The Internet Computer Roadmap 2025 Update
New milestones pushing the boundaries of sovereign compute
We are excited to announce the 2025 update to the ICP Roadmap. The DFINITY Foundation will further extend the capabilities of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), enhancing the developer and user experience, and further embracing AI. More than twenty new features have been added across the various focal areas and grouped into milestones. With this updated roadmap, DFINITY is charting a course to achieve the World Computer vision and to provide sovereign software to the world.
The new features have been defined based on the valuable feedback from the community, the path towards the vision of sovereign software, and the latest advances in AI. They incorporate the new Self-Writing Internet paradigm, enabling anyone to become a developer and benefit from the unique properties of ICP. The overall vision and focus areas remain unchanged.
As the Internet Computer Protocol continues to mature, the DFINITY Foundation will increasingly shift its resources towards removing friction in adoption and onboarding of new developers, extending beyond the Web3 community, and enabling new types of applications to be built. An exciting example is Caffeine, which features on the ICP Roadmap for the first time.
A key factor to the success of the Internet Computer is the ICP community. We want to hear from you: please share your feedback on the roadmap, which features are missing, what milestones will you benefit most from? You can submit and upvote DX-related feature requests on the DX feedback board or engage in discussion on the forum. We look forward to hearing your ideas and further update the roadmap with your feedback.
Below, we give a brief overview of the milestones that have been newly added or significantly revised and reflect on their significance, grouped by the various focus areas.
ICP as a Compute Platform
Smart contracts are a superior way to build software, enabling secure, tamper-proof, resilient, and sovereign applications. ICP’s vision is that most of the world’s software will be built with smart contracts. The goal of the “Compute Platform” theme is to lift any limitations of smart contracts and enable the world’s software to run on ICP.
Flux Milestone
This milestone is all about increasing the computational capacity of subnets and balancing the load across subnets. The former will entail optimizing the algorithm to schedule canisters, the management of sandboxes, and increasing the memory efficiency. The latter will be addressed by enabling developers to migrate canisters between subnets. Developers will be able to take a snapshot of a canister, download it, and then upload it to a new subnet. This has the further benefit that developers can make backups of canisters and restore them from backups if necessary.
Magnetosphere Milestone
The second milestone for ICP as a compute platform centers around increasing the use of trusted execution environments (TEE) to increase integrity and security of ICP. The milestone will enable the use of TEEs to protect the node state, prevent tampering with the replica code, and keep key shares confidential. By guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the nodes, verifiable API BN access logs and secure queries are unlocked.
Fission Milestone
Balancing load by developers migrating canisters to other subnets is a very fine-grained method that works best for a small number of canisters. An alternative load balancing mechanism solution is via subnet splitting. The protocol already allows for splitting subnets, but it would incur a few hours of canister downtime. The goal of this milestone is to make subnet splitting practical so that downtime is minimal.
Decentralized AI
Artificial Intelligence and ICP have significant potential to benefit one another, a unique combination that cannot be found elsewhere! ICP allows for uploading and running code on the network and then, thanks to orthogonal persistence and other other ICP superpowers, to later seamlessly upgrade and iterate on dapps in production. Now, AI can fulfil the vision of the Self-Writing Internet paradigm, where everyone is a developer and can build and deploy their own dapps by just describing them.
ICP can further address the — most probably — biggest problem of centralized AI: intransparency and complete lack of verifiability, requiring users to blindly trust a single third party.
Decentralized AI (DeAI) can solve this. DeAI involves running AI inference — and later also training — as smart contracts on-chain, which addresses AI’s trust challenges. Users can trust the integrity of the models they utilize and verify the inputs to the models, reducing the need to trust them blindly. However, AI training and inference are highly resource-intensive, and the limited computational capabilities of traditional blockchain networks often fall short. In contrast, the advanced design of the Internet Computer successfully marries the security of smart contracts with the robust computational demands of AI.
Vertex Milestone
Alpha release of the Caffeine platform that allows prompt-based creation of full-stack applications. This represents a vertex where unique ICP technologies, such as its serverless compute model, enhanced orthogonal persistence, and AI models for Motoko code generation meet, creating the dawn of the Self-Writing Internet.
