The Internet computer Dfinity, which a16z led twice, is still the “king of heaven” when it is two years late?

After waiting for many years, the mainnet of the former “King of Heaven” project Dfinity is finally going online, and it will go online before December 31.

At present, the market’s sentiment for public chains other than Ethereum is not high. Dfinity’s main network has been postponed for many years. Some investors’ memories of Dfinity are very vague except for “T-shirt manufacturers” and some negative news. After the launch of the Sodium testnet, Dfinity’s valuation is as high as 9.5 billion US dollars. Is it inflated? After the Dfinity mainnet goes live, how will the market react?

“Once a King of Heaven project, there are constant negatives”

On October 9th, Dfinity founder Dominic Williams revealed in the event that the team is expected to go live on the mainnet before December 31st. In fact, long before this, the community has been rumored that Dfinity is expected to be launched on the mainnet in the fourth quarter of this year. However, everyone has been “pigeoned” much more, and they are dubious about this statement. When it comes to Dfinity, users in the crypto community often have an impression of the “king of heaven” project, but then it is followed by negative labels such as “Ace Pigeon”, “T-shirt manufacturer”, and “The founder is intoxicated by immortality”.

Dfinity was born in the hottest period of ICO. The three rounds of financing received a total of nearly 170 million U.S. dollars. Even now it seems to be a proper “coin circle giant”. Many well-known investment institutions such as a16z and Polychain Capital have participated. Despite financing over 100 million yuan, Dfinity’s development path has not been smooth. The mainnet, which was originally scheduled to go live at the end of 2018, has been delayed, and the level of “Ace Pigeon” is comparable to Filecoin. If you are mixed in major communities, it is not difficult to find that when you mention Dfinity, in addition to complaining about the delay in launching the main network, they also often ridicule: “How many spring, summer, autumn and winter have passed, my Dfinity T-shirt Why hasn’t it been shipped yet?”

It turned out that in 2018, the Dfinity team promised that users who passed the KYC airdrop would pay 7.5 USD in advance to get a Dfinity T-shirt, but after 3 years, some users have not seen their T-shirts. However, this is not the deadliest. Blockchain projects are most afraid of internal disturbances in the team. In 2019, it was revealed that Tom Ding, one of the co-founders of Dfinity, had left the team and was fascinated by the study of life extension in the field of biological sciences. Tom Ding later responded to this. He no longer participated in Dfinity full-time in 2018, but participated in the project as a consultant. No information about Tom Ding can be found on the Dfinity official website today. The founder left to develop the long-term Delay, Dfinity felt quite ashamed.

“A good hand starts, a16z invests heavily”

Perhaps due to repeated ticket bounces, Dfinity has gradually been forgotten by the public in the past two years, and the most widely spread label in the crypto community is still the T-shirt stalk. Many new entrants also said that they had heard of this project but did not understand. Dfinity is a blockchain project incubated by String Labs, known as the “crazy sister” of Ethereum. String Labs is a venture capital institution located in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2014 by Dominic Willams and Tom Ding. Before Tom Ding quit Dfinity, they were both co-founders of Dfinity. String Labs has also received nearly US$5.7 million in financing three times. The first round of financing was invested by Sequoia Capital, a world-renowned investment institution, with an amount of US$450,000.

Strictly speaking, Dfinity can be regarded as a veteran project in 2016, because its Dfinity Foundation was established in October 2016. In early 2017, Dfinity conducted an ICO and obtained 3.9 million Swiss francs, equivalent to about 4.3 million US dollars. At that time, the goal was just to be a smart contract platform compatible with Ethereum. Perhaps this is the reason why many people still classify it as a public chain today.

In 2018, Dfinity conducted 2 rounds of financing, both led by a well-known venture capital firm a16z. The first financing amount was US$61 million, and the second financing amount was as high as US$102 million. The additional investment amount of a16z also makes Dfinity one of the largest cryptocurrency projects.

With enough money raised, Dfinity recruited troops to expand its team lineup. Dfinity’s official website shows that the team now has a total of 115 people. From management to development and operation, most of them graduated from prestigious schools or have work experience in large companies, especially several senior executives have experience in blockchain or entrepreneurship. The growth of the team also made Dfinity no longer limited to being a competitor of Ethereum, so it adjusted its vision to be an Internet computer (also known as a developer network) that can host back-end software and convert it into a global Computing platform.

