This is the rate at which cycles are being burned by the network.
Cycles are the digital fuel that powers computation on the network, and they disappear when consumed. When a user buys using a credit card, the payment provider purchases ICP tokens behind the scenes, converts them into cycles, and then charges up the user's hosted software or cloud engines.
1 trillion cycles is worth 1 XDR (known as a Special Drawing Right/SDR), a currency defined by the IMF. 1 XDR is worth about $1.44 USD.
dashboard.internetcomputer.orgCanisters are tamperproof units of serverless software hosted by the Internet Computer network.
Most canisters are standalone applications, but they can also serve as individual units of software within larger systems. They are capable of serving web-based user experiences, and storing and processing large amounts of data. Each canister is a combination of Wasm bytecode that defines its logic, and dedicated persistent memory pages that hold its internal state. Canisters communicate through function calls.
Canisters are “software actors” that run asynchronously, allowing scalable high-performance applications to be created on the Internet Computer. Data lives "orthogonally" in memory within abstract logic they define, fueling the modeling power of AI, and delivering a new paradigm where “The Program is The Database.”
dashboard.internetcomputer.orgThe Network Nervous System (NNS) is the Internet Computer’s open and decentralized governance and orchestration system, and runs as part of the network.
Anyone can participate, by handing ICP tokens to the NNS, and receiving voting neurons in return, through which new ICP tokens can be earned, by first increasing the maturity of the neurons involved in voting, and then by eventually using them to mint new ICP.
The NNS is one of the largest DAOs in existence, and the only DAO that runs as part of a network protocol to automate orchestration. Its purpose is to play the role of a decentralized and autonomous ICANN for the Internet Computer ecosystem.
dashboard.internetcomputer.orgThe network market cap is the number of ICP tokens multiplied by their price.
Network users convert ICP tokens into cycles that are burned and disappear (deflation), and they are generated by the network to remunerate node providers operating nodes, and by some participants in network governance (inflation).
ICP tokens exist within the network, and enable it to create a self-sustaining network economy without central points of failure.
Serverless internet cloud for tamperproof, unstoppable apps, requiring minimal admin, powered by network math. Agents build faster. AIware puts AI on the inside. You control where your compute lives, and reclaim your sovereignty.
Open technology created through more than half a billion dollars of R&D spend by a not-for-profit.
The Pakistan Digital Authority runs a national cloud engine across sovereign data centers in Pakistan. Government teams use Caffeine to build and deploy production-grade apps on it, so important software and data stay in the country and are highly resilient.
Read the announcement
Move to Open SaaS, save money, and revolutionize your business by putting AI on the inside. Give AI tasks and questions, and tune what model gets used when.
Explore Open SaaS (opencloud.org)
Join hundreds of thousands of others. Describe the website, app or service you have in mind, and let AI build it on the Internet Computer. Keep the conversation going to refine the design and add features.
Learn more
Swiss Subnet provides sovereign execution environments built in Switzerland for AI-native, regulated, and mission-critical workloads, where legal jurisdiction, technical control, and physical operation are aligned.
Visit subnet.ch
A sovereign messenger for the country that runs entirely on Pakistan's cloud engine. Now in post-pilot rollout, with national digital ID and payment integration next.
Explore ChatT beta
UNDP is piloting cloud engines, Caffeine, and AIware from Open SaaS across UNDP country offices, civil society organizations, and governments.
Read more
The Internet Computer network has added support for "cloud engines" that provide enterprises unparalleled control and configurability through an online console.
Explore cloud engines (opencloud.org)
The most popular authentication framework on the Internet Computer, which pioneered passkeys in 2021, while also offering support for SSO and more.
Explore Internet Identity (id.ai)
OpenChat is fully controlled by a DAO. Stay in touch with friends and join communities in one open messaging app, with your data and conversations under your control.
Learn more
A sovereign wallet that works in any browser. It holds crypto, stocks, commodities, collectibles, and encrypted notes across ten networks, including the XRP Ledger and Robinhood Chain, and it lets you trade, earn, borrow, pay, and tip.
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Other venues put settlement on the network and keep matching on their own servers. Here the order book, AMM, margin, and vaults are all tamperproof code, assets stay native, and every balance is publicly checkable.
Learn moreTraditional software runs banks, hospitals, governments, militaries and enterprises. It's no longer fit for purpose.
Conventional software is defended from the outside. Firewalls surround it, and teams race to find and fix each flaw before an attacker does.
