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ICP has quietly become the 18th most valuable digital asset.
Internet Computer Protocol Founder Dominic Williams says enterprise will be key for ICP to continue growing after the token tripled in the past three months.
ICP has quietly become the 18th most valuable digital asset after starting 2023 as the 34th largest. Most of the growth came in 2023’s final quarter as ICP’s market capitalization jumped over 300% to $5.59B from $1.39B.
Williams said developing solutions for large companies may be key to the protocol’s growth.
“It’s not just about web3,” he said. “The vision for the Internet Computer is also about enterprise.” ICP bills itself as “serving webpages through smart contracts.”
Websites With Smart Contracts
The project uses WebAssembly, a code format that allows for high-performance web-pages which exist inside a form of smart contract which ICP calls “canisters.”
“Our objective is to enable people to create absolutely any kind of backend system or any online system exclusively from smart contracts,” Williams said.
The founder went on to say that cybercrime is becoming a huge cost —$6T in 2021— which smart contracts can help mitigate.
“Governments are beginning to hold IT directors, organizations, responsible for hacks,” he said, noting that Uber’s Chief Security Officer was sentenced to three years of probation earlier this year for obfuscating a hack.
Crypto has long been on the receiving end of criticism as an industry looking for a problem to solve. The clunky user experience, hacks, and rampant speculation has made it hard for many people to see the value in the space.
Fighting Cybercrime
Williams sees ICP as an antidote to many of those criticisms — the founder showed The Defiant a wallet which abstracts away the use of a browser extension like MetaMask, being responsible for custodying funds.
The DFINITY founder emphasized that extensions like MetaMask can be tampered with. He also highlighted that many crypto applications really host their frontends on centralized offerings like Amazon Web Services.
“[Internet Computer] is about full stack decentralization,” Williams said. “Everything from the user experience to the data processing and storage.”
While someone who bought and held ICP since early 2023 is sitting on large gains, the digital asset hasn’t always been a good investment — zooming out, ICP launched in 2021 at over $100 per token —CoinGecko giving an all-time high of $700— only to drift below $3 in 2023.
ICP launched in 2016 and raised an initial coin offering (ICO) of $3.9M in 2017. The DFINITY Foundation subsequently raised over $100M in later venture rounds from investors like a16z, Polychain, and Multicoin Capital.
Recent Initiatives
The project has aligned itself with the wave of interest in AI which came in the last year on the back of ChatGPT’s release — the DFINITY Foundation launched a $5M grant for projects developing AI solutions on ICP.
One of ICP’s major initiatives is an integration with Bitcoin which went live in 2022. The feature allows the protocol to create real Bitcoin addresses and send the cryptocurrency through apps built on ICP.
Williams showed The Defiant a chat application called OpenChat, where he had sent ICP’s “mirrored” version of Bitcoin to another user. ICP is working to integrate similarly with Ethereum.
Moving forward, the market appears to be willing to give ICP a second look after the token dropped well over 90% since launch.
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