Sep 12, 2018
Fintech startup Dfinity is building a supercomputer in Zurich
The USD 2bn startup is building a research laboratory in Switzerland. The goal is to turn the Internet into a computer. This article was published in the Swiss Daily “Handelszeitung” on September 7, 2018, by Marc Badertscher, and translated here to make it accessible to a global audience.
Like no other country, Switzerland has managed to position itself as an attractive location for everything related to Blockchain. Nowhere else did government members promote the cause more than Federal Councilor Johann Schneider-Ammann with his slogan “Crypto Nation”.
But it does reflect reality: so far, Switzerland has been the main haven for managing hundreds of millions of dollars that have flowed into the new, often globally dispersed projects and startups. Every day, a new company is sprouting up in this country, whose goal is the administration of new tokens and cryptocurrencies. With a few exceptions, the actual development of new apps and platforms takes place everywhere in the world, but not in Switzerland.
This is beginning to change with a weighty new resident. The highly regarded project Dfinity is settling down in Zurich near the central station. “Zurich will be our base in Europe,” says Dfinity founder Dominic Williams. «We are constantly expanding. By the end of 2018, 10 to 15 people will work in our Zurich Research Lab. A year later, it will be 40. »
The ambitions are gigantic: Dfinity wants to expand nothing less than the Internet. It plans to mutate into a public infrastructure, which not only push data around like today, but also directly offer apps and services. Williams also speaks of the “Internet computer”. It would be the next stage in the evolution of computing. First there were the isolated personal computers, then the centralized cloud world and now, with Dfinity, a global supercomputer created by the interplay of thousands of distributed computers around the world and accessible to all.
We have not come quite that far yet. But major institutional investors, especially from Silicon Valley, have already invested USD 200m. Meanwhile, Dfinity is valued at just under $ 2 billion. The funds are managed by the Dfinity Foundation, which was founded in Zug two years ago. The foundation finances the further development of the project and thus also the Research Lab in Zurich.
“Zurich is a very good location for our project, above all because of ETH Zurich. At the ETH there is a lot of expertise in cryptography and distributed computing,” says Williams. The research centers of Google and IBM in Zurich also made the city attractive. “We will need talent,” he says. For now, the startup has leased office space for fifty jobs.
Save on the human factor
At its core, Dfinity is all about the new blockchain technology. It is at the center of efforts to reliably interact in the digital space without relying on a single institution. For example, to transfer things of value such as cryptocurrencies to each other in the so-called Internet of Value. But the technology allows much more to take place. Whole programs — and behind every app and every website are such — can be loaded on blockchains and attached systems. It then no longer needs central servers. The trick is that all data, transactions and programs are backed up multiple times on different computers worldwide. Thanks to cryptography and economic incentives, no one, including an evildoer, can unjustifiably alter these data, transactions and programs.
Dfinity does not reinvent the wheel. With Ethereum, there already exists a first rudimentary platform for this new form of computing. Dfinity generalizes the concept and wants to address the business world with its solution. “We do not compete with Ethereum, we try to compete with Amazon Cloud Computing and Google Cloud and classic technology. We want to completely reinvent how people develop and run software, “says Williams.
Of course, the pure computer costs are higher than with a centralized cloud service, as all transactions are calculated by several computers and the data is stored multiple times. Nevertheless, Williams is convinced that he will be able to offer a cheaper option at the end of the day because it requires fewer people to maintain. “There will be a great deal of simplification for anyone who wants to launch a service on the Internet. No storage worries and server problems anymore, the computer is always running, “says Williams. In addition, the power of monopoly-like Internet companies is shrinking.
Smaller application examples would be apps for collecting parking fees as well as the order management of an SME. But the vision is that companies will ultimately outsource entire IT systems to Dfinity, just as cloud services do today.
The challenge in this new field of computer science is enormous. The key questions are: How can such an Internet computer be governed and developed when there is no headquarters? And how could he deal with increasing demand, so scale? Dfinity has answers that are well received in the blockchain industry. The devil is in the detail and in the implementation. At the end of the year, a first rudimentary version of Dfinity goes live. But it will be years before the infrastructure is ready for the mass of companies.
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