CoinVoice: Several well-known public chain tokens have been identified as securities by the SEC, including ICP. What is your response to this?

Herbert: We have an article on Medium specifically responding to this topic.

We are surprised and disappointed that the SEC has classified ICP as a security. We disagree with the SEC and do not believe that ICP is a security. ICP is a functional token of the Internet Computer. The Internet Computer is a decentralized underlying technology protocol and infrastructure network. The DFINITY Foundation is the main developer of the open source technology code used by the Internet Computer network. DFINITY is a non-profit organization headquartered in Switzerland that does not generate commercial income. In addition to contributing code to the Internet Computer, it also provides assistance to other developers and participants in the ecosystem.

The DFINITY Foundation is governed and regulated by Swiss law. DFINITY is an influential technology organization in Switzerland, recruiting many top scientists and engineers from IBM and Google. Our R&D team is widely recognized as one of the strongest teams in the industry. In Switzerland, ICP is classified as a functional token by regulators, and we have always strictly complied with local regulations to ensure that ICP exercises its functions within the scope of the law. We also do not believe that existing laws will define ICP as a security in the United States.

The SEC’s lawsuit against Coinbase included several false claims about ICP, such as, “DFINITY advertised that it would destroy ICP to support the price of ICP.” DFINITY has never destroyed ICP tokens and has never advertised that it plans to do so.

CoinVoice: The founder of DFINITY said that DFINITY may move into Hong Kong Cyberport in the future. What is the intention behind this?

Herbert: Dominic Williams (“Dom”), founder of DFINITY, came to Hong Kong in April and was invited to attend the Web3 Festival held by Hashkey Group. He gave a keynote speech on the main stage of Day 1, sharing the booming development of the Internet Computer mainnet in the past two years, the flourishing next-generation Web3 products presented by the ICP ecosystem, and the exciting ICP development blueprint. Among the several OG founders of the L1 public chain, Dom should be the only one who came to Hong Kong at that time. The DFINITY Asia-Pacific team arranged intensive meetings with major developers, community leaders, investment institutions, and Hong Kong government executives in the Chinese IC community during Dom’s stay in Hong Kong. Dom had a very good impression of Hong Kong and deeply felt the great enthusiasm and eager expectations of the Asian Chinese community for the Internet Computer.

Inspired by this atmosphere, Dom proposed the idea of ​​establishing the "ICP Asia Pacific Alliance" in response to the Hong Kong government's call last October to build Hong Kong into the Asian Web3 center. Based in Hong Kong, the ICP ecosystem will further expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region and attract more developers to join the Internet Computer camp. The ICP Asia Pacific Alliance will carry out extensive multilateral cooperation with a number of Hong Kong investment institutions, Web3 communities, developer teams, the Hong Kong government, university research institutions, incubators and other ecological participants.

Dom's idea reflects the DFINITY Foundation's high regard for the Asia-Pacific community. Although the DFINITY Foundation is headquartered in Switzerland and its 270-person global team is mainly distributed in Europe and the United States, it has deep roots in Asia. The early co-founder Dom Ding was from China, and later met Dom in Silicon Valley, and incubated DFINITY through his own incubator Spring Labs. In its early days, DFINITY received strong support from a number of the most influential Asian investment institutions - angel investments from Hashkey Group, Fenbushi Capital, SNZ Capital, Zhen Fund, Amino Capital, and Anmi Capital. It was precisely because of the early value discovery of this group of discerning Asian investment institutions that the subsequent investment from Silicon Valley's top VC a16z and Polychain and the recognition of many international investment institutions were achieved.

