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Internet Computer

ICP

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Market

Market stats

Market cap

$2.3B

Volume (24h)

$61.2M

Circulating supply

449.9M ICP

Typical hold time

63 days

Popularity

#32

All time high

$750.73

Price change (1h)

-0.16%

Price change (24h)

+3.7%

Price change (7d)

+12.09%

About Internet Computer

Internet Computer (ICP) is a utility token that allows users to participate in and govern the Internet Computer blockchain network. The network aims to help developers create websites, enterprise IT systems, internet services, and DeFi applications by "installing their code directly on the public Internet." ICP can also be staked or "converted into cycles" that can be used to power computation for dApps and traditional applications.

What is Internet Computer?

Internet Computer (ICP) is a set of protocols that allow independent data centers worldwide to band together. ICP's basic idea is to create a new kind of decentralized Internet and global computing system — where independent data centers all over the world could join together to create an alternative to the cloud services (from companies like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud) that power most of the current Internet. Its innovative design and vision position the Internet Computer as a scalable and efficient platform for building almost any online system or service, including demanding web applications, without the need for traditional IT infrastructure. The Internet Computer has also launched its own token, the ICP token, which is used for governance (holders can vote on the future of the network), to reward network participants for good behavior, and to pay fees for making transactions. Originally called DFINITY, ICP's global and distributed network of data centers can run most of the applications that are accessible via traditional Internet standards, such as DNS (the domain name system you use via web browsers and smartphones).

How does Internet Computer work?

The Internet Computer works by running canister smart contracts on a network of node machines. These node machines are connected using the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), which enables them to communicate and coordinate their actions. As explained in the MIT Technology Review's profile of the Internet Computer: "Instead of running on a dedicated server in Google Cloud, for example, the software would have no fixed physical address, moving between servers owned by independent data centers around the world." You can think of ICP as a way of converting crypto into processing power — the network will establish a fee based on the amount of computing power required by a developer's project. The website will run on the public Internet as long as the fee is paid. Finally, the Internet Computer network is controlled and managed by a master subnet, which runs an advanced permissionless Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the Network Nervous System (NNS). This system instructs the node machines how to structure the network and verifies that the instructions they have received are genuine.

What are the potential use cases for Internet Computer?

Popular applications on the web are often closed-source, proprietary, and hosted on a handful of data centers owned by big tech firms. If one critical data center fails, huge swathes of the web can also shut down with it. Another major concern with the web (particularly for privacy advocates) is that centralized, corporate web service providers have the ability to censor or de-platform applications. This is why the Internet Computer attempts to offer a fundamental alternative to the current solution, so that developers can build, host, and serve applications in a more decentralized way — allowing websites to be deployed directly onto the public Internet. Internet Computer can be used to build almost any online system or service, including demanding web applications, without the need for traditional and centralized IT infrastructure, making it possible to create fully decentralized online systems and services that are tamperproof, unstoppable, and that can trustlessly interact with the outside world. In theory, any kind of application can be created and run on the Internet Computer — from social networks similar to LinkedIn and TikTok to software similar to all the familiar applications you know today to new kinds of applications not yet conceived. Because it operates via open standards, Internet Computer tends to reduce the conflicts of interest that can arise when a major cloud-computing provider hosts products that compete with its own services.

What is the history of Internet Computer?

The Internet Computer was developed by the DFINITY Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Zürich, Switzerland. The foundation was established in October 2016 with the goal of developing the Internet Computer blockchain. The project's founder, Dominic Williams, first used the name DFINITY in early 2015 to refer to his theoretical crypto work, which he hoped would make a World Computer possible. In February 2017, the DFINITY Foundation ran an early public Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds and scale out its open-source project. This was then supplemented by private fundraising rounds in 2018. By mid-2022, DFINITY employed almost 300 people, primarily in R&D. Researchers worldwide contribute to the foundations' work — including cryptographers who hold around 100,000 academic citations and 200 patents.

How do you buy ICP?

The ICP token can be purchased and traded via exchanges like Coinbase.

News

DFINITY Blog • Dec 06, 23

Hashing It Out On ICP:

Hashing It Out On ICP: Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake to Proof-of-Useful-Work“If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.”― G.K. ChestertonI- How To Hash Our...