Ignition Milestone
AI agents are a growing paradigm in software, and the Internet Computer is uniquely positioned to be the home of AI agents. Compared to the traditional IT stack, AI agents on the Internet Computer can securely and easily manage digital assets, transact amongst each other, be fully sovereign, and be tokenized and managed by DAOs. This milestone focuses on providing access to foundational LLMs, along with basic tools to make it as simple as possible to deploy agents on the Internet Computer.
Ignition will also introduce AI worker nodes that specialize in processing LLM prompts. AI workers will have security guarantees similar to canister smart contracts on the Internet Computer and provide powerful AI models as a service that canisters can call.
Chain Fusion
Chain Fusion leverages chain-key cryptography and enables direct interoperability with all major blockchains in a decentralized fashion. ICP smart contracts can read from and write to different chains. Developers can thus make use of the capabilities ICP offers when developing apps for other blockchain ecosystems instead of resorting to centralized cloud infrastructure or insecure bridges. In this area, we are currently working on the Helium milestone, integrating ICP with Solana. The next and freshly added milestone is Meridian.
Helium Milestone
The Helium milestone enables Chain Fusion for the Solana network, bringing Solana and ICP closer together, combining the powers of the two networks. Dapps leveraging the capabilities of both networks look and feel like single-network dapps.
Meridian Milestone
Dogecoin has a very similar design to Bitcoin, and therefore, integrating ICP with Dogecoin requires relatively little work. Dogecoin is popular and has a high market cap but has no smart contract capabilities. With this milestone, Chain Fusion is extended with support for Dogecoin, allowing canister smart contracts to hold and transfer Dogecoin and extend Doge with all kinds of new DeFi capabilities.
Privacy
Canister smart contracts can be used to implement privacy-preserving dapps that give users full control over their data. Leveraging cryptographic protocols, ICP enables developers to build dapps where users store and share encrypted on-chain data. Advanced cryptographic protocols will eventually allow computations on encrypted data.
Niobium Milestone
vetKeys is a decentralized key management service, allowing users to derive cryptographic keys on demand, in a fully decentralized way. This allows developers, for instance, to build dapps where users’ data is encrypted, addressing privacy needs on a public blockchain.
Containment Milestone
This milestone enables the full use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), providing an extra layer of integrity guarantee and shielding from unauthorized access to canisters’ state, further strengthening the privacy properties of ICP.
Decentralization
The security of ICP is based on the elimination of central points of control. A user interacting with ICP will not need to rely on a single party. Besides architectural aspects, such as the edge infrastructure, this also encompasses operational aspects, complementing the DAO-based governance of ICP.
Levitron Milestone
This milestone enhances visibility into the Internet Computer’s edge infrastructure by making aggregated and anonymized API boundary node access logs publicly accessible. Developers gain valuable insights into their dapps’ usage patterns, enabling traffic analysis and user statistics. To ensure log integrity and verifiability, this milestone builds on the Trusted Execution Environments introduced in Magnetosphere.
Knot Milestone
Knot milestone will define the next generation (aka Gen3) node hardware specifications, refine reward calculations, and improve network topology to enhance network performance, efficiency, and decentralization of the ICP infrastructure.
Identity
Most dapps on ICP interact with users and authenticate and possibly require some identity information about them, such as whether they are human, unique, of age.
Indeed, an identity solution that is secure, privacy-preserving, self-sovereign, and user-friendly is a fundamental building block for Web3 adoption. Users need to be able to use their dapps seamlessly across different devices, be able to recover their access if they happen to lose a device, and their security guaranteed — after all, this is crypto and users have their assets onchain. Internet Identity addresses this and makes users’ and developers’ lives easy.
Pulse Milestone
The Pulse milestone centers around the user experience of Internet Identity. By eliminating the need of anchors, supporting the OpenID standard and disentangling the relationship between Internet Identity, wallets and dapps integrating with them, essential friction points are removed.
Plexus Milestone
The Separatrix milestone reached in 2024 introduced verifiable credentials to Internet Identity. This milestone will overhaul the Internet Identity’s credentials solution by adopting established credential standards and thus making the issuance and consumption of credentials more interoperable.
Digital Assets
DeFi protocols, real-world asset tokenization, and other digital asset solutions are strong drivers of Web3 adoption. ICP’s Chain Fusion capabilities, unparalleled scalability, and the ability to serve web assets from the chain opens up novel digital asset classes. Moreover, it makes ICP an attractive platform to build multichain custody solutions and wallets.
