Exclusive interview with DFINITY: ICP is a victim of SBF Capital's operation; much of the future of Web3 lies in Asia.
Interview: Jack, BlockBeats
Compiled by: czgsws, BlockBeats
Believing in DFINITY is a topic that countless investors who entered the cryptocurrency field in 2021 cannot avoid. This "king-level project" with a financing of nearly 200 million US dollars has seen its native token ICP maintain a downward trend since its high opening in 2021, leaving investors who entered at a few tens of dollars or even 100 dollars in the past two years with no hope of making a profit.
At the end of 2021, the bull market came to an end and with the market in chaos, investors cut their losses and left. We no longer hear anyone talking about DFINITY, nor do we see any updates on new projects on the network. In the following year and a half, many excellent new projects took the spotlight in the market, with Optimism and Arbitrum launching their own tokens. New public chains like Aptos and Sui, which use the Move language, also made a dazzling debut with huge financing. DFINITY has gradually been forgotten by the market.
Now that 23 years have quietly passed, when we read the official DFINITY blog, we find that the project has not experienced the situation of discontinuation like some "runaway" projects. Monthly reports, quarterly reports, BTC network integration, Ordinals topic articles, and research reports that closely follow current events tell us that this former king has not stopped the progress of research and development.
What is the ICP network like? How has it developed and what kind of performance does it have? Are there any misunderstandings or unknown situations regarding the rumor of "high-level selling by the project party"? Can DFINITY, which was supported by a group of Asian capital investments in the early days, return to the public eye in the Hong Kong narrative? BlockBeats interviewed DFINITY founder Dominic Williams to address these questions.
BlockBeats: First, please introduce yourself briefly to the readers. Why did you enter the encryption industry and create DFINITY?
Dominic Williams: Of course, I have been working in the field of distributed systems and cryptography for a long time. In 2010, I launched a large-scale multiplayer online game, which had expanded to millions of users at that time. I built a distributed system for this game. Before that, during the dot-com bubble, I worked on early online file sharing and created a system called "Crypto++". So I think I have been working in this field for a long time.
In late 2013, I switched to the cryptocurrency industry full-time and attempted to build something called GameCoin, which aimed to become a cryptocurrency for the gaming industry, allowing for the transfer of value between different games and creating a cross-game economy. At that time, I realized that a cryptocurrency network capable of processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second was indeed needed for virtual goods. So I began researching and spent the entire year of 2014 working on this. I should be the first person in the cryptocurrency industry to devote myself to setting up the Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm for blockchain, and the first person to propose that mathematics can create cryptocurrencies infinitely. This was my original starting point, but I was also a member of the early Ethereum community, and someone in the community proposed the concept of the "World Computer," which fascinated me.
At that time, we had already seen that blockchain was not only used for cryptocurrency, but could also run code and host computations on blockchain and smart contracts. So when I heard the term "world computer," my interpretation of it was that eventually, every online service and enterprise system would run entirely on blockchain, on a world computer created by many blockchains. There will be a "blockchain singularity" one day. However, it is clear that a lot of technical work needs to be done to achieve this goal. So I accepted this challenge in 2015.
ICP, which stands for Internet Computer, is a blockchain, but it is completely rebuilt and does not share technology with any other blockchain. Even the cryptography that supports the blockchain is developed by a large team of some of the world's best cryptographers. So when you try to understand the Internet Computer, you must adjust your thinking. This is a blockchain that aims to replace all traditional IT.
BlockBeats: When ICP was first launched, its high market value attracted a lot of attention, but it almost disappeared from the public eye shortly after. In your opinion, why did this happen? What progress has DFINITY made in the past two years?
Dominic Williams: First of all, it is important for those who are confused about the lack of information coverage for Internet Computer to understand why this is the case. At the root of everything, there are many mysterious and powerful people who are afraid that Internet Computer will reduce the value of their tokens because our technology is very advanced. What I mean is that this is obviously a revolutionary technology. Anyone who has investigated the DFINITY Foundation will find that it is the largest research and development team in the encryption industry. We have one of the world's most famous teams of cryptographers and one of the best teams in the technology field.
Many people are very concerned that the emergence of Internet Computer will somehow reduce the value of assets such as Solana and Avalanche that they hold, which has caused many problems.
So when ICP was launched, the token price was heavily manipulated by Sam Bankman-Fried on FTX, yes, using something called ICP-PERP (ICP perpetual contract). Later we found out that in order to make it crash, SBF raised the price of ICP by five times. It seems that he did this to defend his large holdings of Solana. Unfortunately, this person stole billions of dollars from FTX customers. He then invested these billions of dollars into the Solana ecosystem, as well as later projects such as Near and Aptos.
