Internet Computer (ICP), The Next Big Crypto Project?
ICP took the cryptocurrency universe by storm. It reached as high as $640 during its Coinbase listing. The crypto surpassed giants like XRP, Litecoin, Polkadot, Chainlink, etc. to reach the 4th spot in the market cap, coming close to $45 billion. ICP has been a much-hyped project even before the launch, backed by Polychain Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, etc. it has some solid investors behind it.
What is ICP all about?
The Internet Computer is a project by Dfinity, a non for profit organization based in Zurich, Switzerland. Dfinity states its vision is to build an Internet Computer, with new technology to reverse the monopoly by big giants like Facebook, Google, etc. in the internet space. Dfinity was founded in 2016 by Dominic Williams who is the chief scientist behind Internet Computer.
Currently, it has a team of more than 180 people who have previously been associated with giants like Google, IBM, Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc. Now let us try to understand what problem is this rockstar cryptocurrency trying to solve.
As we all know, the internet is our lifeline today and without the internet, our world can collapse. Did you know when the internet was first invented in the 1960s, it was used for the transfer of information and communication purpose by the military? But the internet we know today can store data, run thousands of applications and software. How did we get here?
To build websites and other complex systems on the internet, developers had to create different layers over the internet like CDNs, Databases, Firewalls, etc. Due to this, the tech stack was getting very complex, costly, and prone to hack. As the demand for building the complex tech stacks grew, the world saw the rise of tech giants which provide the infrastructure and solution for creating software and websites easily without having to develop different layers yourself. But this also comes with many risks like a few players having a monopoly in the internet industry. We all know data is the new oil and social media apps and search engines collect and sell our data to third parties. ICP envisions bringing an end to a centralized system and gives us the ability to directly build applications over the internet easily with help of the Internet Computer Protocol.
How Does ICP Work?
Just like smart contracts ICP uses canisters that can serve web content directly to the end-users. The developers now do not need to deal with the traditional IT stack, they can simply build by uploading canisters into cyberspace. The data will not be held in a centralized manner like today, instead, it will be distributed across nodes all over the world.
The major issue that startups face today is platform risk. For example, I use Facebook’s APIs to build an application and suddenly Facebook plans to withdraw their APIs, my application will be destroyed! With ICP the need to use pre-existing APIs will eliminate since emerging startups could build applications on their own. Also, the user concern of data privacy will be taken care of, thanks to its underlying blockchain technology.
Is ICP a Good Investment?
So far ICP has been very promising. Their vision can disrupt not even the traditional internet using patterns, but also it can be a step ahead of Ethereum.
No doubt, once fully functional ICP can dethrone tech giants such as Google, Facebook, AWS, etc. but we still have a long way to go. I think that ICP is worth investing in if we look at the longer picture provided we constantly monitor the developments and interact with the community to manage our risks.
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