Internet Computer founder says crypto has 'snake-oil’ problem

Dfinity Foundation's Dominic Williams doesn't pull any punches when asked to give his thoughts on the world of crypto and blockchain, an area he's been working in for roughly a decade.

"It's gotten to a place where people actually invest in snake oil. Like, 'who's got the best snake oil, I'm going to invest in that because their marketing is better,'" Williams recently told The Block. "Today there's a lot of confusion and people are just buying into these narratives. And I think that's the biggest challenge facing the industry today.”

Williams is chief scientist and founder of Dfinity Foundation, the builder and main contributor to the Internet Computer ICP +0.091% Protocol. Years ago, the project was one of the most hyped in the blockchain space after Dfinity raised a total of $195 million from big-time backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Dfinity is officially a non-profit based in Zurich.

It's clear Williams highly regards his team at Dfinity Foundation, which he says boasts "1,000 years" of research and development expertise and the Internet Computer blockchain it launched. He's not so generous with the rest of the industry.

"There's a lot of junk, frankly. Like 95% of the blockchains out there are just junk, and they're just selling snake oil," he said in a recent interview. "It's no longer about the technology. It's often about who can spin the best narrative and make that sound the most convincing, with websites pretending the product is finished or does something that it doesn't."

'Only third-generation blockchain'

While Williams sees utility in blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche, he doesn't feel people truly understand their limitations in terms of building a scalable internet that functions in a cost- and time-efficient manner. He believes, however, that the Internet Computer Protocol, as what he claims is the "only third-generation" blockchain, can power a new era of online interactions that are completely on chain.

Williams says some popular blockchains work well for processing transactions, but he doesn't have much faith that they can form the basis of a completely new and decentralized internet that mainstream users would embrace en masse.

"A blockchain is a kind of compute platform, and it can either be like a traditional blockchain that does compute sequentially, like Ethereum, Solana, or it can be a third-generation blockchain that can scale and compute" more efficiently, making it possible to build web3 platforms like on-chain social networks, he said.

Trying to illustrate his point, Williams pointed out how inefficient web3 currently is: "Take a photograph with your phone, three megabytes. It would cost you $110,000 to put that on Ethereum. It [would] also cost you a week or something to upload it; on Solana like $400," he said.

Solving blockchain's 'trilemma'

Already in 2021, those behind Internet Computer felt that they had something different.

“At its core, the Internet Computer is the world’s first blockchain that runs at web speed with unlimited capacity — solving the ‘blockchain trilemma’ by producing a blockchain network that is decentralized, secure, and scalable,” the Dfinity Foundation said at the time.

While Internet Computer may claim technical superiority to rival blockchains, the protocol has not been without its issues, at least in terms of maintaining a timeline. After Dfinity Foundation delayed the launch of the Internet Computer Protocol in late 2018, it eventually launched roughly two and a half years later.

“In 10 years, the wider tech community will realize that the Internet Computer is on a trajectory to one day become humanity’s primary compute platform for building software and the Open Internet,” Williams said at the time of launch.

Messari's research points out that the public launch not only "marked the release of the Internet Computer’s source code" but also the "ICP utility token's transaction and governance functionalities." After initially shooting up to over $400 in price and a market cap of over $18 billion in May 2021, according to CoinGecko, ICP's value plummeted. The price of ICP has since made a small recovery, beginning to rebound substantially at the end of last year.

The token was changing hands at over $13 at time of publication, according to The Block Price Page.