Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧

ICP Maxi

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Soon I will demonstrate how AI can be "inside" an arbitrary ICP app, service or website built using the latest Motoko, understanding all its data, analysing it any way you want, and taking actions, without need for one special line of code. Insane and groundbreaking.

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

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 https://t.co/D5Dfj44BmO.

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 (https://t.co/ptsshOm9nj) 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 https://t.co/lloVYiGYs8 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 https://t.co/IfQrVovF3L 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!!

[WASP @WaspTechnology]

WooCommerce is now running on WordPress inside WASP on ICP

This is a huge milestone.

https://t.co/DX82kOqnUB

We are not just running a static site.
We are not just running a basic WordPress page.
We are now running real plugin-heavy PHP workload inside ICP canisters.

No VPS.
No traditional hoster.
PHP + WordPress + WASQL + WooCommerce on ICP.

Load times are improving progressively, and we are getting closer to something big:

A decentralized hosting layer for the existing PHP and WordPress world.

WASP is building the bridge from Web2 to Web3.

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

People asking what ICP "cloud engines" – the Internet Computer as frontier onchain cloud for agents building apps, services and systems - actually looks like.

Here's approximately what's coming:

[project hail dado ⚢ 🎱 @astrasdoctor]

public speaking skills 10/10

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Caffeine v3.0 ☕️, Tuesday, April 7th
https://t.co/IfQrVovF3L

A new era begins on ICP in a few days. A huge Caffeine upgrade will take place. This is about more than the new features it packs: what can be built on the Internet Computer through chat alone shall advance by a quantum leap.

It will blow your mind, because you can go so much further: those wanting to build apps and services on self-writing cloud, where every technical task is automated and directed by natural language interaction, may rationally decide that the Internet Computer is the place to be thanks to the work of Caffeine Labs.

But, stunning as the v3.0 advance is, this only marks the beginning of a new beginning for ICP. Caffeine is just getting started, and will be joined by other major advances unfolding in the ICP ecosystem. Several things are coming together:

1) The architecture that powers Caffeine v3.0 will ensure it continues to grow more powerful as time goes on. We expect that it will be possible for non-technical people to build almost anything on the Internet Computer in the future. Eventually special features like "Caffeine Snorkel" will also make it possible to auto-migrate legacy apps and services to the Internet Computer.

2) For the first time, Caffeine will allow all users to publish the App Market, so that other users can install copies of their apps, and if they want, remix them, since apps from the market are mutable and can be changed as needed. This is important change will be followed by the activation of monetization features, which will kickstart a new open source onchain economy based around the AI-driven development of re-usable apps and services.

3) Caffeine apps use ICP Blob Storage (which is currently exclusively available to Caffeine owing to its ongoing development) to maintain copies of files and binary large objects. Coming advances will enable Caffeine apps to store data at the world's best $/GB — making the Caffeine the perfect plartform to use to build apps that must store and share large amounts of data (for example, for a photo sharing app, or a team communications platform where video meetings are routinely recorded and archived).

4) Caffeine will soon be joined by new ICP "cloud engine" functionality, and then, the Internet Intelligence Network (IIN) — two new parts of the Internet Computer. Cloud engines will provide enterprise users with much more control over how the Internet Computer hosts their apps and services. IIN will provide everyone with access to inference on open weights models at lower cost than is possible today (for example allowing a business to create an e-commerce website on the Internet Computer where every customer can be helped through product exploration by AI, without worrying about the cost).

5) Cloud engines, which are essentially private subnets that can be controlled via a control panel, enable the Internet Computer to provide a cloud experience that feels more familiar to prosumers and enterprises used to centralized clouds. Users will be able to select the nodes combined to power their cloud engines, and nodes can include cloud-on-cloud nodes, such as AWS instances, as well as traditional sovereign node hardware. These nodes can be chosen to match precise throughput needs, or regulatory requirements (e.g. GDPR). The Internet Computer is thus transforming into a mass market cloud solution.

