History

In 2013, founder Dominic Williams, was running an MMO computer game he had grown to several million users, scaling-out its capacity using novel distributed systems he had built. In April of that year he caught the Bitcoin bug, and within months had transitioned to working full-time in crypto.

Pebble white paper, 2014

By the end of 2013, Dominic was looking for ways to build faster blockchains with more throughout, which he hoped could be used with virtual goods inside the games ecosystem, and he acquired the domain name "gamecoin.org." This led to him spending 2014 working on a blockchain project called "Pebble." His work on Pebble heralded two major firsts for blockchain: (1) the use of traditional consensus math within a blockchain protocol, and (2) efforts to design a scalable blockchain that could process hundreds of thousands of transactions a second.

While working on Pebble in 2014, Dominic connected with the early Ethereum community, and quickly became an avid early supporter of the project, which he remains to this day. At the time, the concept of a blockchain that could also run software (i.e. smart contracts), which processed and stored data within its autonomous, unstoppable and tamperproof universe, was both revolutionary and controversial. The departure from the coins-only blockchain theme upset parts of the Bitcoin community at the time, and Vitalik Buterin credits Dominic with co-inventing the term "Bitcoin Maximalism."

During these early years, someone mooted the concept of a World Computer within the Ethereum community. At the time, most people thought that a blockchain could never be engineered with the capabilities necessary to provide a true World Computer, but Dominic thought otherwise, and he decided to dedicate himself to realizing the idea. For that reason, Pebble was dropped, and Dominic adjusted the direction of his technical work towards this end.

In 2015, Dominic began proposing new consensus math and applied cryptography that might enable a true World Computer blockchain to be produced, and began using the name Dfinity as a brand for his work, which name is a shortening of Decentralized Infinity. His original purpose was to produce designs that might be used for Ethereum 2.0 or 3.0.

During the 2015-2016 period, the main consensus researchers within Ethereum were Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir, and they were highly focused on "cryptoeconomic" consensus schemes. Dominic alternatively was more focused on finding new ways to apply cryptography, and the development of alternative blockchain architectures that might enable a World Computer to be created. Eventually, Dfinity became its own project.

However, traces remained within the Ethereum community. For example, early in 2015, Dominic had proposed using a scheme called Threshold Relay, which involved using cryptography to generate random numbers, then using those numbers to drive a blockchain — essentially by selecting random committees of nodes that would produce and finalize blocks (essentially by "attesting" to, or "witnessing" them). This concept is what has now been used in Ethereum 2.0, with it's Beacon Chain.

Dominic explored the idea of generating random numbers in a decentralized network using cryptography, which numbers can be applied to drive consensus protocols, after reading the research paper Random Oracles in Constantinople: Practical Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement using Cryptography (one of the authors of this paper, famous cryptographer and distributed computing scientist Victor Shoup, joined the Dfinity Foundation in 2021). At the time, Dominic was living in Palo Alto, California, and met another famous cryptographer, Dan Boneh at nearby Stanford, who advised him to use BLS threshold cryptography to generate the random numbers. Dan Boneh is the B in "BLS," and in 2017, the Dfinity Foundation hired Ben Lynn from Google, who was the "L".

[More updates coming...]