From research in 2015 to the self-writing cloud.

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

Subnets running on Gen II nodes begin switching on SEV-SNP TEE functionality. Even if a node provider opens the hardware, all that’s inside is encrypted bytes.

April 2024: demonstrations begin of the Internet Computer hosting neural networks running as fully onchain software (i.e. smart contracts). The first demos perform image classification, 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 as a major mass-market cloud solution. This adds a new cloud-engines capability — making it easy for app owners to create private subnets and select their underlying nodes from a marketplace, subject to decentralization rules.

Cloud engines can run over Big Tech clouds, sovereign node hardware, or any combination, depending on the owner’s preferences and required security level. Alongside this, increasing focus is placed on self-writing cloud — where AI plays the role of a wish machine, creating onchain apps, websites, services, and enterprise systems on demand from natural-language descriptions.

As AI and self-writing capabilities improve, self-writing cloud will make up an increasing share of the overall cloud market — which saw almost a trillion dollars in revenue in 2025. Internet cloud is the ideal platform on which to implement it.

Because software hosted fully onchain is automatically tamperproof, the risk that an AI mistake creates a security vulnerability is greatly reduced — crucial when self-writing leads to the creation of millions of new apps that human security teams cannot possibly scale to protect.

The serverless environment, where logic and data are unified through orthogonal persistence, dramatically increases code abstraction. AI working as an autonomous tech team can build more sophisticated backends faster and at lower cost.

Motoko soon becomes the first programming language specifically targeting AI that codes, rather than human developers, and begins evolving rapidly. It includes a framework that guarantees: if an AI mistake during an upgrade would corrupt or migrate data destructively, the result is a coding retry rather than data loss.

October 15, 2025: the beta of the Caffeine self-writing cloud platform — a self-writing internet, by virtue of being built on the Internet Computer — is made publicly available at caffeine.ai.

Use of the network grows. Soon it has one of the largest developer communities in frontier computing, despite not being backed by big money.

It also proves itself as a viable new technology stack by hosting revolutionary apps — OpenChat (oc.app), an instant chat and community-focused social media app that functions as an open internet service, controlled directly by its community through fully decentralized digital governance with no backdoors.

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

Advanced multi-chain functionality is added by extending the chain-key cryptography engine at the heart of the network. Hosted apps can now interact trustlessly with other blockchains and custody and process their tokens.

The first full network integration is made with Bitcoin, leading to the Internet Computer hosting an increasing share of Bitcoin integration. This functionality also allows hosted e-commerce sites to accept stablecoins and other digital currency alongside credit cards.

Vested interests in the blockchain industry worry that multi-billion-dollar investments are threatened by the Internet Computer. Powerful actors launch hidden attacks on the project and its ecosystem — price manipulation, disinformation, corrupt law firms filing misleading lawsuits.

In June 2022, an investigative journalism outfit called Crypto Leaks appears (cryptoleaks.info) and dedicates time to investigating what occurred, revealing extraordinary detail about what happened behind the scenes. Their exposés continue to this day. Many of the perpetrators have now faced serious consequences — some are in jail.

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

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

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

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

DFINITY runs two private fundraising rounds. The latter raises 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 summer 2018 sells ICP tokens at approximately $5 each, giving the network a fully diluted valuation of around $2 billion.

Design decisions for launch are finalized: onchain software will run as Wasm bytecode (one of the first five employees was an inventor of WebAssembly); computation will be paid for via a revolutionary reverse-gas model; onchain software will process HTTP and 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 framework.

The network is powered by chain-key cryptography and derivatives of unique high-performance secure consensus and distributed-computing protocols pioneered in the early days of the project. Administration and orchestration happen through the first fully autonomous onchain decentralized governance system. Scaling happens by adding new subnets that combine in such a way that they remain transparent to hosted software. The replica software switches from Haskell to Rust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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