Ha! DFINITY ran on BambooHR, but we switched to Open HR just 3 weeks ago (part of the Open SaaS suite of free "AIware" you can install on ICP cloud engines to run enterprises). Tamperproof, unstoppable, with AI inside... general availability soon with the cloud engine unlock.

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Dear ICP community, the Internet Computer has now been running strong for 5 years 👏👏👏 Here is a celebratory preview of ICP "cloud engines," the sovereign frontier cloud technology the network shall soon provide from Main points: — Cloud engines enable anyone to spin up their own sovereign frontier cloud. The technology involves an extraordinary inventive step, in which cloud is created from a mathematically secure network of nodes. The nodes run as part of the Internet Computer network ( but are selected and configured by the cloud engine's owner. — The frontier cloud provided by engines is strongly focused on enabling AI agents to build and update online applications and services for us. The world is changing fast, and nearly all new online apps and services are already being built with the help of AI, and thus cloud engines target the future of cloud. — Software hosted on cloud engines is tamperproof, which means that it is immune to infrastructure hacks, because it runs inside a mathematically secure network protocol, rather than on computers directly. This means that AI agents, and those building with them, don't need to have a security team in the loop, or to trust someone else's security team. This is crucial, because in the future, non technical people will demand the freedom to build with full automation — where they just need to issue instructions to AI about what to build, and don't need to worry about anything or anyone else. Of course, apps and services running on engines are also vastly safer from the new breed of hacker being enabled by frontier AI. (The cloud engines themselves are also "tamperproof." Even if a hacker gains physical access to some portion of a cloud engine's nodes, and can make arbitrary changes, the computations and data of the hosted apps and services cannot be corrupted or interrupted so long as the network's fault bounds aren't exceeded. The recent hack of Vercel, a major cloud platform, which gave hackers access to the apps it hosted, provides additional perspective on the importance of this advantage.) — Software hosted on cloud engines is guaranteed to run, so long as a sufficient number of the engine's nodes are running. This means that AI can build applications and services without the need to have a human systems admin team constantly tinkering with the underlying platform to keep it running, which is again crucial, because in the future, non technical people will expect the freedom to use AI to build without the support of others. — New frontier programming language technology, in the form of the Motoko language developed by Caffeine Labs, leverages seminal "orthogonal persistence" technology that unifies program logic and data to deliver further unlocks for AI (Motoko is the first computer language being developed that targets agents that are writing software rather than humans engineers per se). Nowadays, AI can build and update production apps at a prodigious rate, even at the speed of conversation. But it can also make mistakes, and there's a risk that an update it creates might be "lossy" in the sense it causes some transformed data to be lost. Again, in this new world, it's both undesirable and impractical for everyone to have to have a systems admin team on-hand to detect lossy updates and roll them back, but Motoko provides a solution: it can detect new software updates are lossy before they are applied, reducing potentially catastrophic errors by AI to harmless coding retries. — Software hosted on cloud engines is "serverless" but unlike traditional serverless software, directly it directly incorporates data through "orthogonal persistence." Another key purpose is simplify backend software logic and fuel the modeling power of AI by increasing abstraction (sorry for the technical language!!!). Put simply, this enables AI to produce more sophisticated backends, faster, and at dramatically lower costs, as measured by the number AI API tokens consumed during coding. (Tip for the technical: orthogonal persistence is a new paradigm where "the program is the database," and data lives inside program variables, which is possible because it's as if hosted software runs forever in persistent memory). — An expanding database of skills at shall make it possible to develop and directly deploy apps and services to your cloud engines directly from Claude Code, Perplexity, Codex and other AI platforms. Further, your account on can be connected, so that new apps and updates created through conversation automatically appear hosted from your cloud engine. In the future, R&D is going to be very seamless. You converse with AI, and your secure and unstoppable apps or services are created or updated. Cloud engines are designed to directly support this "self-writing cloud" future where we can work hands-free. — Tech sovereignty is becoming a huge issue worldwide, with governments and corporations seeking to create sovereign tech stacks owing to geopolitical tensions. Increasingly, people are realizing that tech provided by foreign nations can come with hidden backdoors and kills switches, from