Through the Internet computer, developers can create websites, corporate IT systems and Internet services by directly installing the code on the public Internet. The founder Dominic also mentioned in an event that after they adjusted their vision, it was too difficult to realize the technology, so they had a strong technical team and it took a long time to develop.

“The mainnet is coming soon, surprise or disappointment?”

Although the main network has repeatedly bounced votes before, from the perspective of Dfinity’s development, at least this is a serious project. In the development of Dfinity, it is divided into 5 stages, namely Copper (brass) test network, Bronze (bronze) test network, Tungsten (dock) test network, Sodium (sodium) test network and Mercury (mercury) main network , Is now in the Sodium stage.

Judging from the sentiment of the community, the release of the first two testnets did not cause much waves. In the Tungsten testnet released in June this year, a demo similar to TikTok was announced: cancan. Although cancan has not yet been officially released, it is just as TikTok is becoming popular overseas. The concept of a decentralized version of TikTok is very exciting. Heartbeat.

Different from the mediocre response in the previous stages, the community is much more enthusiastic about the release of Sodium. It may also be related to the warm-up of ICP (formerly known as DFN) airdrop tokens before the release of the testnet. Users can confirm their claimable ICP The number of airdrop tokens. After three years of waiting, the airdrop finally saw the light. Along with the release of the Sodium testnet, there is also an algorithmic governance system: Network Neuron System (NNS). It is reported that after Dfinity launched NNS, the market valued it as high as $9.5 billion. Dfinity’s governance process is divided into node creation, proposal phase, voting phase and execution phase.

Users pledge ICP tokens to create neurons (nodes), they can vote through neurons, and they can also obtain revenue by staking tokens to neurons. The weight of voting depends on the number of pledged tokens, income and user pledged tokens There is a positive correlation between the number and the active degree of neurons participating in network proposals. Dfinity’s proposal stage is divided into off-chain + on-chain. Proposals initiated by users need to be reviewed by an auditor (off-chain), and then enter the on-chain process after passing the review.

Therefore, in order to allow users to submit valuable proposals as much as possible, users need to pay for reviewers and neurons participating in voting, as well as a certain amount of deposit when they initiate a proposal. In the voting phase, users need to mortgage tokens to neurons to participate in the on-chain governance voting. When voting, they can vote according to their own subjective opinions, or follow other neurons to vote. The very peculiar point of Dfinity governance is that the execution phase is divided into two types: smart contract directly effective and artificial call parameters.

“Can you awaken the enthusiasm of investors?”

After the launch of the Sodium testnet, the Dfinity mainnet is already in sight, and the Dfinity team is also actively preheating the mainnet. Will the market pay for it by then? It is worth mentioning that Coinbase included Dfinity on its watch list for listing as early as 2019. Dfinity supporters are also eagerly looking forward to the listing of Dfinity on Coinbase by then, because the coinbase community has always seen the coinbase effect.

In recent events, Wanxiang Blockchain Chairman Xiao Feng took a more positive attitude towards the development of Dfinity after the mainnet launch. He believes that Dfinity and Ethereum are similar in that they are both developer-friendly Network. As a distributed application platform, Dfinity provides developers with a more simplified application environment. Application development, deployment and distribution in this environment have the characteristics of low cost, low code, low operation and cold start. But after the Dfinity mainnet went live, one thing that cannot be ignored is whether its Motoko programming language can attract enough developers.

For low-level applications, the importance of developers in the ecosystem is self-evident. Although Ethereum has been complaining about problems, the number of developers in its ecosystem far exceeds that of its competitors. Many large public chains also face the problem of how to attract developers to form a network effect because of their niche programming languages. Whether the Motoko language is better than the Go and Rust languages ​​is yet to be verified.

Previously, many users were worried about Dfinity. They believed that the public chain market was fiercely competitive and the golden period of the public chain had passed. Now Ethereum has a strong momentum. The early EOS and others have been abused to perfection. The new Tezos Star public chains such as, Algorand, etc. are still facing the lack of infrastructure, scarce users, and unformed ecological development after more than a year on the mainnet. What will happen to the Dfinity mainnet after the launch may depend more on whether it can deliver a satisfactory job to the market.