Exclusive interview with DFINITY: ICP is a victim of SBF capital operation; much of the future of Web3 lies in Asia

Interview: Jack, BlockBeats

Compiled by: czgsws, BlockBeats

Believe in DFINITY, which is a topic that countless investors who entered the field of cryptocurrency in 2021 cannot avoid. This "king-level project" with nearly 200 million US dollars in financing, its native Token ICP has maintained a downward trend since it opened high and went online in 2021, leaving investors who entered the market at tens of dollars or even 100 dollars in the past two years with no hope of making a profit.

The bull market ended at the end of 2021. As the market was in a mess, investors sold their stocks and left the market. We gradually stopped hearing people talking about DFINITY, and even saw no news about new projects on the network. In the year and a half since then, too many excellent new projects have taken turns to grab the spotlight on the market stage. Optimism and Arbitrum have successively issued tokens, and new public chains using the Move language such as Aptos and Sui have made their debut with huge financing. DFINITY has gradually been forgotten by the market.

Now, 23 years have quietly passed halfway. When browsing the official DFINITY blog, we found that the project has not been discontinued like some "runaway" projects. Monthly reports, quarterly reports, BTC network integration, Ordinals topic articles, and research reports that keep up with current developments tell us that this once-king has not stopped its research and development progress.

What kind of network is ICP? How is it developing now and what kind of performance does it have? Are there any misunderstandings and unknown situations about the rumors of "the project party selling at a high price"? Can DFINITY, which was invested and supported by a number of Asian capitals in the early days, return to the public eye in the Hong Kong narrative? In response to these questions, BlockBeats interviewed DFINITY founder Dominic Williams.

BlockBeats: First of all, please briefly introduce yourself to our readers. Why did you enter the crypto industry and found DFINITY?

Dominic Williams: Of course, I've been working in distributed systems and cryptography for a long time. I launched a massively multiplayer online game in 2010 that scaled to millions of users, and I built distributed systems for that game. Before that, I worked on early online file sharing during the dot-com bubble, when I created a system called "Crypto++", so I guess I've been working in this field for a long time.

I turned to crypto full-time in late 2013 and tried to build something called GameCoin, which was designed to be a cryptocurrency for the gaming industry, allowing you to transfer value between different games and create a pan-gaming economy. At that time, I realized that for virtual goods, there really needed to be a crypto network that could handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

So I started working on it and I worked on it for the entire year of 2014. I am probably the first person in the crypto field to work on reusing the Byzantine Failure Consensus algorithm for blockchain settings, and the first person to propose that mathematics can create cryptocurrencies infinitely. This was my original starting point, but I was a member of the early Ethereum community, and someone in the community came up with the concept of the "World Computer", which fascinated me.

At that time, we had seen that blockchain was not only used for cryptocurrency, but also for running code and hosting computations on blockchains and smart contracts. So when I heard the term "world computer", my interpretation of the term was that eventually, every online service and enterprise system would run entirely on blockchains, on a world computer created by many blockchains, and there would be a day when the "blockchain singularity" would arrive. But obviously, a lot of technical work needs to be done to achieve this goal. So I took up this challenge starting in 2015.

ICP, or Internet Computer, is a blockchain, but it was built from the ground up and shares no technology with any other blockchain. Even the cryptography that powers the blockchain was developed specifically by a large team of some of the best cryptographers in the world. So when you try to understand Internet Computer, you have to reorient your thinking. This is a blockchain that is designed to replace all traditional IT.

BlockBeats: When ICP was first launched, it attracted a lot of attention due to its ridiculously high market value, but then it almost disappeared from the public eye. In your opinion, why did this happen? What progress has DFINITY made in the past two years?

Dominic Williams: I think first of all, for people who are confused by the lack of information coverage of Internet Computer, it is important to understand why this is the case. At the root of everything, there are a lot of secretive, powerful people who are afraid that Internet Computer will reduce the value of the tokens they hold because our technology is so advanced.

I mean, this is obviously revolutionary technology. Anybody who looks into the DFINITY Foundation will see that it's the largest R&D group in crypto. We have one of the most renowned cryptographers in the world, one of the best in the technology field.

There are a lot of people who are very worried that the emergence of the Internet Computer will somehow reduce the value of the assets they hold tokens such as Solana and Avalanche, which causes a lot of problems.

