History
In 2013, founder Dominic Williams, was running a MMO computer game he had grown to several million users, scaling out using distributed systems he had designed himself. In April he caught the Bitcoin bug, and he was working full time in blockchain by the end of the year...
Dominic spent 2014 working on a design for a blockchain called "Pebble." In hindsight, his work involved two groundbreaking firsts in blockchain: (1) the application of traditional consensus techniques within a blockchain protocol, and (2) efforts to design a scalable blockchain that could easily process hundreds of thousands of transactions a second.
While working on Pebble in 2014, Dominic connected with the Ethereum project, and became an avid early supporter, which he remains to this day. At the time, the concept of a blockchain that could run software (i.e. smart contracts) that processed and stored data on the blockchain, was revolutionary and controversial. Some people in the Bitcoin community were upset about the idea and trolled those who believed in Ethereum, and Vitalik Buterin credits Dominic with co-inventing the term "Bitcoin Maximalism." (which phraseology has now been extended to blockchain XYZ Maximalism).
During this time, someone in the Ethereum Community proposed the concept of a World Computer. Most people thought that a blockchain could never be engineered with the capabilities of a true World Computer, but Dominic thought otherwise, and decided to dedicate himself to realizing the idea. For that reason, Pebble was dropped, and Dominic adjusted the direction of his work.
In 2015, Dominic began proposing technical ideas that would 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.
At the time, Vitalik Buterin worked closely with Vlad Zamfir, and they were highly focused on "cryptoeconomic" consensus schemes, whilst Dominic was more focused on finding new ways to apply cryptography and devising alternative blockchain network architectures (i.e. networks that worked in a different way to Bitcoin and Ethereum). 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 to drive a blockchain, which involved generating random numbers using cryptography and using them to drive a blockchain — essentially by selecting random committees of nodes that would finalizing blocks (essentially by "attesting" to, or "witnessing" them). This is essentially what has now been used in Ethereum 2.0, with it's Beacon Chain.
Dominic explored using random number generation 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, he 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...]