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#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]
#Flash A Blockchain marker project
Since blockchain technology appeared, there has been a persistent problem in its development: how to make it scale to billions of users. Bitcoin was famously never really designed for this, and today other platforms like Ethereum are also struggling. If you could crack this problem, the thinking goes, you’d end up with the hottest property in blockchain right now.
That, a very healthy dose of ambition, and a bench of strong computer science talent are some of the big reasons why investors are gathering around DFINITY, a startup based out of Zug, Switzerland and Palo Alto that is also a foundation, and has a very lofty goal to build what it calls the “Internet Computer”: a blockchain-based, decentralised and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of mega-applications. DFINITY aims to launch an initial version of its public network — which it has also dubbed “Cloud 3.0” — towards the end of the year.
Today, DFINITY is announcing that it has raised $102 million in funding, in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz (via its crypto fund a16z crypto) and Polychain Capital. Both were previous investors in a $61 million round DFINITY announced earlier this year — which has been a blockbuster for blockchain, with at least $1.3 billion being invested into the technology in the first half of 2018 alone. DFINITY has now raised just over $195 million to date since being founded in 2015.
While the tech world is awash in blockchain projects, Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz told Fortune that Dfinity is distinct because of the technical prowess of its team. Led by founder Dominic Williams, Dfinity claims to have made a number of breakthroughs related to scaling the blockchain and making it secure.
Ali Yahya and Chris Dixon blogged at a16
As we’ve articulated before, a platform’s tendency to extract value from its users and compete with its third-party developers only increases with time. Over the past two decades, the inevitable consequence of this has been a slowdown in innovation because entrepreneurs no longer trust that the rules of the platforms they are building on will remain neutral and fair.
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Cryptonetworks will enable the emergence of a new breed of digital platform that, unlike the centrally governed platforms of today, will be owned and governed by their respective communities of users and developers. The resulting broad representation of interests will go a long way toward ensuring that they operate and evolve in a way that is both neutral and fair.
In addition to Williams, that team is impressive indeed.It includes Timo Hanke as head of engineering, who is a former mathematics and cryptography professor who created AsicBoost to increase the efficiency of Bitcoin mining; Mahnush Movahedi, who joined as a senior researcher from Yale where she’s worked on “scalable and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for consensus and secure multi-party computation, secret sharing, and interactive communication over noisy channels”; ex-Googler Ben Lynn, who is the “L” from BLS cryptography, used in Threshold Relay to “generate randomness and achieve security, speed and scale in public networks”; and Adreas Rossberg, another ex-Googler who had co-designed the WebAssembly virtual machine, which is also used at DFINITY.
The bet signals some investors are still willing to back blockchain projects despite this year’s slump in cryptocurrency prices. While initial coin offerings and venture capital investment both slowed in July, funding for blockchain companies has topped $16 billion this year, a record and more than double the amount raised in all of 2017, according todatacompiled by CoinDesk Inc.
[Editors Note Do read the a16 lengthy blog. Key ideas on scaling, reducing mining etc or watch the video ]
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