So when ICP 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 crash it, SBF increased the price of ICP five times. It looks like he did this to defend his large Solana holdings. So unfortunately, this guy stole billions of dollars from FTX customers. And then took those billions and invested them into the Solana ecosystem, and later projects like Near and Aptos.

BlockBeats Note: An earlier article pointed out that within a few hours of ICP’s release, its market value exceeded $230 billion as the price of the coin continued to rise due to price manipulation. Once the price manipulation stopped, the price of ICP began to fall back to its natural market level.

The market cap data decreased by a cumulative $200 billion over the next 6 weeks. The rapidly falling price greatly damaged the reputation of the Internet Computer ecosystem and caused the project to be attacked by many parties, with some even claiming that the price drop was caused by insider selling. These attacks reinforced the decline in ICP prices, causing ICP prices to be much lower than they should be.

Especially on Solana, where he holds a double-digit percentage of the total supply. Of course, Jump Trading has a large portion. They are very afraid that Internet Computer will destroy the expected returns of SOL. And for Sam, he knows that if this happens, his journey to prison will be accelerated because he has stolen billions of dollars and invested them in the Solana ecosystem to drive the value of SOL up. And he knows that if this plan is disrupted and the price of SOL does not rise as originally planned, he will not be able to repay the funds he secretly embezzled from FTX customers. So for him, this is definitely a desperate act.

But actually, when you dig deeper, you find that Sam worked with people like Barry Silbert (DCG CEO). They had an almost unbelievable level of control over the crypto media, just incredible. They even invested in a crypto industry research institute. On top of that, of course, all the US VCs and New York hedge funds invested with SBF. They thought SBF was a miracle, a financial genius.

So they took billions of dollars and invested with SBF. The irony is that these investors should have been very excited about DFINITY because they had made incredible gains from Internet Computer, and their investments had increased 50 times, 100 times, and they had amazing gains.

But the problem was, they had already invested so much money in the things they had invested in with SBF at the time, and those investments were largely underwater. So there was a large group of people who didn't want Internet Computer's publicity to get exposure, and they did their best to exclude it from the crypto media. The crypto media was largely controlled by these investors, and they were afraid that Internet Computer would disrupt their plans.

So that's why, I mean, DFINITY actually did a lot of PR. But you couldn't see any coverage of it in the media. Journalists at places like Coindesk, they were very happy to write about Internet Computer. But they came back to us and said, sorry, we can't write about Internet Computer anymore. So, I think that's a big problem, you know, for people who work in the cryptocurrency industry and are interested in this space, it's hard to understand the depth of corruption in the ecosystem.

It's absolutely incredible. We're working on it, and we're hoping that the guy behind these issues that we're facing will eventually leave the crypto industry in some way. SBF is obviously leaving, and things will change. But as of now, if you're wondering why you've never heard of Internet Computer in the crypto media, this is why. It's not because we don't work on it, or we don't talk to crypto journalists.

This is because behind the scenes, the owners of these mainstream media outlets are often concerned that their portfolios will be devalued due to the rise of Internet Computer. We just hope that eventually, things will become more reasonable.

We have been engaged in the largest cryptographic R&D business for many years, with some of the best minds in technology and cryptography, and we have one of the most prominent and visionary teams of cryptographers in the world.

In fact, we are one of the few blockchain projects that actually employs a large number of cryptographers, much larger than Google's cryptography team. People with unique vision should do their own research, study Internet Computer technology, go to internetcomputer.org to read about it, look at the team on dfinity.org, and ask yourself.

Like, what kind of ecosystem do we have today? We're fighting the good fight, we're continuing to improve the 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 are that one should not share one's personal computer equipment with others in a decentralized way. What do you think of this view?

Dominic Williams: They should think so. The Internet Computer is an infinitely scalable blockchain that acts as a crypto cloud, and 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 just build online services on it, which is why people use it today.

Currently, the Internet Computer 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, and you can think of it as a crypto cloud, an alternative to traditional centralized cloud computing platforms, a public blockchain network where you can build web applications that are 100% on the blockchain using a new type of smart contract called a "container." Contracts are built to run 100% on the blockchain.

BlockBeats: We know that ICP has previously integrated the Bitcoin network. Can you explain to our readers why ICP should also be integrated with Ethereum?