That race was already hard to win. Now AI models search code for weaknesses at machine speed, around the clock, and have uncovered flaws that went unnoticed for decades. Staying safe increasingly depends on having better AI than your adversary.
Today's online services are intricate machines. Servers, databases and clusters must be configured, upgraded in step and constantly tended, and a single mistake can bring them down.
They are also concentrated in a small number of very large data centers, which makes those buildings targets. In 2026, drone strikes on data centers in the Gulf and in Russia took cloud services and payments offline, and some customer data was never recovered.
AI agents can write and ship software far faster than human teams. But the infrastructure they build on was designed for people. It expects specialists to configure it, secure it and check every change.
That keeps a human in every loop, and a single rushed upgrade can still destroy the data a business depends on. To work at full speed, agents need foundations that are safe by design.
Government, banking, healthcare and communications now run on cloud platforms, and most countries rent them from a handful of companies based abroad.
Those companies answer to their home country's law. The US CLOUD Act of 2018, for example, lets American authorities legally compel US providers to hand over data they control, even when it is stored in another country. And a service delivered from abroad can be switched off from abroad.
The Internet Computer was designed to solve all four.
Internet Computer cloud is created by a mathematically secure network that hosts a new form of serverless code that runs in a sandbox and needs no dependencies. That code is tamperproof, which means that it can only run its correct logic against its correct data. Simply put, no cyber attack on infrastructure can corrupt its functionality or the data it maintains, unlocking a profound cybersecurity revolution.
Internet Computer cloud replicates hosted software and its computations and data across diverse hardware that's selectable according to need. Apps and services can continue functioning correctly when some hardware goes offline, or data centers fail, and even when hardware falls under the control of adversaries, thanks to the underlying network mathematics involved, unlocking a resilience revolution.
Internet Computer cloud allows enterprises to create "cloud engines," which are essentially internal subnets that they control. Enterprises can select precisely the hardware they wish the network to combine to produce serverless cloud, from a marketplace, or from on-prem inventory, so they can tune the security and resilience achieved to their precise needs. Hardware can be swapped, while hosted apps and services continue running.
On the internet, any software can transmit data to any other software, in a universal connectivity paradigm. Internet Computer cloud makes all hosted software services directly composable subject to permissions, extending the paradigm. That means services can directly integrate the functionality of other services, to form a new larger service, independently of the software language used to create them. Enterprises can advance beyond traditional systems integration.
Now, agents build our apps and services, either directly instructed by chat, or within software factories. Agents are not human, and need a tech stack that's optimized for them. On the Internet Computer cloud, software runs in persistent memory, and there are no databases and files, such that hosted serverless code is vastly simpler, and more abstract, which fuels the innate modeling power of AI. Agents create better apps and services, using fewer tokens.
Today, agents can create and update production systems at the speed of conversation. However, if there is a risk that data can be lost, then human teams need to be kept in the loop, vastly slowing down the upgrade cycle, and increasing costs. On the Internet Computer cloud, new language frameworks like Motoko 2.0 are designed for agents that build, and can detect whether an upgrade would cause data loss, resulting in harmless coding retries. By removing human security, sysadmin, and code reviews from the loop, agent productivity is force multiplied.
Users of traditional personal productivity apps, e-commerce websites, or SaaS services, say, achieve their goals by interacting with screens. AIware technology supported by Internet Computer cloud allows those screens to be augmented by in-built agents, without extra development work. This enables users to ask for analyses of data and actions to be performed, which are often much more complex than they could orchestrate via screens, and save huge amounts of time. Subject to permissions, agents can see all data in realtime, prototype arbitrary changes, and invoke internal functionality, because AIware puts AI on the inside.
Apps and services are built from serverless code, without separate databases or traditional cloud infrastructure to manage. They don’t need infrastructure security or sysadmin teams to keep them running. App installs on cloud engines are as hands-free as phone apps.
Assistant
HR
CRM
Accounts
Email
Calendar
Expenses
Projects
Messaging
Knowledge
Directory
IT Assets
Signing
Agents
Team
Teamboard
Requests
Software factories
AdminICP (Internet Computer Protocol) combines independently operated specialized hardware, including hyperscaler capacity for cloud engines, using network protocol math and advanced computer science, implemented in open source code, to form a new kind of open cloud that is secure, resilient, and nobody owns that's controlled by a public governance framework. It’s cloud, built the internet way.
The Internet Computer is the first sovereign serverless cloud formed by an open, mathematical network. It is also ideal agentic infrastructure, and hosts AIware.