BlockBeats Note: Previously, an article pointed out that within a few hours of ICP's release, its market value continued to rise under price manipulation, exceeding $230 billion at one point. Once the manipulation stopped, the price of ICP began to fall back to its natural market level. Market value data decreased by $200 billion in the following six weeks. The rapid decline in price greatly damaged the reputation of the Internet Computer ecosystem and led to attacks on the project, with some even claiming that the price drop was caused by internal personnel selling. These attacks reinforced the decline in ICP price, causing it to be far below its rightful level.
Especially on Solana, he holds a double-digit percentage of the total supply of tokens. Of course, Jump Trading also holds a large portion. They are very afraid that Internet Computer will disrupt SOL's expected returns. For Sam, he knows that if this happens, his journey to prison will accelerate because he has stolen billions of dollars and invested it in the Solana ecosystem to drive up the value of SOL. And he knows that if this plan is disrupted and the price of SOL does not rise as planned, he will not be able to repay the funds he secretly embezzled from FTX clients. So for him, this is definitely a desperate move.
However, in fact, when you dig deeper, you will find that Sam has worked with people like Barry Silbert (CEO of DCG). Their level of control over the cryptocurrency media is almost unbelievable. They even invested in a cryptocurrency industry research institution. Of course, in addition to this, all American venture capital companies and New York hedge funds have invested with SBF. They believe that SBF is a miracle, a financial genius.
Therefore, they invested billions of dollars with SBF. Ironically, these investors should have been very excited about DFINITY because they had incredible returns from Internet Computer, with their investments increasing by 50 or 100 times, resulting in amazing profits. However, the problem was that they had already invested so much money with SBF, and these investments were largely underwater. So there was a large group of people who did not want Internet Computer's publicity to be exposed, and they did everything they could to exclude it from the cryptocurrency media. The cryptocurrency media is mainly controlled by these investors, you know, they are worried that Internet Computer will disrupt their plans.
This is the reason, I mean, DFINITY has actually done a lot of PR work. But you can't see any coverage in the media. Journalists from media outlets like Coindesk are very willing to write articles about Internet Computer. But they have told us that they can't write any more articles about Internet Computer. So, I think this is a big problem, you know, for people who are involved in the cryptocurrency industry and interested in this field, it will be difficult to understand the depth of corruption in this ecosystem.
This is absolutely incredible. We are working hard and we hope that the person behind the problems we are facing will eventually leave the cryptocurrency industry in some way. SBF is obviously leaving and the situation will change. But so far, if you want to know why you have never heard of Internet Computer in cryptocurrency media, this is the reason. It's not because we're not working hard or we're not talking to cryptocurrency reporters. It's because behind the scenes, the owners of these mainstream media outlets are often worried that their investment portfolios will be devalued by the rise of Internet Computer. We just hope that eventually things will become more reasonable.
We have been engaged in the largest password development business for many years. This business has some of the best brains in technology and the password field. We have one of the world's most outstanding and visionary team of cryptographers. In fact, we are one of the few blockchain projects that truly employ a large number of cryptographers, much larger than Google's cryptography team. People with unique insights should do their own research, study internet computer technology, read relevant information on internetcomputer.org, look at the teams on dfinity.org, and ask themselves, for example, what kind of ecosystem do we have today? We are fighting a beautiful battle and continuing to improve internet computer technology, and more and more people are participating in its construction. Today's internet computer processes the equivalent of 250,000 Ethereum transactions per second, which is incredible.
BlockBeats: Some voices from the community suggest that personal computer devices should not be shared with others through decentralized means. What is your opinion on this viewpoint?
Dominic Williams: They should think of it this way. The Internet computer is a blockchain that can be infinitely scalable, playing the role of encrypted cloud. Users use the Internet computer to build online services such as social networks and enterprise systems. The world computer will not replace personal computers, people are just building online services on top of it, which is why they use it today.
Currently, internet computers can process the equivalent of 250,000 Ethereum transactions per second. We expect that in a year, it will be able to process the equivalent of billions of Ethereum transactions per second. This is the world computer, which can be seen as an encrypted cloud and a replacement for traditional centralized cloud computing platforms. It is a public blockchain network where you can use a new type of smart contract called "containers" to build network applications that run 100% on the blockchain. The contracts are established to run 100% on the blockchain.