Dominic Williams: Yes, we integrated with Bitcoin before we integrated with Ethereum. The Internet Computer is powered by a technology called chain key cryptography, which allows the Internet Computer to sign transactions with other blockchains without private keys, which is an amazing advancement. Smart contracts on the Internet Computer can call APIs that result in the creation of Bitcoin transactions.

This is already possible today. If you create a smart contract for the Internet Computer, you can hold Bitcoin directly on the Bitcoin blockchain without relying on a third party to provide a cross-chain bridge. The Internet Computer nodes talk directly to the Bitcoin nodes, without the need for a bridge. People have used it to create a token called ckBTC.

You can hold native Bitcoin directly with the help of a container smart contract. 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 integration with Ethereum, where 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, and that's our vision.

BlockBeats: The Ordinals protocol on the Bitcoin network has been very popular recently. Since ICP has integrated Bitcoin, why haven’t Bitcoin NFT, BRC-20, etc. happened on ICP?

Dominic Williams: Well, yeah, I think there are all kinds of manias in crypto, right? Bitcoin Ordinals are another mania. People are buying NFTs and things like that in the hope that they go up in value. And maybe they do. I think that's pretty cool, right? Being able to actually store an NFT image on a Bitcoin block, even though it's very small, I think about 14KB or so. But as far as I know, there's already someone who's allowed users to use Bitcoin Ordinals on the Internet Computer, that's been done, his name is Bob Bodily, from Tonic Labs.

BlockBeats: In addition to Bitcoin Ordinals, new public chains using the Move language such as Aptos and Sui have also received the favor of capital. In your opinion, which one is better, ICP or not?

Dominic Williams: You can't compare them to what the Internet Computer can do, ICP has a large R&D team with some of the smartest technical talent who have been working in the blockchain industry for many years.

Simple question, show me a social network running on Sui or Aptos? It's impossible. Today's Internet Computer processes the equivalent of 250,000 Ethereum transactions per second. We predict that next year, it will process the equivalent of 1 billion Ethereum transactions per second. These emerging blockchains can't even contemplate that level of throughput. And it's not just about 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 web application front ends, they can interact with HTTP, and you can even provide web services securely without using Amazon Web Services.

You can create a social network on the Internet Computer blockchain, such as OpenChat, and you can control it with a decentralized community organization DAO - we call it the Service Nervous System SNS. And this SNS will update the software, and there is no backdoor for developers. It is completely autonomous end-to-end, and it is truly decentralized.

There's a lot of hype around Sui and Aptos. And that's thanks to a lot of VCs, big VCs are investing in this. It's not about what the technology is and what it can achieve. It's really just about generating traffic on social media.

If you really look at what these technologies do, are they just another proof-of-stake blockchain that runs mostly on Amazon Web Services? They don’t do anything new. They don’t advance gaming. But it allows investors to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for it. They hope that this will allow them to develop something like the Internet Computer. Even if they had billions of dollars, it would still take them years of hard work to catch up to where we are now. And the Internet Computer project has never slowed down.

No doubt VCs and the founders of Aptos and Sui are going to make tons of money from this. But technically you can’t even put them in the same category. Just because they say they are fast and scalable doesn’t mean it’s comparable in any way. Solana claims to be the most efficient blockchain, but the Internet Computer is 23,000 times more efficient than Solana.

People hear Solana is a high-speed scalable network, the same thing with the Internet Computer, and the hype sounds like the same term. But you know what, it's not really comparable. In the case of Solana, the projects that people talk about being built on Solana, they're not built on Solana, they're built on Amazon Web Services, and the things that are built on Amazon Web Services hold NFTs on Solana. There's no comparison to actually building a social network on Solana.

But on the Internet Computer, this is what's actually happening, no other crypto network is advanced enough to support this model, and they're still years away from being able to do it. But they're marketed as if they're actually the thing that's driving actual development, and people think they're investing in the next big thing in technology, but they're not really, they're just making the investors and founders of these projects rich.

Unfortunately, this is the reality of the blockchain industry today. It is very, very difficult to get real technical information. A lot of what you see online is not true. It is hard to imagine that the media coverage, research, etc. in the crypto industry can be so controlled.