the base platform, right up through hosted apps and services. ICP technology is open source, and those building on ICP using AI own their own source code. When you have the source code, you can verify that there are no backdoors, and when you own the source code thanks to AI, you can update it at will, freeing you from vendor lock-in. But cloud engines take sovereignty much further... — You create a cloud engine by selecting the nodes that will be combined. You can choose the class of nodes used, and their number, but more importantly, you can choose who operates the nodes, and where they are located. Almost any configuration is possible, because the Internet Computer scales the security privileges afforded to hosted software within the network according to configuration (software hosted on cloud engines can directly interoperate with software on other engines and traditional subnets, but base restrictions are applied according to security rules). A cloud engine can be created within a region such as Europe, to comply with regs such as GDPR, or completely within a sovereign state like Switzerland or Pakistan. But cloud engines go further still... — Sovereignty is also about freedom from vendor lock-in. Cloud engines are essentially ICP (Internet Computer Protocol) network configurations, and this means the underlying compute nodes they combine can be swapped out without interrupting their hosted apps and services. This is a big deal. In addition, cloud engines now support nodes that are instances running on Big Tech's clouds, in addition to nodes that are dedicated specialized hardware, as per the Gen I and Gen II nodes that dominate the Internet Computer today. For example, it is possible to have an engine running across different AWS data centers, say, and then reconfigure the engine to run across a mixture of AWS, Google, Azure and Hetzner for even more resilience, without the users of hosted apps and services noticing a thing. That's true freedom. — Sovereign AI is becoming increasingly important too, and cloud engines allow special "AI nodes" to be added to them, so that hosted software can perform inference on hardware provisioned by the owner from a location the owner has selected. Even though the AI nodes are only accessible within the cloud engine, they can still benefit from the forthcoming Internet Intelligence Gateway (IG), which will make it possible to validate inference performed on key frontier open weights LLMs, even when the inference is performed on completely independent AI clouds. When the results of inference are received, this technology can verify that neither the prompt+context (input) nor the inference result (output) have been modified, and that the results were produced by the precise LLM expected. This ensures that AI clouds don't cheat by running inference on cheaper models than are being paid for, and bad actors aren't modifying the inputs or outputs to surreptitiously insert advertising into results, say, or change facts, or insert malware when code is being generated. What's super cool about this technology is the cost of the verification is scalable. A very valuable additional security can be achieved with only 1-2% of extra cost. — Scaling apps and services when they hit capacity limits is another thorny problem that cloud engines help the world address. Engines make scaling possible without rewriting or reconfiguring software. The query workload capacity of hosted software can be horizontally scaled simply by adding new nodes to an engine, and nodes can also be added in geographical proximity to demand. Meanwhile, update workload capacity can first be scaled-up by swapping an engine's nodes out for the next class up, and then when no larger class of node is available, horizontally scaled-out by "splitting" the engine into two, which doubles available capacity. (Technical tip: horizontally scaling update capacity by splitting engines requires multi-canister architectures). — For those who have been following how Caffeine builds apps that can efficiently store large numbers of files, I should mention that apps built on cloud engines will also support the new ICP Blob Storage cloud network (since cloud engines currently have up to about 3 TB of memory, which apps storing large amounts of files can easily exceed). We are also working on allowing blob storage nodes to be added to cloud engines, to enable sovereign mass blob storage within an engine, similarly to how AI nodes can be added currently. — Lastly, but certainly not least, I should mention that cloud engines are multi-blockchain capable, and ready for digital assets, thanks to the clever math at their core. For example, an e-commerce service built on a cloud engine can securely accept and custody stablecoin payments, or a multi-chain DEX could be hosted. Further, engines can support software autonomy (software orchestrated and controlled by other autonomous software, in a decentralized way) and can themselves be orchestrated by SNS technology, and thus run autonomously too. Today, though, the focus is on *mainstream* cloud. This year, the cloud industry will generate approximately one trillion dollars in revenue. That number is already huge, but is expected to grow to two trillion dollars by 2030. After years of continuous development, which have seen more than $500m spent on R&D, the Internet Computer network is now tacking directly toward this mainstream