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. Eventually, this would lead to the launch of the Internet Computer, which is the product of R&D work that began in 2015, and continues today - the Dfinity Foundation runs the largest R&D operation in blockchain.
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."
The concept of a World Computer was then mooted 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, he decided to stop work on Pebble, and direct all his future work towards the realization of a World Computer.
By 2015, Dominic's thinking about blockchain design had become more mature, his work took a new direction, and he began proposing new consensus math and applied cryptography that might be used to produce a true World Computer blockchain. At this time, he 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 technical works that might be used to create Ethereum 2.0 or 3.0.
During the 2015-2016 period, Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir were the Ethereum project's primary consensus researchers, and they were highly focused on developing cryptoeconomic schemes under the "Casper" banner. Dominic was more focused on finding novel ways to leverage cryptography, and devising novel alternative blockchain architectures that might enable a World Computer to be produced. Eventually, the decision was made that Dfinity should be its own project.
However, important traces of Dfinity thinking remain within the Ethereum project today. For example, early in 2015, Dominic first 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). Ethereum 2.0 uses this concept with it's Beacon Chain.
Dominic's own work at Dfinity also had many important 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.
The Threshold Relay scheme Dominic was promoting in 2015 came to rely upon BLS threshold cryptography to generate random numbers. This was because he was living in Palo Alto, California, at the time, and he had met famous cryptographer Dan Boneh at nearby Stanford University, who had advised him on its use. Dan Boneh is the B in "BLS," and later, early in 2017, the Dfinity Foundation hired Ben Lynn from Google, who was the "L". At the time, and for some years after, Vitalik Buterin remained unconvinced by the safety of BLS cryptography, but Ethereum 2.0 now also relies entirely upon it.
The complexity of Dominic's early technical designs, and general disbelief about the viability World Computer blockchain, made it hard for him to muster support for his ideas, and persuade the Ethereum community to work on implementations. However, in 2016, Dominic was co-founder of a crypto incubator called String Labs. He persuaded co-founder Tom Ding that String Labs should incubate Dfinity, and help it become a standalone project. At this time, they were joined by Timo Hanke, the developer of AsicBoost, and the CTO of CoinTerra, from the Bitcoin community, and other people. Dominic decided to copy Ethereum's fundraising model, and create a neutral not-for-profit foundation to drive development of a World Computer blockchain protocol. Accordingly, the Dfinity Fonudation was formed in Zug, Switzerland, with Dominic as President, in October 2016.
The ICP token ledger was bootstrapped on the Ethereum network in January 2017, which included allotments for early contributors, and an endowment for the Dfinity Foundation. An ICO was then run February 2017, which sold ICP (then called DFN) to the public on behalf of the Dfinity Foundation, to raise funding for its work.
In the February 2017 ICO, ICP was sold in exchange for bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), which was marked-to-market, such that a contribution of 1 Swiss franc was rewarded by 30 ICP. This meant that hundreds of members of the public purchased ICP at approximately 3 cents each, later making large financial gains. Through the ICO, the Dfinity Foundation received $3.9 million in initial funding, although total cash receipts were greater, as the price of the ETH and BTC received rose dramatically before it was sold.
This initial funding allowed the foundation to begin expanding its operations. Notable early technical hires included Ben Lynn, and Andreas Rossberg, also from Google, who was the co-inventor of WebAssembly. They were also joined by Artia Moghbel, who headed up operations, and had worked at a VC that had funded the MMO game Dominic had earlier developed. By October 2017, Dominic was able to demonstrate an initial version of its test network to the world for the first time.
In January 2018, Dfinity published its first formal white paper describing its consensus system, although it had been described informally for some time. With this, and the test network in hand, the Dfinity Foundation decided to raise significant additional funds and scale-out its operations — since it the scope of the R&D work required to deliver a true World Computer was substantially broader than originally anticipated.
[more history coming...]