After the successful launch of ICP’s mainnet two years ago, DFINITY established an Asia-Pacific team and has since begun to explore various opportunities and ways to develop the ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the Chinese community, and has taken a unique development path compared to the European and American communities. DFINITY has been the exclusive diamond sponsor of the Shanghai Blockchain Global Summit, an industry event held annually by Wanxiang Blockchain Group, for two consecutive years. Dom was invited to give a keynote speech at the conference. During the conference, an unprecedented ICP developer offline gathering was held in Shanghai, re-establishing close cooperative relations with China’s most hardcore developers, early investor groups, major communities in the industry, and many ecological institutions. DFINITY and Wanxiang also cooperated in an IC incubation camp, incubating 10 promising early-stage startups, among which Dmail, Relation Labs and AstroX have successfully raised funds, making full use of ICP’s unique technology, and have achieved rapid development in product implementation, user accumulation and overseas expansion. With the sincere cooperation of the Asia-Pacific team and community leaders, the number and influence of ICP Asia-Pacific projects have steadily increased, from an initial 10% share in the global ecosystem to nearly 40%.

Hong Kong has a unique geographical location. It only takes 30 minutes to get from Hong Kong's Science Park to Shenzhen Port. It is very convenient for developers from Shenzhen and other cities in the mainland to come to Hong Kong. Going back and forth within the same day has become the normal work of many people. There is a strong complementarity between Hong Kong's international environment and mainland science and technology talents. As an L1 foundation that is more technology-oriented, this is a point we value very much. DFINITY hopes to better empower Chinese developers and attract them to start businesses in Hong Kong through Hong Kong's current various policies and resource support for Web3. Here they can make full use of ICP's global exclusive full-stack architecture that integrates ledgers, computing power, and storage, connect with international capital and customers in Hong Kong's positive and enterprising entrepreneurial atmosphere, and create Web3 applications that can generate real value. We hope that they can go beyond the traditional blockchain field of finance and come up with more paradigms to explore a path of transformation for the entire Web3 industry and the Hong Kong economy.

CoinVoice: The previous manipulation of ICP prices led to ecological damage. How do you view the development potential of ICP in the new cycle?

Herbert: For details on how the ICP price was manipulated by FTX after the launch of the mainnet, please see the long article "Is the ICP price manipulated by the mastermind on FTX?" disclosed by Cryptoleaks on June 9, 2022. Dom, the founder of DFINITY, pointed out on Twitter on July 7, 2022 that FTX founder SBF needed to be held responsible for this - at that time, SBF was in its heyday, and he was still playing the role of white knight in the industry, acquiring companies that were about to collapse and go bankrupt. FTX's own collapse only showed signs in November 2022. After a large number of users discovered that their assets had been misappropriated by FTX/SBF, they gradually saw the true face of SBF. SBF himself was arrested in the Bahamas on January 3, 2023 and extradited to the United States to face a series of criminal charges. Now the public opinion in the industry is one-sided, and everyone has accused SBF and the FTX team of being rampant and misbehaving in the past. Have you ever thought that if you had listened to Dom's voice a few months earlier, you might have seen all this earlier?

After the price of ICP began to fall, many investors' confidence in the ICP ecosystem was affected. We can fully understand this - we don't want to see this situation either, and our foundation itself is also a victim. Some investors know our team and know that we have a hard time. They continue to support us, cooperate with us in industry activities, and invest in startups in our ecosystem. It is a pity that many investors have gradually faded out of our ecosystem because they have been hurt. In the blockchain industry, many project companies have run away and failed the trust of investors and the developer community. Such examples are everywhere and happen every day. It is actually very simple to see whether a team has this tendency - it is to see whether they are doing things seriously, whether they are continuing to go their own way and continue to develop products despite the ridicule and attacks of the industry, or whether they gradually disappear and lie flat and fish.