BlockBeats: We know that ICP has already integrated with the Bitcoin network. Can you explain to readers why ICP should also integrate with Ethereum?
Dominic Williams: Yes, before integrating with Ethereum, we had already integrated with Bitcoin. The Internet computer is powered by a technology called chain key cryptography, which allows Internet computers to sign transactions with other blockchains without private keys, which is a great advancement. Smart contracts on the Internet computer can call APIs that result in the creation of Bitcoin transactions.
It is now possible today. If you create a smart contract for an internet computer, you can hold Bitcoin directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without relying on third-party cross-chain bridges. Internet computer nodes can directly communicate with Bitcoin nodes without the need for bridges. People have used it to create a token called ckBTC. With the help of a container smart contract, you can hold native Bitcoin directly. It allows you to send Bitcoin in less than a second, and the transaction fees are very, very cheap. The next stage on the Internet computer roadmap is the integration with Ethereum, and Internet computer smart contracts will be able to directly call Ethereum smart contracts, and vice versa. So in a sense, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Internet computer network will become one network, one world computer, which is our vision.
BlockBeats: Recently, the Ordinals protocol on the Bitcoin network has been very popular. Since ICP has already integrated Bitcoin, why haven't Bitcoin NFTs, BRC-20, and others occurred on ICP?
Dominic Williams: Yeah, I think there are all sorts of crazes in the cryptocurrency world, right? Bitcoin Ordinals is another craze. People are buying things like NFTs hoping that they'll appreciate. Maybe they have appreciated. I think it's cool, right? To be able to actually store an NFT image on a Bitcoin block, even though it's very small, like around 14KB or so. But as far as I know, someone has already allowed users to use Bitcoin Ordinal on internet computers, and that's been done by Bob Bodily from Tonic Labs.
BlockBeats: In addition to Bitcoin Ordinals, new Move language-based public chains such as Aptos and Sui have also received capital favor. In your opinion, how does ICP compare to them?
Dominic Williams: You can't compare them to what internet computers can do. ICP has a large-scale R&D team, including some of the smartest technical talents who have been working in the blockchain industry for many years.
A simple question, can you show me a social network running on Sui or Aptos? That is completely impossible. Today's internet computers process the equivalent of 250,000 Ethereum transactions per second. We predict that by next year, it will process the equivalent of 1 billion Ethereum transactions per second. These emerging blockchains simply cannot consider this level of throughput. And this is not just a problem of transaction throughput.
Internet computer smart contracts have persistent memory pages. You can have thousands of persistent memory pages in a smart contract. Internet computer smart contracts can deploy the front-end of web applications, which can interact with HTTP. You can even securely provide web services without using Amazon Web Services. You can create a social network on the internet computer blockchain, such as OpenChat, and control it with a decentralized community organization DAO - we call it the Service Nervous System SNS. And this SNS will update software without any backdoors for developers. It is completely end-to-end and truly decentralized.
There is a lot of promotion about Sui and Aptos. This is thanks to many venture capital firms, with large venture capital firms investing in this. This is not about what the technology is and what it can achieve. This is really just to create traffic on social media.
If you really look at the role of these technologies, they are just another proof-of-stake blockchain running primarily on Amazon Web Services? They haven't done anything new. They haven't pushed the game forward. But it allows investors to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for it. They hope this will allow them to develop something like an internet computer. Even with billions of dollars, they still need years of effort to catch up to where we are now. And the development of the Internet computer project has never slowed down.
Undoubtedly, venture capital firms and the founders of Aptos and Sui will make a lot of money from it. But technically speaking, you can't even put them in the same category. Just because they say they are fast and scalable doesn't mean it is comparable in any way (to ICP). Solana claims to be the most efficient blockchain, but the efficiency of the internet computer is 23,000 times that of Solana.
People hear that Solana is a high-speed and scalable network, and the internet computer is the same, and the hype sounds like the same term. But did you know that this is not truly comparable? As far as Solana is concerned, when people talk about projects built on Solana, they are not built on Solana, but on Amazon Web Services, and what is built on Amazon Web Services is reserved for NFTs on Solana. This is not comparable to actually building a social network on Solana.
But on the Internet computer, this is what actually happens. There is no other advanced encrypted network that can support this mode, and they are still several years away from achieving this goal. However, they are being marketed as if they are actually driving real development, and people think they are investing in the next big thing in technology, but they are not really. They are just making the investors and founders of these projects rich.