6) Powerful additional advantages of cloud engines include a) since they are essentally Internet Computer subnets, as usual hosted apps and services are tamperproof and unstoppable, and don't require support by security and systems administration personnel, b) hosted apps can have their query throughput auto-scaled horizontally by adding nodes, which can be located in proximity to demand, and can have ther update throughput auto-scaled by splitting the engines — enabling auto-scaling where software does not have to be updated — and c) owners can traverse underlying compute vendors and geographies and jurisdictions, simply by adding and deleting nodes, which can be done without interrupting hosted apps.

7) The Internet Intelligence Network is an extension to the Internet Computer that we plan to propose to the NNS soon (which I have mentioned before). This will be powered by community-operated hardware devices, which crucially, in combination with new technology we are developing, shall shall facilitate provision of lower per-token inference costs than AI clouds can currently achieve within targeted market segments (low costs that are derived from the technology involved, in contrast to certain contemporary decentralized GPU networks that use token appreciation to drive unsustainable subsidization flywheels).

8) A key unique additional aspect of IIN is that inference is verifiable, just like onchain compute — that is, those supplying prompts and context will know that their results are correct, and shall not have to trust that the IIN nodes powering inference haven't changed their results (for example, by inserting advertising, or malicious content). The strength of the verification is configurable. In the default mode, there will be no discernible difference in cost or performance/time thanks to the techniques developed. In higher security modes, useful for special high-security purposes, verification cost will scale linearly with every node checking the inference, while the hit to performance/time remains very small. (Note that because inference is non-deterministic, inference verification is technically challenging and novel, and will advance the state-of-the-art).

In all, v3.0 is part of the Internet Computer's march towards the mainstream cloud market, which is predicted to generate $1 trillion in revenue in 2026, and $2 trillion in 2030.

While we see the Internet Computer as a revolutionary decentralized cloud platform, rather than a network beloning to the web3 industry per se, we note that after tokens (Bitcoin), and DeFi (Ethereum), onchain cloud is the first new decentralized network functionality to unlock mass market potential — and it's happeing exclusively on the Internet Computer, which is by far the most technologically advanced network the world has ever seen.

ICP is advancing to define an important new cloud sector, where the network is the cloud, and the cloud is self-writing.

[Mo @atmoio]

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

@herbertyang @ICPsimp @JoshHQ sweet, is there a way to automate so i don't have to manually top up each time?

[Fabio @Zero2HeroZombie]

My $BTC Dominance Indicator is live on $ICP
I was able to build this application in 1 hour using @caffeineai ☕️

I hope you enjoy it⬇️
https://t.co/G92Gi6dPzd

PS: This is just a test to display the capabilities of ☕️ It is not my final product. I will build something even better in the near future. Stay tuned!

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

⚡ Major privacy advance ⚡
✅ Apps run e2e on public network
✅ User data is 100% encrypted
✅ Multi-user/secure data sharing
✅ No backdoors
https://t.co/JaZ2EJAkFt

[caffeine @caffeineai]

Watch the full Caffeine demo by @dominic_w

Apply for early access: https://t.co/VwRRbleMVU

[QuantumPink @QuantumPinkkk]

$ICP fam !!!
the new dashboard is badass !!!
https://t.co/Kaa8Zdp8r1

[Justin Trudeau @JustinTrudeau]

Good to have you back.

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

4:30am still at the gate

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

@SunwingVacay strikes again! The return flight is as horrible as the arrival one. From 4pm pushed to 3am, lack of communication on every front, no one answers the phone or the chat, no idea on accommodations, bus arrival, everyone at the gate with no clue when we’re actually leaving. Supposed to be gone by now but here we are 3am in Punta Cana and apparently they can’t find the pilot. How is this okay as a business!?

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

@SunwingVacay you have a terrible airline business. Terrible service, delays with no communication, none of the staff seem to have a clue. From 9am to 4am and we’re still stranded, delay after delay in 3h intervals with bullshit excuses. Never again

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

Crew arrived to the wrong gate. You can’t make this stuff up. The level of confusion is concerning.

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Bybit is handling the hack admirably, best wishes from DFINITY.