Since the launch of the mainnet on May 10, 2021, the ICP protocol has undergone more than 140 upgrades, which is unimaginable in the industry - other L1 blockchains are lucky to have 2-3 upgrades in a year. In the "2022 Developer Report" released by Electric Capital on January 17, 2023, the full-time developer activity of the ICP ecosystem increased by 94% compared to 2021, which is the second highest annual growth rate in the industry's first-line large ecosystem (with at least 100 nominal full-time developers); if part-time developers are included, ICP's overall developer activity increased by 48% in 2022, ranking third in the first-line ecosystem (with more than 300 developers). From 2018 to 2022, the number of full-time developers in ICP increased 40 times, and the ICP mainnet was launched only a year and a half ago - this shows that ICP has reached or even surpassed the level of most other public chain ecosystems in the industry in a very short period of time.

Developers are the writers of the future narrative of the technology industry. Compared with investors, they look at things more simply and directly. A technology ecosystem without competitiveness cannot continuously attract developers to join. So, what do developers see on ICP? What kind of development potential of ICP will be reflected by their vision, and is it worth everyone's attention?

I think, first of all, everyone has seen the stubbornness and perseverance of the DFINITY Foundation. As the main developer of the ICP mainnet protocol, the character and culture of the DFINITY Foundation have a subtle influence on the ICP ecosystem. We are not afraid of being misunderstood, and we are unwilling to follow the crowd, but insist on going our own way. DFINITY is a very technical foundation. Most of our employees are R&D. Dom's favorite thing is to study technology with R&D engineers, and exchange ideas with developers around the world in his spare time when attending major industry events to understand what they are doing. Some ecosystems are good at BD, some are good at marketing, some are good at product iteration, and some are good at financing. The ICP ecosystem is good at developing the most disruptive technology. The number of people in our ecosystem may not be comparable to that of several other companies, but our developers, whether they are within the DFINITY Foundation or those who still stick to it in the community, are the most hardcore people in the industry. This is our gene. We may not be the smoothest in other aspects, and often a little awkward, but we have unparalleled confidence in our technology. In our industry, which is full of ever-changing trends, it is still difficult to say which ecosystem will make it to the end. But we believe in our own path, and more and more people, whether developers or investors, have gradually seen our sincerity and determination and joined our camp. Looking at the industry trends in the short term of 2-3 years, it seems very uncertain, and it is still a foggy moment. But if you look at the development of the Internet in the next 15-20 years, it is not that difficult to deduce the ultimate outcome. Dom published a long article on January 6, 2021, "20-Year Roadmap for Internet Computers", which is worth reading. I used to be the CFO of the capital business department in GE (General Electric). After returning to China, I served as CFO and CEO in many startups. I have written and read countless business plans. Later, I was responsible for the startup business unit in Greater China at AWS and participated in the preparation of the AWS Global Startup Strategy Manual. I have never seen a 20-year plan, and I have never seen a team that can realize this ambitious plan step by step in the first few years, until I joined DFINITY.

Second, everyone saw the uniqueness of ICP technology, and could create scenarios and products on ICP that could not be realized on any other technology platform. In the blockchain industry, too many public chains are doing repetitive work, hoping to do better than Ethereum in some aspects, and then hype it up, get on the hot search, attract the same group of developers to flock to it, and make the same financial product again on a different chain, and get another grant from a foundation. After so many years of tossing, everyone should be tired. If blockchain cannot go beyond the financial industry, it will not be able to break the circle. If everyone just keeps repeating the narrative of Ethereum, hoping to make a patch and sell the L1 or L2 story to make money before the next upgrade of Ethereum, it will not solve the embarrassing situation that the industry cannot be accepted by the general Internet users. ICP is the only blockchain network in the world that can run the front end of network applications - that is, a website, an Internet service, a SaaS product, its front end and back end can run in ICP's container-based smart contracts. The Solidity contract of the Ethereum system is just a distributed ledger that defines the ownership of digital assets. Its unique atomicity does bring about various efficient transactions, but these gameplays still cannot escape the scope of traditional financial investment that Wall Street is good at. ICP's smart contracts can provide not only distributed ledgers (and return data privacy rights to developers), but also distributed computing power and data storage. ICP is more like a decentralized AWS. Its ceiling is the IT infrastructure industry valued by the entire current cloud computing industry, such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, a market of 4 trillion US dollars per year. It can even be said that even the territory of AWS cannot limit the boundaries of ICP - AWS is the leader in IaaS (Infrastructure-as-as-Service), and the vast PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) markets where hundreds of schools of thought contend are difficult for AWS to intervene. ICP's mainnet protocol actually already includes IaaS and PaaS, and the future prosperity and flourishing of SaaS will be directly linked to the value of ICP through the cycles burning mechanism in the ICP token economy. This is the unique charm of the crypto industry and a future worth looking forward to that Web2 giants will never be able to achieve.

