IACR News item: 25 January 2022
The DFINITY Team
ePrint Report
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.
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