Zurich, Switzerland, May 24th, 2024
The DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit and a significant contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain, hosted the highly anticipated ‘Beyond The Blockchain’ event. Held at the DFINITY HQ in Zurich, this event marked a significant milestone in the Internet Computer’s journey, celebrating its third Anniversary and paving the way for future developments.
The Internet Computer launched in May 2021 after several years of R&D development. It owes its success to the support of the ICP community and vibrant ecosystem. Since its launch, the Internet Computer has experienced zero downtime, processed over three billion blocks, and has amassed over three billion USD locked in the NNS DAO, which governs the network.
The Beyond The Blockchain celebration brought together the ICP community, ecosystem projects, ICP.Hubs, investors and DFINITY’s strategic partners. The day consisted of keynotes, panel discussions and inspiring words from Dominic Williams, Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation.
Dominic Williams, Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, says “The Internet Computer has been in production for three flawless years. Each year has brought an increase in computation and new features. We will continue to evangelize the only third generation blockchain”.
The first half of the day covered Chain Fusion, AI, DAOs, the ICP Ecosystem, and the recently launched acceleration platform Olympus. Notable contributors included 9Yards Capital, Arche Capital, Warburg Serres, the Knowledge Foundation, and the G-20 Group representatives.
During the second half of the day, the discussions covered the ICP.Hubs, investment trends, incubators, institutional adoption, security, digital assets, and the Swiss blockchain ecosystem. Notable contributors included Web3 Music Association, Outlier Ventures, Cypher Capital, Microsoft, Taurus, HELIX Marketplace, Börse Stuttgart, and the Greater Zurich Area.
The third-anniversary celebration coincided with the first milestone in the recently updated Internet Computer Roadmap – Tritium. The Tritium milestone means ICP’s Chain Fusion technology now has full support for Ethereum and other EVM chains. ICP smart contracts can read from and write to EVM chains using a decentralized approach, and transactions can be signed in a trustless manner using threshold ECDSA signing.
The milestone also includes the launch of ckUSD. ckUSDC is a digital twin of the USDC stablecoin. Similar to ckBTC and ckETH, ckUSDC uses chain-key cryptography to create a token deployed on ICP that is backed 1:1 with USDC. ckUSDC is the first ERC20 twin to launch on the Internet Computer. Other popular ERC20 token twins are expected to launch in the coming months.
The next twelve months will include a number of milestones in DecentralizedAI, digital assets, identity and more. The full roadmap can be viewed here.
About the Internet Computer:
The Internet Computer Protocol (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 running on top of ICP are tamper-proof and can negatively interact with the outside world in a trustless manner, both with traditional web 2.0 services and with other blockchains. The fast, low-cost, and energy-efficient protocol establishes a new paradigm for how a decentralized network truly operates in web3.