CoinVoice: How will the ICP ecosystem be laid out in the future multi-chain landscape? What is worth looking forward to?

Herbert: Everyone is talking about multi-chain. The multi-chain structure is more in line with the ups and downs of this industry, and it is easier for most people to accept. The key question is how many public chains there will be in the future. I don’t think the number will be too large - dozens or hundreds of public chains that seem to be no different from Ethereum will not be competitive with each other, and developers, investors and users will soon get tired of them. As a digital asset, Bitcoin is enough; as a financial asset, Ethereum’s current position is also difficult to shake. In the application chain, there are several public chains in specific vertical fields, but if they cannot solve all the modules that a developer needs to make a network application, they must rely on centralized cross-chain bridges or some centralized servers - these are huge security risks, and there is no need to prove it anymore, but people in this industry are just reluctant to mention this embarrassing topic head-on.

ICP is the only general application chain in the industry that can directly deploy the full range of services required for a complete network application without relying on the servers of centralized cloud services. Application-based L1 blockchains have many similarities with the cloud computing industry, and the small and beautiful business model cannot survive. Either don't do it, and give this opportunity to the industry's financially strong giants or the most technically capable players (Alibaba Cloud has been plagiarizing AWS's technical documents until 2021, often making jokes in the developer community), or if you want to do it, you have to do the full range of services, and implement all the technologies between TCP/IP and end users, and abstract them all. Other public chains refer to the white papers of Ethereum and ICP (the sharding problem that has been a headache in the industry was solved through subnet when ICP launched its mainnet two years ago), and launch an L1 or L2 every two years on average. Why can it be so "agilely developed"? Because there is no real technical accumulation, just some patching of Ethereum. The DFINITY Foundation was established in October 2016 and it took five years until May 2021 to launch ICP, because rewriting the underlying Internet protocol is too difficult and requires solving too many technical problems.

I think the narrative of financial investment has become tired, and the market will eventually return to its essence and start to pay attention to the underlying infrastructure services of the Internet. ICP has chosen the most difficult and even lonely path because we believe that this is the only way that can be sustained and worth going. Once this muddy path is walked out, it will become wider and smoother. In the past two years, the ICP mainnet has not been down once. Although it has experienced several network congestion and performance degradation caused by the NFT craze and public offerings, the mainnet has survived, allowing us to learn a lot of valuable experience, and the mainnet's ability to withstand pressure is getting stronger and stronger. After two years of tempering, the performance indicators of the ICP network have steadily increased, and are completely not at the same level as blockchain peers. Storing 1GB/year of data requires $15 million on Ethereum, $48,000 on Solana, and $5 on ICP. The data transmission cost on ICP is one-seventh of that on AWS. ICP can process more than 4,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum is in the double digits.