cloud market with cloud engine technology. In their first version, cloud engines are not meant to be a cloud panacea. For example, currently they are not ideal for working with big data. You should use something like DataBricks for that. Cloud engines are carefully targeted at enabling AI to produce traditional online applications and services, including SaaS, in a safer and more productive way, which represents a new market segment with tremendous potential. Of course, DFINITY will continue to work relentlessly to push forward ICP's capabilities, so expect further developments. It's worth mentioning that this cloud segment isn't just about creating new apps and services using AI, it's also about replacing legacy systems and apps built on super expensive SaaS services. Caffeine Labs is working to produce technology (Caffeine Snorkel) that can study an enterprise's legacy systems and app built on SaaS, create replacement systems and apps, and migrate the data, while supporting key stakeholders through the process over email and chat, with full automation. Thus the legacy systems and SaaS markets shall also be addressed by cloud engines. Zooming out, and reasoning in a more metaphysical way, we believe, as we always have, that there is room for a new kind of cloud created by mathematical networks, that provides seminal advances in the fields of security and resilience, as well as true sovereignty and freedom from lock-in. That this same technology, with the help of additional technologies like orthogonal persistence and Motoko, enables AI to build for us without the need for so much oversight, and to create more backend sophistication while consuming fewer AI API tokens, enables ICP to bring game-changing advances to the world. Cloud engines will work synergistically with the Intelligence Gateway, which will enable apps and services running on engines to seamlessly leverage AI, wherever that AI is running, while providing verifiability at extremely low cost for open weights frontier models. We believe that cloud engines represent an inflection point in the storied history of the Internet Computer project, and I'm very proud to be sharing the details with you on the network's fifth birthday 💪 I'll be back with more news soon!!

ICP "cloud engines" launch trajectory: DFINITY will soon begin disbursing coupons with enough cycles to create and power an engine for 1 month+, unlocking in sequence: 1. Agentic infrastructure ⚡️ Quickly build secure, sovereign onchain production apps using Claude Code, Codex, Caffeine, ... 2. Open SaaS beta release ⚡️ Install AIware apps that can run any enterprise, as easily as installing phone apps... 3. Unlimited growth ⚡️ A new end-to-end, mainstream onchain cloud tech stack will come into being. *** What this means *** ICP cloud engines are a new development on the Internet Computer designed to allow it to play the role of a revolutionary new cloud tech stack for the AI era. Currently, the Internet Computer scales by combining internal subnets, which are akin to individual, high performance blockchains hosting secure serverless software called canisters (something like smart contracts, but much more powerful, which can be used to create huge onchain apps, which serve their web screens directly to users) Cloud engines allow enterprises to create their own subnets that belong exclusively to them, which they control and configure — while their canister software can still seamlessly interoperate with software on the main network, and engines run by others. An enterprise creates a cloud engine by choosing nodes from a marketplace, which the ICP protocol combines into a revolutionary serverless cloud platform for them, where the computation and data of their hosted apps and services is tamperproof (immune to infrastructure hacks) and always on (incredibly resilient), AI agents can build and update apps far more effectively than on traditional tech, and next generation AIware software can be created. Today, enterprises demand to be able to control where their sotware and data lives, and cloud engines make that possible with no loss of flexibility. Cloud engines can even be re-configured with new nodes, without interrupting the hosted apps and services — the ICP protocol just handles it, granting complete sovereignty and freedom from vendor lock-in. In advance of general release, cloud engines are already being used by governments and NGOs seeking to create sovereign cloud tech stacks and apps. On general release, they will be used in far more mainstream ways too. Here are the details of what's coming. *** Agentic Infrastructure *** In the future, and really already today, nearly all of our apps and services will be created by AI agents rather than humans. Further, next generation software is "AIware," which has AI deeply integrated on the inside, which allows it to provide superpowers relative to traditional software. Agents have different needs when they building things. They can write software orders of magnitude faster than humans, and we will demand they update our production apps and services at the speed of conversation. Functionality will be fluid and its shape will change to match what we want. On traditional tech stacks, updating apps and services is a necessarily laborious and risky process for three reasons: 1) a security flaw might be introduced, 2) a systems configuration change might break them, and 3) the way