DFINITY’s Internet Computer Protocol Blockchain surpassed 1 Billion Blocks within 14 Months of Mainnet
DFINITY recently celebrated the end of its global hackathon Supernova and ICP blockchain’s impressive feat of surpassing 1 Billion Block
Internet Computer Protocol blockchain recently surpassed 1 billion blocks. Blocks denote the capacity of the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain, which has been running non-stop since its mainnet, prospering with its sovereign web3 ecosystem of Internet Scale composable and tamperproof smart contract softwares.
Dfinity's Internet Computer is a giant, but it is not sleeping.
While it is easy to get distracted from monkey jpegs and some roll-ups claiming to be the next big thing, many in crypto fail to separate the signal from the noise.
But what if the signal is entirely on-chain, within the web3 internet, which requires one just to take a peek into the rabbit hole and ask themself whether it’s time to go down the rabbit hole or stay ignorant blissfully
For me, the answer was quite simple, it was the rabbit hole or the red pill.
The moment I landed on DFINITY's website, I found myself lost in the vast library of resources and technical videos. The professionalism and the standards they displayed sold the idea to me instantly. I dug a bit deeper and found videos on Youtube as well. As I watched more and more videos about ICP and Dominic Williams, the rabbit hole kept getting deeper and deeper.
Soon after that, I started to see blockchain all around me. I realized that the entire internet could be tokenized in a decentralized manner when the limitations of smart contracts were removed.
Internet Computer Blockchain recently surpassed 1 billion blocks at block speed of 36 BPS, with the total state of the chain at 1.43 TB and rising daily.
Block speed and number speak of the blockchain's capacity since the messages and transactions are stored within blocks secured with cryptography. Writing and deleting data on ICP dapps is storing and deleting data on the blockchain’s canister smart contracts.
This only proves that ICP has the potential and capacity to create infinite blocks and thereby rightfully claim to be the blockchain that scales infinitely and runs at web speed owing to its subnet architecture powered by hardcore novel cryptography developed by DFINITY.
Infinite block space enables infinite bandwidth for ownership of data
Blockchain singularity with Infinite Blockchain.
End-game for DFINITY and the Internet Computer (IC) is blockchain singularity, where every system and software around us is reimagined as smart contracts running entirely on the blockchain. This enables the vision of realizing a more decentralized, secure, and open internet, owned and governed by its users through advanced Decentralized Autonomous Organizations [DAOs]
A crypto cloud computing platform that is entirely a blockchain capable of serving the web directly without relying on Corporate cloud servers for hosting is game-changing for web3.
Internet Computer is the virtual machine ( akin to EVM ) assembled by the IC Protocol that hosts WebAssembly programs as smart contract canisters. DFINITY's novel cryptography protocols, such as Chain Key Cryptography & Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation are what sets Internet Computer apart from any blockchains in the web3 space.
Chain Key Crypto is a suite of cryptographic protocols orchestrating the network’s nodes. Through Chain Key, the entire IC has a single public key, with private keys shared among the nodes of the subnet. With a single 48-byte public key, it becomes extremely efficient to verify the artifacts or transactions on devices without having to download hundreds of gigs of state data.
This enables #ICP to run at web speed, i.e., the finality of txn happens within 2 seconds, and to scale infinitely with interoperable subnets.
Fast forward to 14 months after the mainnet launch, the ICP ecosystem is already thriving with thousands of developers building entirely on-chain, leveraging #ICP's full stack dev and deployment onto the chain without having to rely on any external third party such as Corporate Cloud for critical infrastructure to serve the internet.
End to End blockchain is served directly to the user’s browser through HTTP calls
In contrast, 67% of Ethereum’s Nodes use cloud hosting, out of which 50% run on Amazon Web Services. This makes Ethereum extremely vulnerable to a multitude of threats.
A variety of dapps are being built and used on ICP. On-chain Decentralized Social Media and NFTs are popular on ICP at the time of writing. There are now more than 120,000 Smart Contract Canisters hosted on IC Network.
Canisters are an evolution of smart contracts.
Canisters can be composed and blended to create an array of powerful trustless transactions/messages, like building Lego models from individual blocks.
Canisters are an evolution of smart contracts that can scale without bounds leveraging Chain Key cryptography to achieve asynchronous state updates/consensus in under 2 seconds [ fastest finality at scale ].
On Internet Computer, users can Sign transactions without paying gas, use advanced smart contracts without paying gas, deploy software securely and effortlessly, do full-stack development and deploy globally, scale other blockchains without bridges, and more…
Recent breakthrough developments happening on ICP.
ICP <> Bitcoin direct integration is one of the breakthrough developments taking place on the ICP Blockchain network
With direct integration, IC eliminates the need for insecure bridges to provide a means of utilizing tokens of another blockchain network such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Bridge exploits in the first half of 2022 alone have crossed more than 1 Billion USD in thefts or damages.
ICP’s canister smart contracts will be able to natively hold, store, and wrap Bitcoin, giving smart contracts to Bitcoin. The canisters will be able to create a bitcoin address, hold tokens and sign the transactions.
DFINITY’s Chain Key cryptography is extended to sign threshold-ECDSA Signatures. ECDSA is a type of digital signature algorithm used by the Bitcoin network to ensure the ownership and transfer of funds securely. This protocol enables users to generate private keys securely corresponding to the public key and use them to sign the transactions.
Canisters holding Bitcoin’s private keys are shared among the nodes of the subnet { separate chains that makeup IC as a whole chain } using the modified version of chain key cryptography i.e., with distributed signing protocols { 2 subprotocols, one for Distributed Key Generation & other for signing the messages.}
DFINITY’s development of threshold ECDSA enables every canister smart contract to control ECDSA signing keys and hold BTC directly on the Bitcoin blockchain
Threshold ECDSA: The Key Ingredient Behind the Internet Computer's BTC and ETH Integrations
Enabling Canisters to make HTTP(S) Requests.
Soon the canister smart contracts will be allowed to make HTTP(S) requests, allowing the ICP blockchain to communicate with the web2 systems and services via outbound HTTP calls.
Smart contracts on the Internet Computer, like on any other blockchain, cannot communicate with external servers per se, e.g., via making HTTP(S) requests. Enabling canisters to make HTTP(S) requests will help integrate the Internet Computer with the Web 2.0 world.
This can be leveraged to build verified immutable tamperproof APIs that can be maintained and upgraded through turnkey DAOs, ensuring a risk-free service, otherwise impossible with the current legacy IT stack.
Developers can get started here - smartcontracts.org