Unfortunately, this is the reality of the blockchain industry today, and obtaining true technical information is very, very difficult. Much of what you see online is not real. It's hard to imagine how much control the media has over reporting and research in the crypto industry. SBF stole billions of dollars from FTX customers and invested it in over 500 crypto companies, giving him immense power. He also invested in investigative news media such as Vox, Intercept, and Politico to ensure that no one investigates him. And SBF is not alone, there are other players like him who have not yet been fully exposed.
BlockBeats:
Indeed, many cryptocurrency projects are currently showing overvalued valuations.
Dominic Williams: Individual investors are flocking to the secondary market to buy, but prices will eventually fall. People will realize that this is not the next big thing. Retail investors lost money in this game, while a group of wealthy and behind-the-scenes investors and insiders became very rich, which is sad. They created this crazy zero-sum game, where everyone just wants to invest in the next big wave, but most of the cryptocurrency community is just meat in a sausage machine, without realizing it. They are manipulated and controlled, and are denied access to true information about where real innovation is happening in cryptocurrency.
BlockBeats: Where do you think the solution lies in breaking through this "market fragmentation dilemma"?
Dominic Williams: Well, I think the Internet computer is one way out. I think people will see projects built on the Internet computer and utilizing its multi-chain capabilities achieve massive breakthroughs and success. For example, there's a project called Hot or Not on the blockchain TikTok, which is built on the Internet computer. My prediction is that it will definitely have over a million users within a year, and it may take even less time. On the Internet computer, you can stream videos, store and process large amounts of data on the chain, create social networks built using smart contracts on the blockchain, and tokens can be stored in your social media account and used for bounties. Just like you can send some Satoshis to someone using OpenChat right now. This is the revolution, this is the future.
BlockBeats: How long do you think it will take for this paradigm shift to occur?
Dominic Williams: It's already happening, and internet computers are constantly advancing. Our current transaction volume is equivalent to 250,000 Ethereum per second. People are building incredible things, including social networks built on internet computers, and multi-chains are already in operation. I expect to see, for example, chain keys for Bitcoin being used in cities, and integration of Ethereum is happening. Internet computers are developing rapidly. Soon, Web3 artificial intelligence will appear on internet computers, which can use Ethereum smart contracts to launch AI models and receive alerts from Ethereum smart contracts. Ultimately, we invest in technology. I believe that the market will eventually return to rationality, and technology will prevail.
BlockBeats: Returning to DFINITY's development roadmap. Where is the future focus of DFINITY's development?
Dominic Williams: One thing we are really focusing on at DFINITY is paying attention to Asia, especially mainland China. Ethereum is closely related to internet computing, and early investors in Ethereum also invested in internet computing, with investment funds mainly coming from Chinese investors. String Labs incubated the internet computing project DFINITY, which later established a Swiss foundation, and the supporters of venture capital are Chinese companies. My co-founder Tom Ding is from Shanghai, China. So when we see Hong Kong gradually opening up the cryptocurrency market, we are very excited.
Did you know that Wanxiang and distributed systems are supporters of the Internet computer? Dr. Xiao Feng helped us connect with Hashkey Group, so we are very excited that the Chinese community is accumulating and benefiting from these larger investment funds. We have seen incredible teams from China, such as AstroX, which is a multi-chain wallet that uses Internet computer technology to store cryptocurrencies on any blockchain using a technique called chain key encryption. Another excellent example of a Chinese team is ICDEX.io, which looks like a CeFi trading platform, but is actually a smart contract deployed on the Internet computer, using decentralized blockchain technology to gain credibility, and even user experience is written into the smart contract. Soon, through chain key cryptography, ICDEX.io will be able to trade all cryptocurrencies listed on Ethereum.
Another project called EMC comes from Singapore and Nanjing. They are creating a marketplace for trading artificial intelligence computing resources on the internet. A lot is happening in Asia, which is why we are paying close attention to it. We will never forget that all the original funding that made internet computing possible came from Asia.
There is also DMail, which has 300,000 users. Another project by a team in Singapore is called Relation Labs, and there are many similar teams in Asia. Hot or Not is a team from India. We all love our work, just like I am an entrepreneur who works 16 hours a day, every day for decades. I appreciate the energy, determination, and perseverance of Asian teams. Therefore, we are looking for opportunities in Europe, but we are also paying special attention to Asia.
I believe that Hong Kong is very important because it will allow mainland Chinese teams to transfer their executives there and find ways to make their services compliant on internet computers, ultimately gaining support from the Chinese government. The Chinese government is supporting Hong Kong's migration to Web3 and monitoring its progress. I believe this is crucial for the future of cryptocurrency.
