Ahead of the Crypto Valley summit in Zug next week celebrating Switzerland's ten-year Blockchain involvement, finews.com looks into one of the country's most ambitious Distributed Ledger Technology projects. The Dfinity Foundation's founder Dominic Williams explains how the «Internet Computer» will make the World Wide Web more accessible.
Apart from having set himself the by no means insignificant task of improving the internet itself, Dominic Williams, founder & chief scientist at The Dfinity Foundation, also has to deal with being constantly misunderstood.
That's always the danger of being a pioneer in a new field, where a project comes across as highly complex to non-technical minds.
Ruffling Feathers
Add to this the potential of disrupting a multi-trillion-dollar industry, which threatens the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, profound disagreements are to be expected.
And yet «our biggest challenge comes from within the crypto industry itself,» Williams said in an interview with finews.com.
The foundation is embroiled in a legal battle following a class action lawsuit alleging Dfinity insiders misled investors. In response, Dfinity filed an action for defamation against several industry players, claiming they colluded to harm its operations.
Along with the legal issues, it is also fighting the misperception that Dfinity is a company in the crypto space. Although Dfinity uses cryptography, it's a foundation set up to carry out research. Most of this is done from Zurich where 140 of its 270 employees are based, with the rest of the team located in San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Since its inception in 2018, the foundation, one of Switzerland’s largest blockchain R&D operations, has provided over 500 grants worldwide.
Research Foundation
Its foundation status is key to its purpose of making the internet more accessible than it is today. It wants to do this by replacing traditional IT such as big-tech-owned databases and cloud services to enable individuals and companies to build directly on the internet.
«Even though the internet itself is decentralized, connecting to it requires you to use service providers such as Amazon Web Services,» Williams said.
No One Owns the Internet
In Williams' view, being dependent on a few commercial enterprises, which act as gatekeepers to the World Wide Web, brings security risks and other disadvantages that a blockchain-based code doesn't. Due to its transparent nature, using code from a distributed ledger eliminates the cyber risk and removes the necessity for firewalls.
It also stops companies from being held «captive customers.» This often occurs in a business that initially built its systems on Microsoft and wants to move to Linux but can’t, he said.
Automated Governance
Furthermore, in the Internet's next iteration of Web3, services on the «Internet Computer» will be governed autonomously. «Services will be owned by a community in a digital governance system where there is no board, no CEO. An algorithm will run everything,» Williams said.
In such a structure, an algorithm approves or rejects proposed updates, according to whether they're in line with the organization’s preprogrammed purpose. The system’s token works as an incentive to users who end up acting as the workforce.
The technology is already being used in open internet services, such as «Hot or Not,» modeled on TikTok.
Staying Sovereign
Another drawback in today’s internet infrastructure is its geopolitical implications.
«We are having very interesting conversations with several governments and NGOs,» Williams said, adding that many countries are uncomfortable storing data on infrastructure that belongs to US companies and would prefer to have sovereignty over their data.
NGOs are equally aware that to be neutral, they can’t run the risk of not controlling what happens with their data, he said.
Blockchain Storage
Essentially, Williams is looking to extend the socio-economic advantages that the internet has already brought to the world with additional technology that allows them to build their services directly on the blockchain.
In this context, it is important to remember that currently, most blockchains have very limited computing power. Many can hold tokens on the blockchain but are unable to store vast amounts of data on them.
False Promises
«Although many crypto companies claim they build their systems and products on the blockchain, the truth is they have built their services on Amazon Web Services and hold tokens with limited financial logic on the blockchain,» Williams said.
More baffling is when crypto companies say they're running artificial intelligence (AI) models on their systems.
«Considering that self-learning AI models need vast amounts of data to learn from and blockchains are unable to store even as much as a photo’s worth of data, their overlap with AI is bound to be minimal,» he said.
Artificial Intelligence for Rent
What the «Internet Computer» aims to be able to do in the future is to support AI models.
Williams sees a company being able to rent an AI model to improve its sales, for example. This requires it to upload its commercial data for the model to analyze its sales database as well as all emails and recorded exchanges with customer support.
The model could then identify which clients to focus on and how to tailor sales pitches accordingly.
Provided that smart contracts can grant the necessary data protection for this functionality, «AI combined with proprietary data in this way could make a meaningful difference to businesses,» Williams said.