SBF stole billions from FTX customers and invested them in over 500 crypto companies, which gave him tremendous power. He also invested money in investigative news outlets like Vox, The Intercept, and Politico to make sure no one investigated him. And SBF is not alone, there are other players like him who have not yet been fully exposed.

BlockBeats: Indeed, today's crypto projects are generally overvalued.

Dominic Williams: Individual investors are buying in droves in the secondary market, but the price will eventually come down. People will realize this is not the next big thing. It's sad that retail investors are losing money in this game while a group of wealthy and shadowy investors and insiders are getting very rich. They have created this crazy zero-sum casino where everyone just wants to invest in the next big wave, but most of the crypto community is just meat in the sausage machine and doesn't realize it. They are being manipulated and controlled and denied real information about where the real innovation in crypto is happening.

BlockBeats: What do you think is the way out of this "market fragmentation dilemma"?

Dominic Williams: Well, I think the Internet Computer is one of the ways out, and I think people are going to see massive breakthroughs and success from projects built on the Internet Computer and leveraging its multi-chain capabilities.

For example, there is a project that is a blockchain TikTok on the Internet Computer, called Hot or Not. My prediction is that it will definitely have more than a million users within a year, and it may also take less time. On the Internet Computer, video streaming can be done, large amounts of data can be stored on the chain and processed, social networks built with smart contracts can be created on the blockchain, and tokens can be saved in your social media accounts and used for bounties. Just like you can now send someone some Satoshis with an OpenChat message. 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, the Internet Computer is making progress, we're now doing the equivalent of 250,000 Ethereum transactions per second. People are building incredible things, there are social networks built on the Internet Computer, multichain is already working. I expect we'll see, for example, Bitcoin's chain keys being used in cities, Ethereum integration is happening, the Internet Computer is developing rapidly.

Soon, there will be Web3 AI on the Internet Computer, which can use Ethereum smart contracts to launch AI models and send alerts to them from Ethereum smart contracts. At the end of the day, we invest in technology. I think eventually the market will return to reason and technology will win out.

BlockBeats: Back to DFINITY’s development path. What is the focus of DFINITY’s future development?

Dominic Williams: One thing we are doing at DFINITY right now is really focusing on Asia, especially mainland China. Ethereum and the Internet Computer are closely related, and the investors who funded Ethereum in the early days also funded the Internet Computer, and the investment funds mainly came from Chinese investors. String Labs incubated the Internet Computer project DFINITY, and later established a Swiss foundation, and the venture capital backers were all Chinese companies. My co-founder Tom Ding is from Shanghai and is Chinese. So when we saw Hong Kong gradually opening up the cryptocurrency market, we were very excited.

You know, Wanxiang and Distributed are the supporters of Internet Computer, and Dr. Xiao Feng helped us connect with Hashkey Group. So we are very happy that the Chinese community is accumulating and benefiting from these larger investment funds. We have seen incredible teams from China.

For example, AstroX, they are a multi-chain wallet using Internet Computer technology, you can save cryptocurrencies on any blockchain, using a technology called chain key cryptography. Another example of an excellent Chinese team is ICDEX.io, which looks like a CeFi trading platform, but it is completely a smart contract deployed on the Internet Computer, using decentralized blockchain technology to obtain credit, and even the 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 is coming out of Singapore and Nanjing, and they are creating a trading market for AI computing resources on the Internet Computer. There is a lot going on in Asia, which is why we are very focused on Asia. We will never forget that all the original funding that made the Internet Computer possible came from Asia.

Another one is DMail, which has 300,000 users. There is also a team project in Singapore called Relation Labs, and many similar Asian teams. Hot or Not is an Indian team. We all love our work, just like I am an entrepreneur who works 16 hours a day for decades. I admire the energy, determination and perseverance of the Asian team. So we are looking for, you know, we are turning to Europe, but we are also paying special attention to Asia.

I think Hong Kong is very important because it will allow mainland China teams to move their executives there and find ways to make their services running on the Internet Computer compliant and ultimately supported by the Chinese government. The Chinese government is supporting Hong Kong's migration to Web3 and watching its progress. I think this is very important for the future of cryptocurrency.

BlockBeats: Speaking of Hong Kong, what do you think of Hong Kong’s new virtual asset policy? Does DFINITY have any corresponding plans for this?