Re: hackers "musking" the Safe UX, this shouldn't even be possible, but traditional smart contracts can't securely serve UX from chain.

In 2018, I had DFINITY develop smart contracts for ICP that can serve UX themselves, directly from chain.

This was 1) to prevent "musking" happening to dapps on the Internet Computer, and 2) also to provide a means for other chains to obtain similar security (more below).

I have been talking about this specific web3 security problem for a long time. In fact, as part of the early Ethereum community, in 2015, I discussed this problem with Martin Koppleman himself, the founder of Gnosis, the source of Safe.

I have long believed in genuinely fully-onchain web3, where web applications, and other services, are constructed from advanced smart contracts that serve their web experiences from the blockchain themselves, directly to users.

The Internet Computer introduced this at launch, May 2021, but this capability remains unique in the industry: thus, while the Safe service holds tokens inside smart contracts on Ethereum, which define the multisig access control logic, the Safe web experience was actually served from somewhere else.

To be clear: the Safe UX/user experience (i.e. the web experience users interact with) does not benefit from end-to-end blockchain security.

The hackers knew its web experience was not being served from the blockchain, and found a way to modify it, musking the UX for the user, and making it display misleading information and tricking multiple signers.

Although multiple signers had to sign, they were all tricked into signing the same bad transaction, because the musked UX they were interacting with told them they were signing something else!

One of the following probably happened: 1) the web assets (html, js, etc) were modified at source, wherever that was, or 2) a network node proxying the web content on its way to the signers' web browsers, was able to maliciously modify the content (a third possibility is that they all had malware on their computers, but that seems less likely).

When smart contracts are serving the web experience themselves, then problem (1) cannot happen, and if there is a concern that problem (2) is a risk, and security concerns are high, then this can also be prevented with certainty.

(Technical tip: if you need to be sure (2) is impossible when interacting with ICP dapps, simply install this software, which checks the "chain key" signatures on all assets served from the Internet Computer https://t.co/X7JOQ1hQDP.)

The good news for the World Computer (which I define as the amalgamation of all blockchains that can host tokens and smart contracts), is that the Internet Computer can fix this for *everyone*.

The Internet Computer's "chain key" engine enables its smart contracts to sign smart contract transactions that run on *other* blockchains (currently Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana also have native API-level support on the network, and this is expanding).

This means that it's possible to build web experiences on the Internet Computer that trustlessly build on smart contracts hosted by other blockchains. In this case, Safe's UX could have been built on the Internet Computer, while the exact same smart contracts on Ethereum could have been used.

It's time for crypto to end these endless hacks by creating web3 experiences that are hosted on the blockchain end-to-end (this is what the Internet Computer community means by "fully onchain").

The good news is we have been working on these problems for years, and the technological solutions are here, and already highly mature.

For those new to this fully onchain paradigm, here are some useful links that help illustrate the different world that is possible:

https://t.co/KlE4H7H2uE – a 100% onchain multi-chain wallet, which you authenticate to using Internet Identity passkey technology, whose underlying smart contract software, which maintains your tokens, and serves you the web experience you interact with, is updated by the ICP's Network Nervous System (one of the largest and most secure DAOs in the world today)

https://t.co/CZ2UwofWPg – a 100% onchain chat service and social network, where you can send "chain key" bitcoin in chat messages at almost zero cost, with 1 second finality. This is also fully autonomous, and its smart contract software is updated by its own DAO.

https://t.co/X7JOQ1hQDP – this is an open source project developing an app designed to run on the Internet Computer, which can be used to create a decentralized versions of Fireblocks (i.e. to maintain custody of multichain assets, and define complex workflows). Institutions seeking more security and decentralization in their crypto asset custody processes, can contact DFINITY for help using the software.

Let's keep working across our industry, in a non-partisan way, to bring these security problems to an end, once and for all 💪

[Hanna 🇨🇦🇱🇧 @hhaddad]

@SunwingVacay you have a terrible airline business. Terrible service, delays with no communication, none of the staff seem to have a clue. From 9am to 4am and we’re still stranded, delay after delay in 3h intervals with bullshit excuses. Never again