BlockBeats: How do you view Hong Kong's new policy on virtual assets? Does DFINITY have any corresponding plans?
Dominic Williams: I think Hong Kong is very important because China has given the Hong Kong government the green light to embrace Web3 more freely. It's like trying to see how it evolves in a sandbox. Today, the United States has many problems, Silicon Valley has many problems, and many people invest in some very garbage ecosystems that have a large market value, but they really haven't done anything interesting technically. Web3 is a huge opportunity for Asia and Europe, but I think Asia in particular can create its own tech economy that is comparable to the tech economy that has almost exclusively existed in Silicon Valley in the past. TikTok is a good example that shows Asian teams can compete at the highest level, and we believe that much of the future of Web3 is in Asia.
BlockBeats: What will be the next "big update" for DFINITY after integrating with Ethereum? What role will it play in the use case of ICP Token?
Dominic Williams: Obviously, behind the scenes, we have many updates that make internet computers easier to develop, more efficient, faster, and more seamlessly scalable. But these changes won't be visible to users visually. By then, internet computer smart contracts will be able to call Ethereum smart contracts and vice versa, which will happen in the next few months after the integration of Bitcoin and internet computer networks. Furthermore, I believe the most important thing is blockchain artificial intelligence, yes, artificial intelligence running on the blockchain, which we consider to be very important. Artificial intelligence is now at the core of our internet computer plan, and we hope to establish and run an artificial intelligence computing unit on the internet computer by the end of this year. Ultimately, we will have Web3 native artificial intelligence.
Interestingly, we have seen many Chinese teams integrating ChatGPT. So I want you to know why it is important for Web3 and artificial intelligence to come together, which is why we hope that artificial intelligence can run efficiently in the form of the most powerful on the Internet computer.
BlockBeats: Why are you so optimistic about the combination of AI and Web3? Can you provide some specific use cases that have already appeared on ICP for readers?
Dominic Williams: So I think the first thing to recognize is that artificial intelligence is a very broad field and can be used for many different things. Artificial intelligence models can actually be very effective and sensitive. For example, today's phones allow you to remove content from photos you've taken. If you have a Google Pixel phone and you take a photo with someone you don't want in it, you can use an eraser to remove them from the photo and artificial intelligence will fill in the gap, making it look like they were never there in the first place. This is an example of how artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous and everywhere.
A team we work with has created an artificial intelligence image compression service that can compress images several times smaller than Google's technology, and you can broadcast audio through streaming at a low cost because of the low bandwidth you use. In terms of internet computing, we believe there will be a market for artificial intelligence models, and people will be able to develop quickly with artificial intelligence computing units. There will be hundreds of different artificial intelligence models to choose from, and if you wish, you will be able to upload your data and have artificial intelligence analyze it. This is one of the major things that will happen on the internet computer. Therefore, we believe that the internet computer will become the core of the artificial intelligence revolution, allowing people to combine artificial intelligence models and data in an open environment, ensuring the confidentiality of data and that artificial intelligence models will not be leaked.
BlockBeats: This does sound more exciting than Token Economics.
Dominic Williams: This is the difference between the internet computer and other blockchains. One is tokenizing things to create a speculative tool, while the other is creating a platform where you can create anything using smart contracts. There are some breakthrough Web3 services built on blockchain, where you can have a social network, create news sources for individual users, stream videos and audios, fully automate under the control of DAO, and do anything you like. This is the future of Web3.
BlockBeats: Finally, is there anything else you would like to say to the readers?
Dominic Williams: We believe in the singularity theory of blockchain, where every online service and enterprise system will eventually be built on blockchain. So the internet computer is much more powerful than what people have seen before. You can build anything on the internet computer, as demonstrated by the Indian team's creation of a TikTok-like "Hot or Not" on the internet computer. You can publish videos and if your video becomes popular, you will be rewarded with tokens. This is an incredible thing, this is really Web3, and it's so exciting. Even content moderation is done through artificial intelligence algorithms, which can only be done on the internet computer. I think this is an exciting direction for Asian developers who are looking for the next new species - developing Web3 services on the internet computer can use tokenization and end-to-end decentralization, and grow to millions or billions of users, even with DAO controlling internet services.
Let DAO push software updates to smart contracts, which can only be achieved on the Internet computer, the technology that changes the game today. One way of thinking is that the Internet computer provides an open encrypted cloud where you can build anything on the Internet computer. It is completely different from anything else today, very powerful, and any network developer who wants to enter Web3 should start with the right technology. They should build disruptive new applications that define the next generation of the Internet on the Internet computer.
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