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Internet-Computer-official • Aug 16, 23

The Internet Computer: A blockchain that offers stateful decentralized serverless computing

Is serverless computation even possible on a blockchain platform? Our recent peer-reviewed article shows that the Internet Computer provides serverless computation comparable to existing cloud providers, but with the added benefits of decentralization and statefulness.Author: Alexandru UtaServerless has taken the cloud computing world by storm, seeing large growth in the past few years with really positive projections for the future. As per a recent forecast, the market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 20% by 2028. Essentially, serverless architectures push cloud-based tech to its full potential through IT automation software, enabling enterprises to propel growth rather than spending time and resources on IT infrastructure management.While this sounds highly promising, serverless cloud platforms are still stateless and centralized. Applications therefore need to work around this shortcoming for storing state, and to avoid being subject to vendor lock-in. The Internet Computer offers another layer of security, control, and trust — all through decentralization, whereby no one single party controls the hardware or the software. Moreover, the Internet Computer operates by design in a stateful manner.In this post we describe how the Internet Computer blockchain offers serverless computing functionality with two important additional benefits: decentralization and statefulness.What is serverless?Serverless is a novel cloud computing paradigm that enables quick and agile development cycles without minding the underlying infrastructure — provisioning and scaling the right virtual machines, installing and maintaining software and frameworks — reducing overall operational costs. There are several incarnations of severless and the most relevant in our case is function-as-a-service (FaaS), where (large codebases are split into) small functions (that) run for very short periods of time (milliseconds to minutes). Functions are charged for per use (i.e., based on how long they run) plus a fixed fee per invocation. The last important feature to mention is the excellent scaling capability, where up to thousands of instances of the same function can be started in a short span of time.The Internet Computer as a serverless platformTaking a brief glimpse at the architecture of the Internet Computer, you will easily notice that it offers serverless features with even extra benefits. Nowadays FaaS functions are packaged as containers or simply as code (in Python, Javascript, Java, Rust etc.), and offer a single endpoint that can either be called directly by external users or other functions. Canister smart contracts on the Internet Computer can also be programmed in several languages, including Rust, Motoko, JavaScript or Python, and can expose multiple endpoints that can offer different functionality per canister. The tables below summarize the main serverless features and their Internet Computer correspondents, as well as the advantages the blockchain has over cloud-based serverless.Table 1. Main serverless features contrasted with the Internet Computer capabilities. Decentralization, statefulness and trust are added benefits of the Internet Computer.As can be seen from the tables, the Internet Computer ticks all the boxes of a serverless environment. Developers may not know it, but they are already executing serverless code and as our research shows — at nearly the same efficiency as traditional cloud vendors offer. And on select dimensions (e.g. memory) the Internet Computer even exceeds the power offered by traditional cloud vendors. However, the most important developer-facing features we’d like to highlight are: statefulness and decentralization, neither of which are offered by traditional serverless clouds.In Tables 2–3, we invite the tech-savvy reader to dive deeper into the technical aspects that enable the Internet Computer to be a competitive serverless platform. It is important to note here that the Internet Computer has two types of executing smart contracts — an update mode and a query mode. The former represents a stateful invocation, while the latter is stateless, just like generic serverless computing.Table 2. Important features for building large-scale serverless applications. Statefulness is an added benefit of the Internet Computer.Table 3. In-depth platform analysis regarding runtime-related features.Keeping state after function execution is a long sought-after feature in the serverless/FaaS world. It is highly difficult to implement as it generally conflicts with the seamless fan-out type of scalability offered in current clouds. Fortunately, the Internet Computer is designed with statefulness in mind from the ground up and offers developers this feature without any kind of manual intervention, like saving data to an outside storage layer or database. Therefore, all variables or data are automatically persisted after a smart contract invocation on the Internet Computer.Decentralization is yet another important feature that is often overlooked. Modern serverless offerings are currently offered by several large centralized clouds, which leads to vendor lock-in. In this case, developer code and data are as secure as their provider is and are liable to geographical outages or simply vendor policy change. The Internet Computer is fully decentralized, with node machines operating in different geographies and running under strong consensus guarantees, tolerating even byzantine (malicious) faults.The Internet Computer vs. traditional serverless platformsTo assess how the Internet Computer blockchain fares against serverless clouds, we ran a CPU intensive benchmark computing prime numbers on the Internet Computer and on one of the top-3 serverless platforms. For small inputs, the Internet Computer is faster than traditional serverless whereas for larger inputs, it is half as fast (see results in the figure below). This is extremely encouraging. This shows that while there’s still a long way to go, the Internet Computer is gaining traction in terms of performance when compared to traditional, centralized clouds. For more detailed information we encourage you to check out our recent peer-reviewed article presented at the prestigious USENIX ATC conference.Fig 1. Speedup vs. top-3 serverless platform.Increasing performanceExtra built-in features such as decentralization and statefulness are what make the Internet Computer performance for large workloads lower (see Figure 2). While these features are extremely powerful and important, they also eat away at raw performance.Fig 2. The decentralization and statefulness overheads of the Internet Computer.DFINITY engineers and researchers will continue to search and explore ways to enhance and improve the performance of the Internet Computer. Some areas of improvement could be increasing parallelism or replacing the current storage layer with a log-structured merge tree approach to improve checkpointing time.Unleashing the full power of composite queries to enable more complex applications will also have a positive impact on performance. Work on composite queries has already begun to enable horizontal dapp scaling and to simplify client-side code. Further engineering to allow cross-subnet query calls and replicated execution is underway.Build serverless applications on the Internet Computer:Developer Docs | Internet ComputerRun an enterprise pilot the Internet Computer:Enterprise | Internet ComputerThe Internet Computer: A blockchain that offers stateful decentralized serverless computing was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Social

