ICP Turns Three, Releases New Roadmap With AI in Focus

The new roadmap summarizes three years of progress and indicates key development areas set to position ICP as the core platform for Decentralized AI and the orchestration layer for the blockchain industry.

ICP turns three, publishes AI roadmap

Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), a decentralized blockchain network, released the "Year 4 Internet Computer Roadmap" today, May 16, 2024, as it celebrates the third anniversary of its mainnet launch. The new roadmap for ICP’s fourth year outlines key focal areas and many pivotal milestones.

In an updated roadmap, ICP indicated two workloads: Decentralized AI and Chain Fusion. The first workload is aimed at releasing AI smart contracts for real world use cases, LLM AI smart contracts capable of interacting with smart contracts using natural language, Web3 communities that control AIs through DAOs and ready-trained AIs traded as NFTs.

ICP's Chain Fusion facilitates direct interoperability with major blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, other EVMs and, soon, Solana without intermediaries. ICP smart contracts can read from and write to various chains, allowing developers to create contracts spanning multiple chains. Chain Fusion solves the fragmentation of liquidity and tackles tribalism in the blockchain industry.

Dominic Williams, Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINIY Foundation, highlights the paramount importance of the new release for the progress of ICP and the entire Web3 segment:

The Internet Computer is the first and only Third Generation public blockchain. The mission is to drive a "blockchain singularity," where over time fully decentralized blockchains become the world's prevailing tech stack, even running secure and unstoppable AI. The DFINITY Foundation and its eminent team of cryptographers, research scientists and engineers, is now pushing ahead with a new roadmap, crafting contributions that will make the network faster, more efficient and more powerful than ever before.

In 2023, the DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss not-for-profit and major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain (ICP), launched a $5 million decentralized artificial intelligence (DeAI) grant program to support Decentralized AI on the Internet Computer blockchain.

Over $3 billion in liquidity locked in the NNS DAO

Since the mainnet release in 2021, Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) accomplished a number of notable milestones for the entire industry.

The blockchain has witnessed zero downtime, processed over three billion blocks, and accumulated more than $3 billion of value locked in the Network Nervous System (NNS) DAO that governs the Internet Computer Protocol. 

Developer growth in the ICP ecosystem has been equally impressive. According to Electric Capital, the number of developers in the ICP ecosystem jumped 12x between 2020 and 2023 despite its mainnet not launching until May 2021. Moreover, ICP is host to some of the most-used applications in crypto, including DMail, DSCVR and OpenChat.