that data is migrated might cause some to be lost, often in subtle ways that aren't detected at the time of the upgrade. This means that AI agents can't just be let of the leash to build and update at the speed they can. ICP cloud engines solve this. Hosted software is tamperproof, so agents can update without needing security teams in the loop. Hosted software is serverless, and the data lives in the logic, so apps don't. need things like operating systems and databases configured to run, so agents can update apps without having sysadmin teams in the loop either. And, if Motoko 2.0, the world's first languge targeting agents is used as the backend language, its framework is able to detect when an app update by AI might cause data loss, and simply require the agent writing the code to try again, reducing potentially catastrophic data loss to a harmless retry. Crucially, apps built with Motoko can also put AI agents on the inside, so that subject to permissions, they can see the data graph in the persistent memory used by serverless software on ICP, and access its functions. This enables you to instruct agents to do things in the apps for you, such as analyzing data, or performing actions, with great flexibility and power. ICP cloud engines are agentic infrastructure that change the game — and it will be possible to use them as such from the moment they are released. There is already a government using internal production software built on a cloud engine using Caffeine. But cloud engines will meet a wide range of mainstream needs, from solorpeneurs to startups, SMEs to corporations, governments and NGOs. *** Open SaaS *** The obvious question, is if AIware is so much better, shouldn't all enterprises be running on it? We believe they should, and that his must be enabled. This has been a labor of love for me. A new venture associated with me will release the Open SaaS suite for use on cloud engines once they have been running a short while, which suite, as you've probably guessed from the name, is open source and free. Open SaaS is a suite of every important SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) app used to run enterprises around the world today, reimagined as onchain AIware that runs on ICP cloud engines. Because of the unique nature of the software that ICP hosts, installing and maintaining these sophisticated enterprise apps on a cloud engine is as easy as installing and managing a phone app. A small selection of the apps: Open Team, Open HR, Open Accounts, Open CRM, Open Projects, Open Email, Open Messaging, Open Signing, Open Knowledge, Op... etc. There are many more, and there will be surprises. The user experiences are beautiful, and easily compete with the big money SaaS screens many enterprises are used to. Moreover, the are linked to what I called a "software factory" driven by AI, and the more enterprises that use them and provide feedback, the better they will get, in realtime. Today's expensive SaaS silos make it hard to integrate and combine enterprise data, and to unleash the full power of AI. They are the opposite to Open SaaS. In the future, enterprise users will spend far more time in AI chat than on SaaS screens. That's the future that Open SaaS enables and unlocks. Enterprise users can even say to their Open SaaS suite, "make me more profitable," and it will have a go. The big surprise coming for the world: once you run your enterprise on AIware, and AI can access all your data in realtime, and is integrated with your software's actual functions — it can become as good at running your enterprise as writing software for you. It's revolutionary, and ICP is pioneering this. Not a narrative, but real decentralized network tech. Something I can share: DFINITY is in the process of migrating to Open SaaS from a vast suite of expensive SaaS silos, and is already reaping big benefits as we refocus ourselves for the era of AI. **** What does this mean for the project? I believe ICP cloud engines are the vector that will transform the the Internet Computer into a mainstream agentic infrastructure tech platform for enterprise— which direction platforms like Caffeine have already helped the network travel, by enabling many tens of thousands of users and enterprises to create onchain apps on the shared network through online conversation. Now, the next and most important phase is approaching. Our go-to-market will proceed quietly as we rollout coupons and work to fettle the new network functionality, but I think that in hindsight, the launch of cloud engines will be seen as the most pivotal moment in Internet Computer history since network launch. With this, ICP shall show the industry how networks can provide real agentic infrastructure. Bear with us as we tie up loose ends. We never stop working, and you can be sure that we're trying to get this out as fast as possible 💪⚡️💥

