAssembly canisters: computational units that consist of both code and data. Canisters, which are an advanced evolution of smart contracts, can be deployed on the Internet Computer and accessed over the internet.
Throughout 2020, the DFINITY team continued to create tools and provide resources that support third-party developers to efficiently create and deploy software — and many developers have already begun doing so.
Little more than a year following the release of the DFINITY Canister SDK and the Motoko programming language, we’re blown away by the activity and innovation demonstrated by our developer community in 2020. Developers have used resources like the Rust Canister Development Kit (CDK) to build things like a GraphQL implementation on the Internet Computer. They have also built their own Candid libraries and CDKs in other languages, like Kotlin and AssemblyScript.
Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of our developer community in 2020 has been the emergence of positive network effects and a willingness to support other developers, as reflected by the +1,800 discussion-based posts created by the community within the DFINITY Developer Forum.
“When you look back on every decade in tech, there’s one thing that really dominated. And I think this will be the one in this next decade,” said Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, at the Tungsten Network Launch event. “If you’re somebody who’s thinking about where to start a company, I think you should really take a hard look at this space. Because we’re not only changing the platform on what you build, but we’re changing what you can build. It’s a new kind of platform.”
What does this moment mean for consumers?
In recent decades, corporations have taken over the internet with proprietary networks that provide access in exchange for the loss of privacy and ownership. The result has been an extractive data economy that primarily serves a handful of tech giants to the detriment of competition and innovation — which is ripe for an intervention.
What might it mean to reimagine the internet and make it open again? Advancements in cryptography and distributed computing such as the Internet Computer, which offers a which offers a blockchain that runs at web speed with unbounded capacity, can restore control and ownership of networks back into the hands of the public.
An open playing field for developers and entrepreneurs is within reach with the potential to catalyze the next stage of growth on the web.
The Road to Mercury
Bronze
Back in 2019, the DFINITY team launched Copper, the first milestone and introduced our software development kit (SDK) and a new computer language called Motoko.
“To offer a seamless developer experience, we wanted to create a specialized programming language, called Motoko, that is designed to directly support the programming model of the Internet Computer, making it easier to efficiently build applications and take advantage of some of the more unusual features of this platform,” explained DFINITY’s Andreas Rossberg, co-creator of WebAssembly.
Bronze, the second release milestone, was unveiled in January at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, where DFINITY demonstrated a desktop-based social network for professional profiles called LinkedUp (an open version of LinkedIn) that ran on the Internet Computer.
Bronze marked the first time that the Internet Computer wove together the compute capacity of special machines running in an independent data center in Switzerland with full consensus and P2P/transport layers. Instead of terminal-based apps, canisters built with Bronze store their own front-end, meaning apps can store their state, backend logic, and front-end directly in a canister — which was demonstrated through the creation of LinkedUp.
As Michael Nuñez of Forbes reported at the time: “Williams hopes that his LinkedUp application will inspire others to create open versions of other popular software like WhatsApp, Facebook, eBay and more. He wants to challenge the largest tech companies that control software, and thus the fate of any companies that choose to build on top of their platforms.”
Tungsten
The Internet Computer’s Tungsten milestone marked the moment when DFINITY welcomed third-party developers to the network for the first time. Ahead of the Tungsten release, we wanted to channel the energy and excitement of our internal engineers while also eating our own dog food — so we organized a 48-hour internal hackathon.
The Tungsten Hackathon took place over a two-day period in mid-June, with teams producing apps such as Magnify, a secure video conferencing application with authentication for participants. The event demonstrated how quickly developers can write and deploy apps on the Internet Computer.
We were also given a glimpse of the vast creative potential of the Internet Computer. As one participant noted: “The dev workflow is highly productive. You could conceivably write and deploy an app in a single day.” The stage was set for the rollout of Tungsten.
The Tungsten launch event took place on June 30. During the event, DFINITY demonstrated CanCan, an open alternative to TikTok that is not owned or operated by a corporate or government entity. The sample application, developed with fewer than 1,000 lines of code, was created to showcase the simplicity of building on the Internet Computer.
“The tantalizing part of DFINITY’s ideas is that because of the nature of the architecture, apps like CanCan can be built with less than 1,000 lines of code,” wrote Mike Butcher about the event for TechCrunch. “Facebook, to take an example, contains more than 62 million lines of code.”
Tungsten marked the moment that developers were officially able to begin building on the Internet Computer, and we have been actively supporting these first movers. The release in August of the “Building on the Internet Computer: Fundamentals” video series, for example, gives developers an introduction to the Internet Computer and shows how they can begin creating apps for it.
Sodium
September marked the Internet Computer’s Sodium milestone. More than 127,000 participants registered across two launch events, in English and Mandarin, to watch as DFINITY Founder and Chief Scientist Dominic Williams and other team members unveiled the Network Nervous System as well as breakthroughs in cryptography and DeFi.
