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 computer 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 pioneered two major firsts for blockchain: (1) the adaptation of traditional distributed computing math for use within a blockchain network protocol, and (2) an effort 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, the founder of Ethereum, 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 believed that it would be impossible to engineer a blockchain with the capabilities required to play the role of a 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 research in pursuit of his new goal.

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, Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir would the primary consensus researchers within Ethereum, but they were highly focused on developing "cryptoeconomic" schemes. Dominic was more focused on finding ways to leverage cryptography, and devising alternative blockchain architectures that might enable a World Computer to be produced. Eventually, Dfinity became its own project.

However, traces of early Dfinity work remain within Ethereum. For example, early in 2015, Dominic had proposed using a scheme called Threshold Relay, which involved using BLS 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.

Of course, Dominic's own work at Dfinity had many antecedents. For example, he became interested in the idea of using cryptography to generate random numbers in a decentralized network, and then using them to drive consensus, after reading the Random Oracles in Constantinople: Practical Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement using Cryptography research paper in 2014. 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 University, 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". At the time, Vitalik believed BLS wasn't proven cryptography, but Ethereum 2.0 now relies upon it.

In 2016, Dominic was co-founder of a crypto incubator called String Labs. He persuaded co-founder Tom Ding that the incubator should incubate the Dfinity project. At this time, they were joined by Timo Hanke, the developer of AsicBoost, and other people. The Dfinity Foundation was formed in Zug, Switzerland, with Dominic as President, in October 2016 (the Swiss German name is Dfinity Stiftung), but later moved to Zürich, Switzerland, as this is where the largest research center was established.

The ICP token ledger was bootstrapped on the Ethereum network in January 2017, and then an ICO was run that sold ICP (then called DFN) to the public in exchange for BTC and ETH. The cryptocurrency received was marked-to-market, such that 1 Swiss franc purchased 30 ICP. This means that hundreds of members of the public purchased ICP at $0.03, later making enormous returns. This initial funding allowed the foundation to begin expanding its operations. Notable early technical hires included Ben Lynn, and Andreas Rossberg, the co-inventor of WebAssembly.