Realizing the World Computer Vision
The Internet Computer is a new kind of blockchain that works like a global, decentralized cloud. It lets people build websites, apps, and services without relying on Big Tech, by running them directly on the blockchain.
User-owned apps and data
Users control applications and data; ICP's access control prevents any single party from making changes without user consent.
Tamperproof
ICP provably guarantees the integrity of the protocol and applications running on it, even if some node machines are malicious.
Verifiable
ICP apps are verifiable—node-signed results ensure users can trust code behavior and data integrity, assuming honest majority.
Robustness and Availability
ICP stays online and secure even during outages or failures, thanks to a fault-tolerant, decentralized protocol run by globally distributed, independent nodes.
History
By the end of 2013, Dominic was seeking technical means to build faster blockchains that could process more transactions per second, which he hoped would support a trade in virtual goods within the computer games ecosystem, and he acquired the domain name gamecoin.org. This activity led to him spending 2014 working on a blockchain project called Pebble. His work on Pebble pioneered two major firsts in blockchain: (1) the adaptation of traditional distributed computing mathematical techniques for use within a blockchain setting, and (2) an effort to design a scalable blockchain that could process hundreds of thousands of transactions a second.
Dominic Williams
Founder & Chief ScientistDFINITY FoundationSovereign Network
The Internet Computer blockchain network is formed by special node machines, which are hardware devices that are dedicated to the task of running the Internet Computer Protocol (thus creating a sovereign network). This is conceptually similar to how the Internet is formed by interconnected network routing devices.
How it works
Traditional blockchains are different. Their network nodes are created using simple software, which interacts with other nodes and maintains a copy of blockchain state.Today, software programs are very easy to spin up on cloud computing "instances" using services such as Amazon Web Services. A consequence has been that the majority of their nodes are typically cloud computing instances.Because these can be spun up in an instant the investment required to create or destroy a node is minimal (notwithstanding any cryptocurrency stake that might be required to add a node to the network).
Sovereign Cloud For Enterpise - Bjöern Tackmann
Explore more about the Sovereign Network on the IC Dashboard