Some highlights about Internet Computer on social media

346 unique individuals are talking about Internet Computer and it is ranked #76 in most mentions and activity from collected posts. In the last 24 hours, across all social media platforms, Internet Computer has an average sentiment score of 0.1 out of 5. Finally, Internet Computer is becoming more newsworthy, with 0 news articles published about Internet Computer. This is a 0% increase in news volume compared to yesterday.

On Twitter, people are mostly neutral about Internet Computer. There were 23.41% of tweets with bullish sentiment compared to 7.1% of tweets with a bearish sentiment about Internet Computer. 69.49% of tweets were neutral about Internet Computer. These sentiments are based on 662 tweets.

On Reddit, Internet Computer was mentioned in 0 Reddit posts and there were 0 comments about Internet Computer. On average, there were more upvotes compared to downvotes on Reddit posts and more upvotes compared to downvotes on Reddit comments.

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Overview

Contributors

346 people

Posts

537 posts

Dominance

0.04%

Volume rank

#76

Average Sentiment

0.1 out of 5

Twitter

Coinbase Bytes

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Internet Computer is on the rise this week.

The price of Internet Computer has risen by 12.09% in the past 7 days. The price increased by 3.70% in the last 24 hours. In just the past hour, the price shrunk by 0.16%. The current price is $5.08 per ICP. Internet Computer is 99.32% below the all time high of $750.73.

The current circulating supply is 449,909,398.294 ICP.

FAQ

What is the current price of Internet Computer?

We update our Internet Computer to USD currency in real-time. Get the live price of Internet Computer on Coinbase.

What is the market cap of Internet Computer?

The current market cap of Internet Computer is $2.28B. A high market cap implies that the asset is highly valued by the market.

What is the all time high of Internet Computer?

The all-time high of Internet Computer is $750.73. This all-time high is highest price paid for Internet Computer since it was launched.

What is the 24 hour trading volume of Internet Computer?

Over the last 24 hours, the trading volume of Internet Computer is $61.19M.

What other assets are similar to Internet Computer?

Assets that have a similar market cap to Internet Computer include Bitcoin Classic, Crypto.com Coin, Bitcoin BEP2, and many others. To see a full list, see our comparable market cap assets.

How many Internet Computer are there?

The current circulating supply of Internet Computer is 450 million.

What is the typical holding time of Internet Computer?

The median time that Coinbase customers hold Internet Computer before selling it or sending it to another account or address is 63 days.

What is the relative popularity of Internet Computer?

Internet Computer ranks 50 among tradable assets on Coinbase. Popularity is currently based on relative market cap.

What is the current trading activity of Internet Computer?

Currently, 99% of Coinbase users are buying Internet Computer. In other words, 99% of Coinbase customers have increased their net position in Internet Computer over the past 24 hours through trading.

Can I buy Internet Computer on Coinbase?

Yes, Internet Computer is currently available on Coinbase’s centralized exchange. For more detailed instructions, check out our helpful how to buy Internet Computer guide.

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