In the multi-chain landscape, a public chain has value only if it provides unique value and allows developers to achieve scenarios that cannot be achieved in any other technology stack. Many developer teams have made use of the characteristics of ICP technology and have made their mark in the six major tracks of finance, social networking, productivity tools, games, and artificial intelligence. IC Lighthouse is the world's first crypto trading platform that is 100% deployed on the blockchain from the front end to the back end, and is written entirely in the Motoko language created by DFINITY. Users no longer have to worry about their assets being misappropriated by centralized platforms and scandals like FTX. Hot or Not moved the short video TikTok model to IC, using the unique token economy of Web3 to motivate passive users. Mora completely rewrites the relationship between content creators, users, and platforms, allowing content creators to truly own 100% of all their output content and gain fans, completely independent of the front-end platform. Dmail has achieved direct reception and sending of emails on the ICP network, directly challenging the highly centralized Gmail that does not care about user privacy. Since its launch, it has reached 30,000 daily active users and 300,000 total users, and has also become a partner of Worldcoin, with an amazing growth. Cubetopia has built a "My World" on ICP, which does not rely on centralized servers like AWS, proving that even games can be 100% on-chain, allowing gamers to truly own their assets. The EMC team, which has recently caused heated discussions in the ICP ecosystem, is about to launch an AI computing power trading platform on the ICP mainnet, gradually deploy AIGC applications on ICP, and bring its existing community of tens of thousands of developers into ICP.

In the next 6-12 months, there will be more and more excellent projects in the ICP ecosystem. My previous team at AWS introduced more than 2,000 of China's hottest startups to join the AWS ecosystem every year. About 1-5% of them later became unicorn companies, reshaping the landscape of multiple industries. The ICP ecosystem is still in its early stages, but I think these early companies in the Web3 ecosystem are more disruptive and contain stronger potential. If they do not break the monopoly and occupation of user data by existing giants, the endless value squeeze of users by Web2 giants, and the increasingly unimaginative use scenarios of the traditional Internet, it will be difficult for them to find their own living space. Once they can successfully break through, they will bring about a true bottom-up revolution in the third-generation Internet, reconstruct production relations and resource allocation, and become a new generation of unicorns.

CoinVoice: How do you view competition and cooperation with other public chains in the future?

Herbert: ICP's unique technology makes it very suitable for cooperation with other public chains. At the beginning of this year, our R&D team completed the BTC-ICP integration that the community has been looking forward to. Using chain key cryptography technology, we realized the interoperability between the smart contracts on the ICP mainnet and the BTC mainnet without the need for a centralized cross-chain bridge. This technology allows users to control BTC wallets through ICP's smart contracts, which actually gives the Bitcoin network the function of smart contracts, and it will be much faster and much cheaper. Other public chains that want to cooperate with BTC all rely on various centralized cross-chain bridges. Centralized cross-chain bridges will not last long because they all rely on an individual with administrator privileges. The open source protocol developed by DFINITY solves the human problem at the technical level through cryptography. This is a very disruptive innovation in the industry. The DFINITY Foundation also created a token called ckBTC, which has a 1:1 relationship with BTC. Users can use ckBTC to trade directly on the ICP mainnet without being restricted by the delays and rising transaction fees of the BTC network. Moreover, ckBTC has enabled KYT (know-your-transaction) to shield black bitcoins and ensure that the wallet addresses traded on ckBTC can be recognized by traditional financial institutions.

In the past few months, the BTC community has been very popular. Many developers have entered Web3 because of the popularity of Ordinal and BRC-20 and started to develop BTC applications. The development language of BTC itself is very simple and can do very limited things. But if it is combined with the industry's most advanced container-based smart contracts on the ICP public chain, it can create almost unlimited imagination and usage scenarios. For example, people no longer need to trade Ordinal through their own wallets on the BTC network, but can use a container-based smart contract on the ICP network to control the BTC wallet address that owns Ordinal, and then trade containers with each other on the ICP network - the cost of exchanging ICP containers is 0.04 cents, and the same actual effect is achieved in the end. Now many of the ambitious new generation of developers in the BTC community come from Web2. Now that they have come to Web3, they hope to find an orthodox narrative and plunge into the torrent of an era. In the blockchain industry, BTC is the most orthodox narrative. There are already many mountains in the Ethereum ecosystem. For new developers, it is not easy to find good opportunities. It is not because of technical problems, but because the resources in the ecosystem have been monopolized by people who entered the industry a few years ago. In this case, the strong combination of BTC and ICP provides developers who focus on technology with an excellent opportunity to write a new round of narratives. The DFINITY Foundation has just cooperated with Encode on a BTC-ICP integration hackathon. Hundreds of teams have signed up enthusiastically. The final Demo Day list can be seen here, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qHEA6cN1Pf2xsuPojSqtxQ.