There's a crazy reason behind how I understood the true importance of fully decentralizing compute. The story needs telling, so here goes. Back in 2015, I'd long shifted to being part of the early crypto scene, but maintained Fight My Monster, a venture-backed MMO game & social network I previously founded that had 3M users, which was self-sustaining financially. I'd found a long-term home working on decentralized compute, but couldn't let down the community that played the game. Fight My Monster was built in 2010-2012, using what was a completely novel architecture at the time that enabled it to scale (i.e. add massive amounts of users) at low cost, and with minimal administration. Essentially it comprised three core backend components. The first, was simple web hosting, which served the frontend game code and assets into its users' web browsers (I used a popular content distribution network). Just like the web-serving, the two other backend components had to be "horizontally scalable," which means that to support more users, and the associated compute and data, all I had to do was add more hardware, without any need to rewrite the backend software code, or perform excessive systems administration. This enabled me to scale fast in the early days, with minimal staff and financing. The second component, was a horizontally scalable game server framework called "Starburst", which was a work of love I created myself. This was built on top of an open source server that supported RTMP, an Adobe network protocol that allowed Flash media (remember that!!) assets running inside web browsers to directly talk to it. Starburst hosted game/social network logic and routed huge numbers of events being generated by the game to users in near realtime. The third component was a horizontally scalable NoSQL database called Cassandra (if you follow databases, you'll know that a modern derivative called ScyllaDB is currently doing well serving realtime AI needs). On my team, I had the only Cassandra core committer outside the company that built it. Further, I was the first serious party using the Cassandra beta in anger, and it got corrupted at 800,000 users, which was followed by a very testy 24 hours recovering the data, and bringing it back online (one moment I was going to the moon, the next moment I thought things had gone irreversibly wrong, but luckily things worked out). What was cool about Cassandra was that you could literally just add nodes (i.e. server machines with big hard drives installed) to horizontally scale its storage capacity, read throughput, and most importantly, its write throughput, which is very rare thing, and in my application absolutely crucial, because Fight My Monster generated a simply vast amount of data. Of course, another very important aspect of Cassandra was that it was fault tolerant, and I used a replication factor of 5, which meant everyone's data was very safe (or so I thought...). A replication factor of 5 meant I only needed nodes 3 online, for any specific "quorum of data," for it to be writable. Unlike a blockchain, Cassandra wasn't Byzantine Fault Tolerant, which meant that I had to manage the security of my infrastructure carefully to make sure hackers or malware didn't get in. But back then, hackers weren't interested in an MMO game/social network where most of the users were kids, and this wasn't supposed to be a general platform for others to build on. My main technical work pressure was just that the nodes hosting the database were under enormous strain owing to the amount of data being generated, and would therefore regularly blow up! This meant that I would have to login to my infra every so often, decommission broken nodes, and add new ones, which was easy enough, because the fault tolerance meant the job didn't have to be done immediately, and the "bare metal" machines involved could be orchestrated through my cloud provider... Fight My Monster used a setup years ahead of its time, and it allowed me to scale up with ease. Moreover, the fault tolerance, and the simple backend architecture with only 3 core system components, meant minimal administration and stress was involved in keeping it running. So what was the important lesson, which plays an important role in my thinking, and in ICP, to this day? You must surely have sensed that something crazy happened, and now I will share it publicly for the first time. I was traveling in Asia, as part of the "traveling circus" associated with the early core Ethereum community, visiting related parties (people often forget the importance of Asia, and China particularly, in helping support the early crypto scene) and attending Ethereum-related events, where I mainly talked about complex Computer Science techniques I had developed that I wanted to be used to make networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum scale and perform better. I don't want to drone on about "what is used to be like in crypto," but I will say that it was a magical time, and I owe a lot to early people for some amazing memories. It was also engaging, and I wasn't checking my email. Consequently, what I did not see on my travels, were email after email warning me of the fact that the credit card that was paying for Fight My Monster's Cassandra nodes had expired.... So what did the cloud operator do when I didn't respond within a few weeks (it wasn't many, but I forget the exact number). Well, they simply deleted all the nodes!!! It's hard to describe how I felt when I got back home to Palo Alto in California, and discovered what had happened. It was a mixture of shock and horror, a kind of hollow feeling in my stomach, adrenaline surges, and unfolding dread, as I worked as fast as I could to fix it, only to confirm that what had happened was irreversible. People who've been hacked in crypto will know the feeling. That was it. Fight My Monster was dead. Some part of the community even created a change dot org website pleading for it to