Internet Computer (ICP) enters the top ten on CoinMarketCap following its exchange debut. ICP was sitting as high as the fourth spot, but following heavy sell pressure, it’s since dropped to the seventh position, just ahead of XRP, at writing.
The CoinMarketCap rankings have seen a flurry of changes during this bull run. But it’s not often that a relatively unknown token enters the top ten. This has many wondering if ICP is a legit project.
What Is Internet Computer (ICP)?
Internet Computer launched simultaneously on several big exchanges yesterday, including Binance, Coinbase Pro, Huobi, and OKEx.
The sudden appearance of ICP in the top ten has caused a stir in that ICP has achieved a lot in a relatively short time. For example, ICP is already listed on Coinbase Pro, whereas ADA, which has been around since late 2017, only achieved this in March this year.
In reality, ICP is part of a project that has been five years in the making. Developed by Swiss-based Dfinity, the project has several prominent backers, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists Andreessen-Horowitz, and Polychain Capital.
Since 2016, Dfinity has been developing a decentralized blockchain network to expand the internet’s functionality. Research specialists Messari said Dfinity’s obscure and technically complex goals make it a highly misunderstood project.
But, as developments pick up the pace, they see more and more people becoming familiar with what the project is about.
“Dfinity is one of the most tenured and well-funded smart contract platforms in crypto. Yet it is also one of the least understood. Most of Dfinity’s obscurity is due to its technical complexity and abstract vision. The launch of their token and finally open sourcing their code will create more interest and understanding in the project.”
What’s The Use Case?
With Internet Computer, Dfinity is looking to build a decentralized, scalable cloud solution to store data, perform computational tasks, and enable community governance.
It hopes to address concerns associated with the internet in its current guise, namely the poor security and dominance of big tech oligopolies. Therefore, Dfinity is not so much focused on delivering blockchain technology. Instead, the primary goal is to build a free and open internet controlled by users.
With its network of independent data centers, apps will be able to run on the network itself. This is in contrast to the current internet, where apps run on servers, the lion’s share of which is controlled by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
Dfinity engineering manager Stanley Jones said, instead of apps running on a dedicated Google cloud server, with Internet Computer, the software has no fixed physical address as it moves between servers run by the independent data centers. This means apps can exist that nobody owns or controls.
The ICP token comes into play as developers pay data centers for running their code. But the data is not accessible, making advertising tracking across this network hard to do.
