The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), a pioneering decentralized blockchain network, marked its third anniversary today with the release of its “Year 4 Internet Computer Roadmap.” This roadmap highlights ICP’s achievements since its inception in May 2021 and sets forth ambitious plans to establish ICP as a leader in Decentralized AI (DeAI) and blockchain interoperability.
Since the launch of its mainnet, ICP has achieved remarkable milestones, maintaining zero downtime, processing over three billion blocks, and securing over $3 billion in value within its Network Nervous System (NNS) DAO. The developer community around ICP has flourished, with Electric Capital noting a 12-fold increase in developers between 2020 and 2023, despite ICP’s mainnet only going live in May 2021.
The platform hosts some of the most widely used applications in the cryptocurrency space, including DMail, DSCVR, and OpenChat. The Year 4 roadmap outlines several key areas of focus, with Decentralized AI and Chain Fusion being the most significant highlights.
Decentralized AI (DeAI)
The DeAI roadmap is designed to bring AI models onto the blockchain, enabling transparent and reliable AI applications. Traditional AI models often function as opaque black boxes, leaving users in the dark about data usage and the correctness of AI outputs. ICP aims to address these issues with its robust computational capabilities and sophisticated smart contracts.
Performance Enhancements
- Faster deterministic floating-point operations, achieving a 10x performance boost.
- Wasm SIMD support, which allows multiple floating-point operations per CPU instruction.
- Optimizing the AI inference engine.
AI Computation on GPU
- Developing a deterministic API for AI computations on GPU.
- Creating tooling and libraries for AI smart contract development.
- Publishing a public specification for GPU-enabled nodes.
- Establishing AI-specialized subnets with GPU-enabled nodes.
These advancements will enable groundbreaking use cases such as autonomous blockchain KYC verification, smart contract verification, natural language interactions with smart contracts, DAO-controlled AIs, and AI models traded as NFTs. This push towards DeAI is supported by a $5 million grant program initiated by the DFINITY Foundation, fostering innovative projects like Kinic, DecideAI, ELNA AI, ICGPT, and Earthstream.
Chain Fusion
Chain Fusion is ICP’s initiative to enable seamless interoperability with major blockchain networks, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, other EVMs, and soon, Solana. This initiative aims to dissolve the silos between different blockchain ecosystems, fostering liquidity and collaboration across networks.
EVM Chain Support
Enabling canister smart contracts on ICP to hold and transact tokens on EVM chains and interact with their smart contracts without intermediaries.
Bitcoin Integration
Utilizing Bitcoin-native protocols (BRC20, Runes) to support Bitcoin ordinals and runes, allowing for decentralized applications that integrate Bitcoin and ICP functionalities.
Solana Support
Bridging the gap between Solana and ICP, allowing smart contracts on both networks to interact seamlessly.
Looking Forward
Dominic Williams, Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, emphasized the transformative vision behind ICP: “The Internet Computer is the first and only Third Generation public blockchain. The mission is to drive a “blockchain singularity,” where over time fully decentralized blockchains become the world’s prevailing tech stack, even running secure and unstoppable AI. The DFINITY Foundation and its eminent team of cryptographers, research scientists and engineers, is now pushing ahead with a new roadmap, crafting contributions that will make the network faster, more efficient and more powerful than ever before.”
The roadmap reflects the Foundation’s commitment to enhancing the network’s speed, efficiency, and power, positioning ICP at the forefront of blockchain innovation. The complete roadmap details these initiatives and more, underscoring ICP’s role in revolutionizing how decentralized networks operate within the Web3 paradigm. As ICP moves into its fourth year, the community and its developers can anticipate a period of rapid growth and technological breakthroughs that will shape the future of blockchain and AI integration.
ICP is a decentralized cloud 3.0 protocol that allows developers to build and run services and enterprise systems directly on a public blockchain network with unprecedented scalability. Services on ICP are tamper-proof and can interact with both traditional Web2 services and other blockchains in a trustless manner. This fast, low-cost, and energy-efficient protocol is setting new standards for decentralized networks in the Web3 era.