be brought back online. Despite the loss of what it might have been worth, and the guilt, in some ways it was liberating, as I no longer had responsibility to maintain it, which probably would have done ad infinitum for the community. Plus it became a fond memory for a generation of kids and some adults that played it, before the game had a chance to grow too old and tired, and it allowed me to focus on what had become my obsession — decentralized compute networks. The lesson however was very clear to me. You can create decentralized compute infrastructure that can scale, and is fault tolerant, but if you have a single point of failure, anywhere, at any moment, it can be toast. That's why I'm always concerned when I hear about blockchains that depend on administrator keys held by the core devs, or blockchains that go down, or almost go down, when a huge chunk of their nodes are shutdown by a cloud running them, or because the cloud running them has technical problems. This problem of great fragility is vastly more prevalent than you might imagine in our industry. The learnings from the Fight My Monster disaster informed how the Internet Computer was designed. It's not only the number of nodes that matters, there are more important things. If nodes are anonymous, the number of independent parties running the bulk of them might be far less than you might think. Further, while large in number, they often turn out to be running on a small number of clouds— and even if they are owned and operated by a few different parties, the cloud might suddenly decide it doesn't want them anymore, and shut them down overnight, as Hetzner once did to a famous blockchain. What matters in practice is the number of independent parties running the nodes, and the physical and jurisdictional independence of the nodes. This simple insight is that was behind "deterministic decentralization," which will appear in new form inside the forthcoming "ICP cloud engines" extension of the Internet Computer. ICP cloud engines allow enterprises (typically) to create what is effectively an Internet Computer subnet whose configuration they themselves control, by choosing nodes to combine from a pool that acts as a marketplace. Currently there are more than 1.5k nodes waiting, and the number is growing. An engine provides a serverless cloud platform with remarkable properties. It is the ideal place for AI-built apps and services, because the has been stack designed to allow AI to generate advanced AIware software with ease, which AIware is secure and resilient. Apps are tamperproof (immune to infrastructure hacks), always-on (and thus incredibly resilient), optionally autonomous (which means there is no backdoor), digital assets native, and many other things. Engines also run e.g. the Open SaaS suite of AIware apps that can be used to run enterprises end-to-end. Cloud engines make installing and maintaining complex apps like Open CRM or Open Email as simple as installing and maintaining phone apps. Nodes are hot-swappable. That means you can change the compute replication factor, swap out the nodes for different ones, without interrupting what the cloud engine hosts, providing freedom from compute vendor lock-in, and, if you want, you can use a new class of nodes on hyperscalers, as well as traditional Internet Computer nodes, so it will function as a general compute marketplace. The cloud engine framework guides people to combine nodes that have independence, but provides flexibility that shared Internet Computer hosting doesn't have. For example, an enterprise in Germany might choose nodes that reside only in the EU, to meet GDPR requirements. However, the cloud engine console, which is autonomous, and served from the Internet Computer network, and updated by the NNS (the Network Nervous System, the world's most advanced DAO), guides users and warns them heavily if they combine nodes from the same node provider, or which are based in the same data center, say, or run by the same cloud operator. Thus, even with ICP cloud engines, the lessons of Fight My Monster live on. People will wonder why the framework pushes them so strongly to combine independent nodes, but there is a good reason, which is just as relevant for the wider blockchain community today, as it was in 2015. Looking forward to sharing cloud engines soon.

Dominic Williams is pitching crypto exchanges a different custody model as hacks keep hitting the sector. The @dfinity founder says Internet Computer ($ICP) Chain-Key threshold cryptography can offer tamper-proof custody with no single point of failure. What he is proposing ⬇️ Story:

Dfinity Founder wants Exchanges to use ICP... @Dfinity Founder Dominic Williams (@dominic_w) is unhappy about the current attacks on exchanges. $ICP is trying to provide a tamper-proof custody service for institutions using its threshold cryptography technology built on the Internet Computer. According to Williams, Dfinity's Chain-Key design has no single points of failure. Instead of a private key system, it uses a decentralized signing mechanism via autonomous network canisters triggered only by approved approval chains. This message is clearly directed at exchanges.

APRO x ARC 🟩 Every growing ecosystem needs data it can verify, not just trust blindly. APRO is expanding to @arc soon — bringing secure, tamper-proof price feeds to support what's being built there. Details dropping shortly ⚡