In addition to BTC, the ICP ecosystem is also actively reaching out to developers in the Ethereum ecosystem. After Vitalik proposed the vision of the "world computer" a few years ago, it has been difficult to achieve due to the technical conditions of Ethereum itself. ICP's technology stack of ledger, computing power, and storage provides a very good technical soil for achieving this ambitious goal. The R&D team of the DFINITY Foundation, as well as teams with strong technical capabilities in the community, such as IC Lighthouse and Bitfinity, are working intensively to develop the integration of ETH-ICP. Once this roadmap function is implemented, the IC network will be compatible with the Ethereum ERC-20 and ERC-721 protocols, stablecoins can be introduced, and the TVL of ETH and ICP can be circulated. It can even be compatible with EVM, greatly reducing the threshold for developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to enter the IC ecosystem. The Bitfinity team has successfully deployed EVM in the container on IC, which can achieve the same functions as Ethereum L1 and various L2, but the consensus and security mechanisms rely on ICP L1, thereby greatly accelerating the consensus speed and reducing transaction costs. Dom, founder and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, is attending ETH Paris in Paris these days. DFINITY has recently participated intensively in a series of Ethereum ecosystem events, from Denver, USA to Montenegro to Paris, in the hope that more developers can be exposed to ICP's unique cross-chain technology.

CoinVoice: ICP’s technical strength is disproportionate to the attention it receives. Why is this the case?

Herbert: Indeed, this is a problem that has troubled the IC community for a long time. ICP's white paper and the super technical strength it has shown as the roadmap functions have been gradually implemented after the mainnet was launched in the past two years are disproportionate to the attention it has received in the media and investor circles. Investors rarely talk about ICP publicly, which is a big challenge for us to develop a developer ecosystem. I think there are three reasons:

The first is that many investors have already heavily bet on the pan-Ethereum ecosystem, and ICP technology is so advanced in the industry that its existence has put forward higher requirements for many other technology stacks - if they want to keep up with the R&D progress of ICP. For example, sharding, which has been a constant topic in the industry, was solved when the ICP mainnet was launched two years ago. We called it "subnet". Later, some peers in the industry also changed the term from sharding to subnet. There are now 36 subnets on ICP, and there is no limit on horizontal expansion. If the network needs more computing power and storage resources, more subnets will be set up. Smart contracts within the same subnet and smart contracts across different subnets can communicate with each other in actor mode. Some public chains for data storage announced a few months ago that smart contracts are finally online - ICP had complete smart contracts when the mainnet was launched two years ago, and its functions far exceeded Ethereum.

ICP's technology is very different from traditional blockchains. It is actually more like a decentralized AWS, and its functions far exceed the scope of a traditional L1 public chain. Traditional public chains basically live in the narrative of Ethereum, only providing distributed ledgers, and then everyone tacitly puts data and nodes on AWS, and when promoting it to the outside world, they pull the posture of Web3 to the fullest - although from data sovereignty to community autonomy, all rely on centralized services and administrators with root permissions. In addition to ledgers, ICP can also provide decentralized computing power and data storage, completely rewriting the infrastructure of the Internet from the bottom protocol level of the Internet. For many blockchain OGs, understanding this is actually quite cognitively impeded, and it means that everyone has to overturn their original investment strategies, which requires a lot of courage. Acknowledging the technical superiority of ICP will inevitably lead to a conclusion - that most of the public chains in the industry actually provide very limited value, most of them are doing Ethereum L1 patching work, and it is inevitable that they will become a fast-running version of the capital game.

