The Internet Computer Solves Web3’s Reliance on Web2 Tech
The Internet Computer is the fastest general-purpose blockchain for Web3 dapps, DeFi, games, NFTs, social media, and metaverse projects.
Decentralized applications (dapps) grew spectacularly in 2021, according to DappRadar’s annual industry report, with some 2.7 million unique active wallets connecting to dapps daily. But while the overall dapp industry saw 765% year-over-year growth last year, the public has yet to see the emergence of hyperscale, blockchain-based dapps such as an Amazon-like e-commerce website or a decentralized social media network to rival Facebook.
This is because conventional and legacy blockchains lack the necessary architecture to host mass-market platforms that can scale entirely on-chain. Moreover, most blockchain protocols rely on centralized, corporate cloud services to host their platforms and store data. These nodes run on servers owned by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and other companies.
For example, almost 70% of Ethereum nodes ran on centralized services in 2020, as reported by Decrypt. Rather than operate 100% on-chain, dapps also typically use centralized web hosting and cloud providers for their front-end interfaces. This severely undermines decentralization and makes dapps dependent on cloud companies.
Dapp creators need a better solution for on-chain Web3 development. The Internet Computer is a layer-1 blockchain for building infinitely scalable Web3 dapps, DeFi protocols, games, NFTs, social media, enterprise systems, and metaverse projects that operate end to end on blockchain. It can host enormous amounts of data and quickly execute vast numbers of computations.
On-chain data storage
Social media platforms and digital marketplaces are storage-heavy applications that add a new state with practically every activity. On legacy blockchains, the network simply slows down due to congestion, leading to exorbitant transaction fees (aka gas) and delayed block finality.
The Internet Computer has much less unnecessary replication, so its on-chain storage of smart contract data is the cheapest in the industry, costing just $5 to host 1 GB of data per year. In contrast, at the time of writing, it costs a whopping $201 million to store 1 GB of data on Ethereum. Solana charges about $1 million and Avalanche charges $988,000 for 1 GB of on-chain storage. This staggering expense limits most dapp development to applications with a small state on which their transactions operate.
On the Internet Computer, each dapp has an ability to store the data it needs within its canister smart contract environment, where it can be used by the dapp’s smart contract logic instantly.
Facilitating scalability
The Internet Computer is the ideal blockchain for building dapps with large state requirements. At the base of its architecture are independent node machines running the Internet Computer Protocol in independent data centers located around the world. A set of these nodes combine to form a subnet blockchain. The Internet Computer is essentially a network of several standalone subnet blockchains, and it can scale its capacity indefinitely by adding new nodes to the network.
The Internet Computer onboards new nodes and subnets via the Network Nervous System (NNS), an open, permissionless, on-chain DAO in which anyone can participate by staking ICP utility tokens into voting neurons. Each subnet hosts canister smart contracts, which are interoperable compute units that consist of code and state.
Smart contract execution on the Internet Computer is divided into update and query calls, improving the network’s scalability. Update calls are state-modifying transactions, while query calls are simple read-only requests that are executed in milliseconds.
On the Internet Computer, every honest node in a subnet processes an update call while only one node is needed to process a query call. Each subnet can independently process update and query calls without relying on other subnets. Therefore the Internet Computer scales update calls by adding more subnets and it scales query calls by adding more nodes to a subnet.
A recent performance evaluation demonstrated that the Internet Computer can process more than 11,500 transactions per second, with 1-second finality on application subnets hosting dapps, as well as 250,000 queries per second. The Internet Computer’s NNS finality is just 2 seconds.
Web3 foundation for dapps
Web3 holds genuine promise for building infinite-state dapps that operate quickly, decentralizing data and platform control and putting them in the hands of users. Unlike other blockchains where smart contracts cannot serve interactive web content to users, canister smart contracts on the Internet Computer can receive and respond to HTTP requests.
The Internet Computer uses a reverse-gas model where smart contracts pay for their own execution, computation, and storage. Application developers charge their smart contracts with cycles, and the users do not need to pay any “gas” fees to interact with these smart contracts. Users can easily interact with on-chain dapps over the web without needing to have a token wallet for paying gas. No gas fees are required to mint or buy NFTs on the Internet Computer, and the NFT and its associated asset are both hosted on-chain, rather than storing the hash on-chain and the asset on a cloud server.
The Internet Computer is a sovereign decentralized network that does not use cloud computing services to deliver web content. There is no risk of sudden shutdowns from centralized servers. NFTs have recently been minted on both Ethereum and Solana and hosted on the Internet Computer — ensuring, as Rolling Stone recently put it, “that the NFT artwork lives forever on a public blockchain without threat of a takedown or cloud-outage issues.”
With Internet Identity, users can anonymously authenticate themselves to dapps using cryptographically-enabled devices like a laptop or smartphone, allowing them to benefit from cryptographic security without needing to manage private keys.
You can already see dedicated user communities developing around platforms like DSCVR (a decentralized social content platform like Reddit), OpenChat (decentralized instant messaging), and distrikt (decentralized professional social media), with dozens more projects in early stages. Storage costs alone would make each of those dapps impossible to develop on other layer-1 chains.
As the Internet Computer’s dapp ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, a diverse set of Web3 use cases will pave the way toward an innovative, decentralized future.
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