Dfinity All Set To Launch An Open-Source Platform

What Is All The Buzz About Dfinity?

Being thought of as a step-change in the world of blockchain technology, Dfinity raised $102 million in funding in 2018, at a $2 billion valuation in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Being synonymous with generating a lot of headlines the whole lot was based around cryptocurrency speculation, which was a shift in focus, looking at the architecture behind Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like instead. It was rather used for purposes more than mining, distributing and using the new financial instruments of which a major mainstream VC is backing the whole idea.

With a very lofty goal, Dfinity was launched to build what it called the Internet Computer which comes as a decentralized and nonproprietary network to run the next generation of mega applications also dubbed as public network “ Cloud 3.0”. Even though currently it looks like this Cloud is now about to break. 

What Is Dfinity’s Internet Computer?

With Dfinity launching the Bronze edition of its Internet Computer there was a limited release that took the startup one step closer to the expected full commercial release.

Dfinity demonstrated an open social network called Linked Up, to prove out the concept of how an application would run on its new network.

Cheekily called “ an open version of LinkedIn”, the Microsoft owned social network for professionals, by the startup. It is not owned or controlled by a corporate entity, unlike LinkedIn, while Linked Up runs on any browser.

Hosted directly on the internet on a Switzerland based independent data center, the software runs on the concept of the Internet Computer, as it could be hosted anywhere: the compute power to run application Linked Up in this case- that is also not coming from Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, instead based on distributed architecture that Dfinity is building. 

How Do Developers And Enterprises Watch Internet Computer?

When the enterprises and developers run their web apps and enterprise systems on the Internet Computer, Dfinity specifically notes the content is decentralized across a minimum of four or a maximum of an unlimited number of nodes in the global network of independent data centers.

There’s also some refinement while the company initially described it as a blockchain-based system. Describing the Internet Computer as a next-generation distributed computing system, similar to Mainframe, Client Server, and Public Cloud predecessors based on cryptography is a spokesperson of the company.

The spokesperson says, “ Dfinity is not into building traditional blockchain/ smart contract platform, but uses advanced cryptography in the consensus layer so that by ensuring apps and workloads the same security guarantees as Bitcoin or Ethereum”. He assures “ the network of independent data centers ensures the speed and scale required by corporate and entrepreneurs,” along with governance tokens, that the Internet Computer ensures with the ownership of technology distributed. 

How Is Linked Up Working For The Good Of Developers?

Dfinity is open-sourcing Linked Up for developers creating other types of open internet services on the structure it has built as Linked Up is a test case for all of this.

On Dfinity’s model, this open social network for professional profiles, creates ‘Open Whatsapp’,’ Open eBay’,’ Open Salesforce’, or ‘Open Facebook’.

The claim that the application was built by ‘ 1.5 engineers in three weeks’, Dfinity demonstrates how it is easy to use the infrastructure.

With a simple programming language called Motoko, the tools used include a Canister Software Developer Kit optimized for Dfinity’s Internet Computer.

Allowing for a new type of software called autonomous software, it can guarantee permanent APIs that cannot be revoked, Dfinity says about the ‘Internet Computer Protocol ‘. It creates mutual network effects where everyone benefits, while these open internet services like open versions of Whatsapp, Facebook, eBay, Salesforce, etc. combine with other open software and services. 

The Concluding Thoughts On Dfinity

Quizzing Dfinity a little more on all this and asking whether this was an actual launch, we arrived at the following conclusion:
It looks like Dfinity will not be raising more money just yet. 

The question relevant here is how they plan to woo people to it? As Dfinity works with a select group of Fortune 500 companies, the strategic consultancies, systems integrators, venture capitalists, and universities are according to the demands of the company. 

We’re fascinated to see how this plays out, but we are not sure it will quite suffice to take out Facebook, LinkedIn, and other tech giants. 

More to go Dfinity, as we keep our fingers crossed and closely watches cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.