Nexus Milestone
This milestone extends the ICRC suite of ledger standards to support the CMTAT (Capital Markets and Technology Association Token) framework to meet enterprise requirements. It will unlock key use cases such as stablecoins and the tokenization of real-world assets, driving the future of trustless digital asset management on the Internet Computer.
Echelon Milestone
Orbit is a secure solution for digital assets and smart contract management, and this milestone will broaden its asset management capabilities by enabling seamless integration of native tokens from other blockchains, starting with ETH and ERC-20. This will create a unified platform for treasury management, allowing users to securely sign and send transactions across multiple chains. Additionally, we will introduce automatic smart contract upgrades, ensuring that users always have access to the latest security updates and features with minimal manual intervention.
Neutron Milestone
To further improve Orbit’s usability and accessibility, we will enhance the user experience through intuitive approval flows, a revamped onboarding, and a comprehensive documentation hub. These improvements will ensure the Orbit platform is efficient for both individual users and teams managing their digital assets management needs.
Dynamo Milestone
A new foundation for a decentralized software marketplace is built, providing developers with a clear path to adoption for their applications without reliance on centralized platforms. By integrating transparent deployment flows and seamless discovery tools, this initiative lays the groundwork for a sovereign software ecosystem where developers can easily package and distribute their applications, and users retain full control over their installed apps.
Apex Milestone
From zero to Degen-Hero: This milestone aims at boosting the ICP DeFi ecosystem by simplifying the discovery of new tokens, creating more transparency into who controls ledgers, and a more streamlined user experience between DeFi dapps.
Governance & Tokenomics
ICP has two kinds of built-in governance systems. The NNS is the DAO governing the ICP protocol. The SNS framework is a toolbox for creating DAOs that govern individual dapps. Both are open for everyone to participate and facilitate decentralized decision making. Tokenomics incentivise voting participation and ensure that DAO decisions are aligned with the long-term interests of the ICP community and the governed dapps.
Neon Milestone
The main focus of the Neon milestone is on expanding the user base and improving the user experience. Holding governance tokens is intuitive and seamless, ensuring that new users can quickly understand their holdings and easily explore and engage with new opportunities, such as Service Nervous System (SNS) launches. Additional features aim to make the governance process more intuitive and simplify SNS DAO operations, laying the basis for the next milestone.
Nucleon Milestone
This milestone focuses on boosting user involvement in governance. It aims to create a sense of belonging to DAO communities and encourage users to contribute to the liquid democracy processes. SNS communities can apply their decisions easily with proposals.
Nucleus Milestone
This milestone integrates Orbit’s multi-approval framework with the Network Nervous System (NNS), designating the NNS as the root of trust. By having the NNS “bless” new versions, the Orbit platform gains a robust, decentralized governance layer without requiring each council to implement its own governance from scratch.
Developer Experience
The developer experience is an essential ingredient for developer adoption. This includes low-friction canister development and operations, expressive smart contract languages, testing frameworks, and a rich set of libraries. Beyond the canister development, developer experience also encompasses an inclusive and quality-preserving protocol development.
Thorium Milestone
This milestone improves the cycles management experience on ICP through the introduction of the Cycles Ledger. End users can hold cycles seamlessly and can more easily manage their canisters cycles balance.
Furthermore, with the exposure of a key set of metrics, getting insights into your canisters’ operations has been greatly improved, especially with the ability to see a breakdown of your cycles usage and which endpoints are the most expensive ones to call.
Atlas Milestone
The second milestone of ICP Ninja introduces multiple AI-focussed features, such as the ability to bootstrap projects with AI, leveraging the Caffeine platform. Additionally, it aims at fostering more community engagement and collaboration through the publication of community projects and templates.
The DFINITY Foundation is also planning an overhaul of the CLI toolchain used for canister development. We are not yet ready to share detailed plans but expect some major updates later this year.
In Conclusion
This updated roadmap represents another bold statement in terms of the technical leadership of the Internet Computer and vision towards the World Computer. We once again invite the whole community to share your thoughts and suggestions on the forum, on X, and at numerous events around the world.
For more detailed information on the roadmap and an overview of what has been deployed already in the protocol, check out the ICP Roadmap and, for an in-depth discussion on this roadmap update, join the DFINITY Foundation for a livestream with Samuel Burri, VP of Engineering, and Björn Tackmann, Head of Research, on 7th March 2025 at 3pm CET on our Youtube channel.
[Article last edited on 5th March 2025]