Dominic Williams explained how the Network Nervous System manages the Internet Computer’s token economics, as well as how ICP utility tokens (formerly known as DFN) and computation “cycles” will be used for governance and to run software, respectively. ICP utility tokens can be used for governance in the management of the blockchain network created by the Internet Computer Protocol, while cycles are used to power computation by software canisters running on the Internet Computer.
“The NNS governance system will run on a native token, dubbed ICP. These tokens fuel Dfinity’s decentralized web, akin to how ETH provides gas for the Ethereum network. ICP can also be used to participate in governance, allowing holders to vote on the proposals that will shape the future of the Internet Computer,” wrote Will Heasman for Decrypt.
Elite entrepreneurs and developers are already building apps
During the Tungsten Demo Day event in July, we gave 10 of the most promising teams that are building on the Internet Computer an opportunity to present their ideas and receive feedback from a friendly, receptive audience. The projects spanned a wide variety of use cases, ranging from social impact initiatives to marketplaces to decentralized financial services.
Sailfish, one of the Demo Day winners, is a decentralized financial exchange with a social component that’s designed to bridge other assets (such as ETH) into the Internet Computer. Users can trade, borrow, and lend assets, as well as collaborate and chat with community members on the application. You can check out Sailfish on Github, Twitter, and the application’s website, as well as check out other the early projects being built on the Internet Computer at our full recap of Tungsten Demo Day.
The DFINITY team has also begun compiling some of the projects of first movers who have chosen to build on the Internet Computer. You can learn more about these projects by visiting the Awesome DFINITY repo on GitHub. You can also find open-source Internet Computer course materials to further your knowledge at DFINITY Education on Github.
The world is taking note
Despite the limitations around global travel that the pandemic has imposed, the DFINITY team made it a priority to make community appearances throughout the year. Some notable engagements include presentations by Dominic Williams at Web Summit, Shanghai Blockchain Week, and the 2020 World Blockchain Conference.
In the press
- A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls
- Dfinity’s valuation soars to $9.5B after revealing its governance system and token economics
- Dfinity poised to launch straight into Top 5 crypto tokens by market cap
- Dfinity’s Internet Computer Could Be a Truly Decentralized Alternative
- DFINITY Founder: “We want to reinvent the Internet” (German)
- How the Internet Computer Reconstructs the Traditional Web (Chinese)
We’ve continued to invest in great people
We welcomed talented researchers, engineers, and operations experts throughout 2020 as we continued to grow DFINITY. We ended last year with 138 team members who are dedicated to building and supporting the Internet Computer.
If you’re interested in working with an extraordinary team to further the development of the Internet Computer, view our open positions.
Helping the Internet Computer scale to millions of nodes
We have introduced new teams within the organization aimed at preparing the world for the inevitable launch of the Internet Computer. Many of these team members continue to do the hard work of supporting independent data centers all around the world that will be running the Internet Computer Protocol.
As we enter the new year, nearly 1,000 independently owned and operated nodes across dozens of geographically diverse data centers — each of them certified to meet high standards of performance and physical security — are approved to run special machines that will allow the ICP protocol to weave together compute capacity to create the Internet Computer. We’re also working with leading industry manufacturers in server technology to build specialized hardware and racks.
Heading into 2021, the pipeline for additional independent data centers as well as funding partners that are interested in supporting data center investment in hardware for a share of the upside is amassing up to 10x the Genesis launch footprint, and we will continue with measured advance to ensure that the network continues to be supported.
Diving Into 2021
For all of the year’s challenges, 2020 gave the DFINITY Foundation and our growing community a lot to be hopeful for in the new year. We have created a novel cryptographic “Chain Key Technology” that aims to introduce the first true blockchain computer, which will help the world reimagine how we build everything. We’ve continued to develop Motoko, a language that’s optimized for building software that runs on the Internet Computer, and we’ve released CDKs for other languages such as Rust. We’re cultivating a growing community of independent data centers. We’re also supporting a growing developer ecosystem that’s composed of veteran entrepreneurs and elite developers with an increasing number of tools, resources, and programs.
For all of these efforts, we have only yet scratched the surface of what is possible with the Internet Computer, and we view the Mercury milestone as just the beginning. As we continue our efforts in 2021, we recognize that for all of our work to date, much remains to be done. There will be occasional complications and continued room for improvements, as well as exciting announcements of new partnerships, programs, and opportunities for the public to participate in this growing movement.
By pushing the boundaries of cryptography, distributed computing, virtual machine technology, and other advanced computer science, the Internet Computer will make the internet better by returning it to its free and open roots.
Look out for important Mercury launch updates in the Internet Computer Review newsletter.
Join our developer community at forum.dfinity.org.
