Network history

2023-2025+

Further extensions of the chain key engine such as vetKeys provide for applications to maintain their data in fully encrypted form, providing the strongest possible privacy guarantees.

Meanwhile, subnets running on "Gen II" nodes begin switching on SEV-SNP TEE functionality, which ensures that even if the node providers that own them open them up, all they will find inside are encrypted bytes.

April 2024, demonstrations begin to be made of the Internet Computer hosting neural networks running as fully onchain software (i.e. smart contracts). The initial demonstrations perform image classification, and then facial recognition. The Internet Computer remains the only blockchain capable of running AI onchain in tamperproof form.

An effort begins to productize "internet cloud" so that it becomes a major mass market cloud solution. This will involve the addition of a new "cloud engines" capability to the network, which will essentially make it easy for app owners to create private subnets to host them, where subject to decentralization rules, they will be able to select the underlying nodes from a marketplace (using criteria such as the location, and who the node provider is).

Cloud engines will be able to run over Big Tech clouds, as well as sovereign node hardware, according to the preferences of the owner and the security level required. As part of this effort, there is an increasing focus on "self-writing" cloud, in which AI plays the role of a wish machine, creating onchain apps, websites, online services and enterprise systems on demand that have been described by non-technical users.

In the coming years, as AI and self-writing capabilities improve, self-writing cloud will make up an increasing share of the overall cloud market — which saw almost 1 trillion dollars in revenue in 2025. Internet cloud is the ideal platform upon which to implement "self-writing cloud."

Because software hosted fully onchain is automatically tamperproof and immune to traditional cyber attacks, the risk that a mistake by AI creates a security vulnerability is greatly reduced — which is crucial, since self-writing will lead to the creation of many millions of new apps, and human security teams cannot possibly scale to protect them all.

Meanwhile, the serverless environment it provides where logic and data are one thanks to "orthogonal persistence" dramatically increases code abstraction, which enables AI working in the mode of an autonomous tech teams to create more sophisticated backends for users faster and at lower cost.

Soon Motoko becomes the first programming language that specifically targets AI that codes, rather than human developers, and begins rapidly evolving. It incorporates a framework that guarantees that if AI makes a mistake upgrading an onchain app, which results in the migration of the data involved, this results in a coding retry rather than data loss.

October 15, 2025, the beta of the Caffeine self-writing cloud (and self-writing internet, by merit of building on the Internet Computer) platform is made publicly available on caffeine.ai.

2021-2023

Use of the network grows, and soon it has one of the largest developer communities in the Web3 industry, despite not being backed by big money.

It also proves itself as a viable new form of technology stack by hosting revolutionary apps, such as OpenChat (found at oc.app), an instant chat and community-focused social media app that functions as an "open internet service" — which is directly controlled by its community through a fully decentralized digital governance system, without backdoors.

Usage proves the Internet Computer acts as a secure "internet cloud," and there is a noticeable absence of hacks. Soon, the Internet Computer performs orders of magnitude more onchain compute than all other blockchains combined.

Meanwhile, advanced multi-chain functionality is added to the network by extending the "chain key" cryptography engine at its heart, which allows hosted apps to trustlessly interact with other blockchains and custody and process their tokens.

The first full network integration is made with the Bitcoin network, which later leads to the Internet Computer hosting an increasing share of "Bitcoin DeFi". In the mainstream tokenized future, this functionality will also allow e-commerce websites, say, which are hosted on the Internet Computer, to accept payment in the form of stablecoins and other crypto, as well as credit cards.

May-June 2021

Vested interests in the blockchain industry worry that multi-billion dollar investments are threatened by the Internet Computer, and powerful corrupt players launch massive hidden attacks on the project and network ecosystem — including price manipulation, spreading disinformation, and funding corrupt law firms to launch misleading lawsuits.

In June 2022, an investigative journalism outfit Crypto Leaks appears (which can be found at https://cryptoleaks.info), and dedicates time to investigating what occurred, revealing extraordinary details about what happened behind the scenes. (Their exposés continue until the current day.) Many of the perpetrators of the attacks have now faced serious consequences, and some are in jail.

Incredibly, the Internet Computer project fights on through an impossible situation, refusing to be cowed, and determined to succeed.

May 10, 2021

The network launches with minimal technical hitches, an extraordinary technical achievement.

2020

Covid hits, but the research and development team is still rapidly expanding while working outside the office, while trying to make the most complex and sophisticated network protocol in history production-ready.

This also involves bootstrapping a community of "node providers" that will operate the node machines that host the network.

2018-2019

DFINITY runs two private fundraising rounds, the latter raising approximately $110 million from more than 100 VCs, hedge funds and high net worth individuals, with participation from major funds like a16z.

The final round in the summer 2018 sells ICP tokens at approximately $5 each, giving the network a fully diluted valuation of approximately $2 billion.

Design decisions for launch begin to be finalized. The network will run onchain software in the form of Wasm bytecode (one of the first five employees was the inventor of WebAssembly), computation will be paid for using a revolutionary "reverse gas" model, onchain software will be able to process HTTP and thus serve interactive web experiences, a domain-specific language called Motoko will be developed, apps will maintain their onchain data through the world's first serverless "orthogonal persistence" software framework.

The network would be powered by "chain key" cryptography and derivatives of unique and highly performant secure consensus and distributed computing protocols pioneered in the early days of the project, the network will be administered and orchestrated in a decentralized way by the first fully autonomous onchain decentralized governance system, scale by adding new subnets that combine in such a way that they are transparent to hosted software, and the project switches from implementing the replica software ("client") in Haskell to Rust.

Rather than proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, the network will be proof-of-useful-work.

December 2017

DFINITY is building the largest and most elite R&D operation in the crypto industry, and ships a network prototype.

February 2017

DFINITY runs a crowdsale, selling 25% of the ICP tokens to the public for 3 cents each.

January 2017

The ICP ledger is created on Ethereum, and assigned to DFINITY.

October 2016

The DFINITY Foundation (DFINITY Stiftung) is created in Zug, Switzerland (later relocating to Zürich).

April 2016

An incubator called String Labs, based in Palo Alto, California, begins providing assistance to the project

Summer 2015

DFINITY has its own website, stating an aim to create a blockchain that can provide internet cloud functionality, which links to early research work and ideas