Swiss blockchain project Dfinity brings „Internet computers“ to the mainnet

Dfinity founder Dominic Williams explains to Crypto Engine how his project can usher in a paradigm shift.

After several years of research and development, in which several breakthroughs in the fields of cryptography and computer science were achieved, the Swiss blockchain company Dfinity finally launched its „Internet Computer“ on December 18th.

The „Internet Computer“ is said to be the first blockchain network that is as fast as the Internet and also has unlimited capacity

This is to be made possible via the so-called “Chain Key Technology”, which divides the requests to smart contracts into “Update Calls” and “Query Calls”.

The „update calls“ are requests that can be processed within one to two seconds, depending on how long the respective block production takes. The „query calls“, on the other hand, can be processed in a few milliseconds, since the changes they have transmitted expire immediately after processing.

In this way, the blockchain developers can create a user experience that can keep up with the functionality of normal Internet apps

In this context, Dfinity founder and head of research Dominic Williams confirms that it is the company’s intention to „expand the functionality of the Internet to a new and innovative blockchain network that no longer requires traditional technologies such as cloud servers, databases and firewalls“ . Accordingly, the “Internet computer enables companies and developers to completely rethink the how and what they develop, which ultimately heralds a paradigm shift”.

The switch to the mainnet went as planned, because the release date was targeted for the fourth quarter of 2020. However, this raises the question of why such a project was not launched with great fanfare.

First of all, it should be noted that the switch to the mainnet is not to be interpreted as with other blockchain projects.

The Dfinity platform is already fully functional and decentralized, whereby it is operated via the so-called Network Nervous System, but there will be no reset on the way to the „Genesis version“ as is often the case. Nonetheless, Williams describes the current „Mercury version“ as a kind of alpha.

Accordingly, only a fraction of the 469 million governance tokens held by Dfinity, early investors and a few other investors have been distributed so far. These in turn will vote on the distribution of the remaining tokens as soon as the conditions for the start of Genesis have been met.

The mainnet is currently operated on several nodes located in data centers in the USA, Germany and Switzerland. The subnet that controls the Network Nervous System has already produced 400,000 blocks since December 18 and currently integrates 896 new nodes for the transition to Genesis.

As Cointelegraph had reported , the price for the futures of the ICP governance tokens is currently a little over 21 US dollars, which would make the Dfinity project almost one of the five largest crypto projects by market capitalization. Although this is still a long way off at the moment, the project has now taken another big step along the way.

As Cointelegraph reported, the current futures price of over $21 on ICP governance tokens would put Dfinity just outside the top five digital assets by market cap. While that may still be on hold for now, this massive undertaking has just passed another major milestone.