Dominic Williams: I think Hong Kong is very important because China has given the Hong Kong government the green light to embrace Web3 more liberally. It's like trying to see how it evolves in a kind of sandbox. There are a lot of problems in the United States today, there are a lot of problems in Silicon Valley, and a lot of people are investing in some really garbage ecosystems that have a lot of market capitalization, but they're really not doing anything interesting technically.

Web3 is a huge opportunity for both Asia and Europe, but I think Asia in particular can create its own tech economy, comparable to the one that existed almost entirely in Silicon Valley in the past. TikTok is a great example of an Asian team that can compete at the highest level, and we think a lot of the future of Web3 is in Asia.

BlockBeats: After integrating Ethereum, what will be the next "big update" for DFINITY? What role will it play in the use case of ICP Token?

Dominic Williams: Obviously, behind the scenes, we have many, many updates that make the Internet Computer easier to develop for, more efficient, faster, and more seamless to scale. ? But these users won't see it visually.

At that point, smart contracts on the Internet Computer will be able to call Ethereum smart contracts and vice versa, which will happen in the coming months, just after the integration of the Bitcoin and Internet Computer networks is complete. Further down the line I think the most important thing is blockchain AI, yes, AI running on the blockchain, we think it's very important. AI is now at the core of our Internet Computer plans, and we hope to have an AI computing unit up and running on the Internet Computer by the end of this year. Ultimately, we will have Web3 native AI.

Interestingly, we've seen a lot of Chinese teams integrating ChatGPT. So I think you know why it's important for Web3 and AI to come together, which is why we want AI to run efficiently on the Internet Computer in its most powerful form.

BlockBeats: Why are you so optimistic about the combination of AI and Web3? Can you provide readers with some specific use cases that have appeared on ICP?

Dominic Williams: So I think the first thing to realise is that AI is a very broad field and it can be used for a lot of different things. AI models can actually be very effective and responsive. For example, mobile phones today allow you to remove things from photos that you take, if you have a Google Pixel phone, you can take a photo and you don't want someone to be in the photo, you can use an eraser to erase them from the photo and the AI ​​will fill in the gap and the person will look like they were never in the photo, that's an example of how AI is going to be pervasive, it's going to be ubiquitous.

A team we're working with has created an AI image compression service where they can compress images several times smaller than Google's technology, and you can stream it, broadcast audio, at a very low cost because you're using very low bandwidth.

In terms of the Internet Computer, we think there will be a marketplace for AI models that people will be able to develop very quickly, and with the AI ​​Compute Unit, there will be hundreds of different AI models to choose from, and if you want, you will be able to upload your data and have the AI ​​analyze it. That's one of the big things that will happen with the Internet Computer.

Therefore, we believe that Internet computers will be at the core of the AI ​​revolution, enabling people to combine AI models and data in an open environment, ensuring the confidentiality of data and the prevention of leakage of AI models.

BlockBeats: This does sound more exciting than token economics.

Dominic Williams: That's the difference between the Internet Computer and other blockchains, one is tokenizing things and creating a speculative tool, and the other is creating a platform where you can create anything with smart contracts. Some of the breakthrough Web3 services built on the blockchain, you can have a social network, you can create news feeds for individual users, you can stream video and audio, you can fully automate under the control of a DAO, you can do whatever you like, and that's the future of Web3.

BlockBeats: Finally, is there anything else you would like to say to our readers?

Dominic Williams: We believe in the singularity theory of blockchain, that every online service, every enterprise system will eventually be built on the blockchain. So the Internet Computer is much more powerful than people have seen before. You can build anything on the Internet Computer, just look at the TikTok-like "Hot or Not" that the Indian team created on the Internet Computer. You can post a video, and if the video you post becomes a hot topic, you get rewarded with tokens, which is an incredible thing, this is really Web3, it's so exciting.

Even content review is done through AI 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, grow to millions or billions of users, and even control Internet services with DAOs.

Let DAOs push software updates to smart contracts, which is only possible on the Internet Computer, and this is where the game-changing technology lies today. One way to think about it is that the Internet Computer provides an open encrypted cloud, and you can build anything on the Internet Computer. It is completely different from anything else today, and it is very powerful. Any web developer who wants to get into Web3 should start with the right technology, and they should build disruptive new applications that define the next generation of the Internet on the Internet Computer.