Internet Computer

Internet Computer was developed by DFINITY, which was informally founded in 2015 by Dominic Williams and formally incorporated as the non-profit DFINITY Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, in October 2016. Williams founded Internet Computer to develop a “World Computer… that will eventually replace traditional IT, and host all of humanity's systems and services, as well as enabling Web3 that is fully on-chain.”

In 2017, DFINITY began raising funds to develop Internet Computer, with a whitepaper describing its consensus system first published in January 2018. On May 10, 2021, Internet Computer was launched and open-sourced by the DFINITY Foundation. Notably, the network’s native token, ICP, was previously called.) DFN, “after the DFINITY Foundation,” but rebranded in 2021.

Other notable milestones in the project’s history include:

According to Internet Computer’s updated roadmap (website) released on May 16, 2024, key in-progress and upcoming developments grouped by focus area include:

Compute Platform

Tokamak Milestone: Focused on maximizing the block rate of each subnet by introducing a new synchronous ingress submission endpoint and improving latency issues.

Stellarator Milestone: Following the completion of the Tokamak milestone, the project team intends to introduce a new storage layer to enable subnet blockchains to host more than one terabyte of canister smart contract memory, as well as other improvements.

Decentralized Artificial Intelligence (DeAI)

Chain Interoperability (Chain Fusion)

Privacy

Decentralization

Identity

Digital Assets

Governance

Developer Experience

Notably, a commercially reasonable search found no intended release date(s) for some of the roadmap items.