The Internet Computer for Geeks

The DFINITY Team

Abstract

Smart contracts are a new form of software that will revolutionize how software is written, IT systems are maintained, and applications and whole businesses are built. Smart contracts are composable and autonomous pieces of software that run on decentralized blockchains, which makes them tamperproof and unstoppable. In this paper, we describe the Internet Computer (IC), which is a radical new design of blockchain that unleashes the full potential of smart contracts, overcoming the limitations of smart contracts on traditional blockchains with respect to speed, storage costs, and computational capacity. This allows smart contracts for the first time to implement fully decentralized applications that are hosted end to end on blockchain. The IC consists of a set of cryptographic protocols that connects independently operated nodes into a collection of blockchains. These blockchains host and execute canisters'', the IC’s form of smart contracts. Canisters can store data, perform very general computations on that data, and provide a complete technology stack, serving web pages directly to end users. Computational and storage costs are covered by a reverse-gas model'', where canister developers pre-pay costs in cycles that are obtained from ICP, the native token of the IC. ICP tokens are also used for governance: the IC is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, which, among other things, determines changes to the topology of the network and upgrades to the protocol.

Available format(s)
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
smart contractsblockchaindistributed cryptography
Contact author(s)
victor shoup @ dfinity org
History
2022-04-19: last of 3 revisions
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/087

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/087,
author = {The DFINITY Team},
title = {The Internet Computer for Geeks},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/087},
year = {2022},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/087}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/087}
}

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