Internet Computer

Internet Computer

ICP
$11.76
-7.09%
$11.42

24H Price

$12.80


About Internet Computer

The Internet Computer price is $11.76, a change of -7.09% over the past 24 hours as of 3:23 a.m. The recent price action in Internet Computer left the tokens market capitalization at $5.42B. So far this year, Internet Computer has a change of -10.99%. Internet Computer is classified as a Smart Contract Platform under CoinDesks Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS).


ICP serves as the native cryptocurrency for Internet Computer, a blockchain platform aiming to revolutionize internet applications. It achieves this by offering faster and more scalable smart contracts. Internet Computer employs a hybrid proof-of-stake consensus, combining permissioned and permissionless structures. Governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), it seeks to harness the efficiency of permissioned networks and the decentralization of permissionless networks.


Notably, ICP's smart contracts have the ability to store data, perform computations, and serve web pages directly on the blockchain. This innovative approach eliminates the reliance on third-party cloud or private hosting services. In essence, Internet Computer functions as a decentralized, blockchain-based internet, providing users with increased control over their data.


DACS Sector: Smart Contract Platform

ICP price

Internet Computer features two types of tokens:

  • ICP, its native asset and governance token, which token owners can use to vote on important protocol decisions that affect the entire ecosystem.
  • Cycles, which are created by "burning" ICP. Cycles are used to pay for computational resources on Internet Computer.

Unlike the case with some other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, there’s no supply cap on the total number of ICP tokens. Thirty-eight percent of the initial supply went to investors and 62% to the founders and team.


When ICP was launched in May 2021 following five years of development, its price hit its all-time high of $460.84. But the price swiftly tanked by 95% to $34 in June and then went even lower to $28.01 in July 2021. At the time, the Dfinity Foundation, the nonprofit organization that developed the Internet Computer blockchain, told CoinDesk that the drop was likely because the token started trading at the height of a crypto-wide bull run.


For the rest of 2021, ICP's price stabilized. It climbed to a peak of $84.75 in August, but since that time, it traded between $20 and $60 (as of January 2022).

How Internet Computer works

The creators of Internet Computer want to use blockchain technology to decentralize the entire internet, making tech giants less powerful. They are trying to do so, not by building one massive blockchain, but by arranging the blockchain into a set of "subnets" that hold a smaller piece of the blockchain. The team claims to have invented new cryptography called “Chain Key” that ties these separate pieces together in a secure way.


To create decentralized applications on the Internet Computer blockchain, developers run their programs on so-called "canisters," which each have a storage capacity of 4 gigabytes. The canisters are smart contracts, which is software code enabled by blockchains that makes it easier to remove intermediaries from digital interactions. But the storage capacity of canisters is bigger than that of normal smart contracts. Canisters are also supposed to be more performant than other smart contracts, which generally take a lot of computational power to run.

Key events and management

Computer programmer and entrepreneur Dominic Williams is the founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation, and he has invented many of the technical and cryptographic innovations that are part of the Internet Computer protocol.


Dfinity, which was founded in 2014, has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital and Scalar Capital.It introduced an “alpha version” of Internet Computer in December 2020 and launched its first real version of the platform the following May.

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