Specialized hardware, and hyperscaler compute capacity, all over the world.
This 13-node example tolerates up to four faulty nodes. Progress needs timely communication. Record integrity requires certificate verification; an unverified query is not enough. How verification works
Intelligence inside. That you can talk to.
Hosted software keeps its data in persistent memory, and "AI on the inside" can analyze your data, including by simulating changes, and then take actions.
6.1 Software AI can work inside
AI chat becomes a new way to use your software, working alongside its traditional screens. Analyze data across apps and orchestrate complex tasks through conversation, within your permissions.
Review all Customer Success time-off requests. Approve those that preserve coverage in every time zone, and send emails asking for alternative dates where requests conflict.
Select an agent to see what it can access.
What this caller can access
CEO chat can query HR, CRM, and Accounts. All memory groups in this example are accessible.
6.2 Software agents can build
Data lives with your code in persistent memory. Agents can focus on the essential logic of your application, with less code to generate and maintain — and more scope to build sophisticated software.
Application logic+Persistent memory
One program. Hosted by the network.
Motoko
persistent actor { // Persistent data
let inventory = {
var stock : Nat = 10;
var orders : Nat = 0;
}; // Application logic
public func order() : async () {
inventory.orders += 1;
inventory.stock -= 1;
};}Declare it. It persists.
inventory and the whole data structure it references are stored automatically, between calls and across upgrades. No loading. No saving.
Both changes. Or neither.
Each order() updates memory as one transaction. With no stock left, execution traps and every change is rolled back — even the order count. No half-written data.
Motoko’s orthogonal persistence preserves persistent variables and the data structures they reference across calls and upgrades. Code works directly with this data, without translating it into database queries or file formats.
Fewer output tokens. Database queries, data conversion, and storage plumbing all add code. Removing that work means fewer code tokens for an agent to generate, which can reduce generation time and cost.
A simpler model to reason about. Orders, customers, and their relationships can be expressed directly as connected data structures. Agents can focus more of their reasoning on the app’s behavior, helping them build and maintain more sophisticated software.
If two orders arrive together, each runs against the latest inventory, so one cannot accidentally overwrite the other’s changes.
In this example, order() has no await, so each call runs as one transaction. Work spanning asynchronous calls needs its own coordination. Read about execution boundaries.
The next-generation software framework
WebAssembly
The Internet Computer runs WebAssembly (Wasm), a low-level bytecode format for fast, portable execution. Supported by all major browsers and used across backend and cloud platforms, it is an open W3C standard co-invented by an early DFINITY Foundation team member.
Any language that compiles to WebAssembly can target the Internet Computer. Motoko and Rust are the two most popular.
Motoko
A language designed for agents to safely and rapidly build and evolve enterprise apps, services, and infrastructure, and imbue them with AIware capabilities.
AI agents build vastly faster than humans can, and they have their own needs. The Internet Computer runs software inside persistent memory, introducing a powerful new paradigm where the program is the database. Now a program's essential logic persists data automatically, reducing complexity, and fueling the modeling power of AI, enabling AI to go further, faster, and at less cost.
AI agents can develop apps and enterprise infra at unprecedented speed. However, upgrading traditional production systems is risky, as mistakes can result in data loss. On the Internet Computer, new languages like Motoko automatically verify the safety of every upgrade, preventing mistakes resulting in data loss, so you can remove the brakes.
Traditional infrastructure is insecure and sensitive to components such as databases being misconfigured or failing. Apps on the Internet Computer are tamperproof, keep their data in persistent memory, and are guaranteed to run. This means apps don't need support from security and sysadmin teams, and you can give your agents far more autonomy.
More than half a billion dollars has been spent developing the technology that powers the Internet Computer, which represents the most sophisticated network the world has ever seen. The purpose of the project is to extend the internet, so that it can host software, as well as connecting software.
In recent years, the project has focused on developing the Internet Computer as agentic infrastructure. The Internet Computer unlocks the full potential of AI by force-multiplying agents that build apps, enabling the creation of AIware software that integrate AI much more closely than traditional software can, and removing security and sysadmin requirements, so agents can be allowed to work with far greater autonomy.
The latest innovation, "cloud engines," enables the creation of private subnets that can be arbitrarily configured, for example to combine compute hardware located in the home country, or operated by specific providers, unlocking the simple creation of fully sovereign tech stacks that meet national security needs, or regulatory needs such as GDPR compliance. Cloud engines keep on running even when the underlying compute capacity is swapped, making vendor lock-in history.