Second, ICP's technology is too unique. It has proposed many technical concepts that are very different from Ethereum. For developers and industry analysts, if they do not have a deep understanding of the entire set of cloud computing in the Web2 field and only know Solidity contracts, they cannot actually understand the great power of ICP, or even why ICP's smart contracts are called "containers" - and this name is easy to understand for developers in the cloud computing industry - a container is a lightweight docker. ICP's smart contracts are actually more like an actor program. This has the effect that many industry analysis companies, whether Messari or DeFi Llama, automatically exclude ICP's statistics because they cannot understand ICP, which greatly affects the spread of ICP technology. For example, when DeFi Llama calculated the TVL of major public chains, it only counted the million-dollar TVL of Sonic, a DEX in the IC ecosystem. However, on the NNS (Network Nervous System, or network nervous system) of the ICP public chain, $1.4 billion in assets are pledged. This part of assets is enough to make ICP one of the public chain ecosystems with the highest TVL. There is no concept of staking ICP for mining on ICP nodes, so many statistical companies do not include assets on NNS in industry data, which is very unfair to ICP. So why is there no concept of mining on ICP? Because the access mechanism of ICP nodes is neither PoW (BTC) which consumes energy, nor PoS (ETH 2.0) which is highly centralized and highly concentrated in funds, but PoUW - Proof of Useful Work, that is, the ICP network pays nodes according to the computing power resources provided by the nodes through NNS, a highly intelligent and automated DAO. This is a concept of cloud computing services, which has been a resource allocation method recognized by governments and corporate users in the Internet and the entire technology industry in the past fifteen years, but it is exactly incompatible with the concept of capital disk familiar to the blockchain industry.

Third, the DFINITY Foundation itself has also made various attempts in marketing strategies, trying various routes and positioning. This has indeed caused considerable confusion to the developer community and the investor group. We are a small team with less than 300 people worldwide. The main employees are mainly from a technical research and development background. What we want to do is to leverage the underlying infrastructure and prerequisites of the entire Internet, not only subverting the blockchain, but also subverting the centralized cloud computing industry. We are walking a path that no one has ever walked before, and we don’t know how to interpret this script. This script has never existed, so please forgive our immaturity and naivety. From the GE Capital era to the AWS era, I have experienced major trends and outlets from Web1 to Web2. I have never seen a more exciting vision and such an ambitious project than ICP. Her embarrassment and occasional helplessness are understandable. She has been attacked, ridiculed and ignored so frequently, and it is not without precedent in the past 30 years. Jobs' return to Apple in 1997 and Musk's launch of the first generation of Tesla sports cars in 2008 are similar to the current situation of ICP. The three companies (ICP is not a company but an ecosystem, but we call it that for the convenience of comparison) all seem to be very unorthodox and completely deviate from the mainstream narrative of the industry at that time. Specifically, first, they all firmly took the route of one-stop vertical integration (full-stack technology), while the industry at that time was taking the style of horizontal integration and mutual compatibility (various cross-chain and multi-chain); second, the first generation of products made were all for niche, but they were all the most hardcore and sentimental niche customers; third, the corporate style tended to be introverted or conservative, which was quite different from other practitioners in the industry. The style of the leaders was also eye-catching and quite unique. Of course, the biggest common point is that the first two companies completely subverted the entire industry and set off a magnificent innovation revolution, which is still in the ascendant. This is also the mission of the DFINITY Foundation and the ICP ecosystem. I firmly believe that valuable technology will naturally find like-minded people. With the rise of AI, how to deploy the most powerful machine reasoning and data collection on a truly decentralized platform, manage it in a decentralized DAO manner, and achieve true data sovereignty for users is likely to be the mainstream narrative in the next ten to twenty years.In this technological revolution, ICP, the most decentralized infrastructure protocol in the entire Internet technology industry, will play an important role and play an almost irreplaceable role. Thank you for your attention.