Since its launch in May 2021, the Internet Computer blockchain has distinguished itself by achieving zero downtime, processing over three billion blocks, and locking more than $3 billion in the Network Nervous System (NNS) DAO. The developer community within the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) ecosystem has also seen significant growth. According to Electric Capital, the number of developers increased twelvefold between 2020 and 2023, despite the mainnet only launching in May 2021.
The ICP, a decentralized blockchain network designed to extend Web3’s functionality by addressing traditional blockchain and smart contract limitations, has unveiled its “Year 4 Internet Computer Roadmap” to mark its mainnet’s third anniversary. This roadmap highlights three years of progress and delineates key development areas aimed at positioning ICP as a leader in decentralized AI and as a central orchestration layer for the blockchain industry.
Decentralized AI: Pioneering the Next Frontier
A focal point of the Year 4 roadmap is Decentralized AI (DeAI), which envisions AI models being trained and operated directly on-chain. This contrasts sharply with the current landscape, where AI models are often opaque, leading to trust and reliability issues. ICP aims to address these challenges through advanced computational power and sophisticated smart contract capabilities.
The DeAI roadmap outlines several milestones. The first milestone includes implementing faster deterministic floating-point operations to achieve a tenfold performance improvement and introducing Wasm SIMD support for executing multiple floating-point operations with a single CPU instruction. Additionally, optimizing the AI inference engine is planned to enhance overall performance and efficiency.
The second milestone involves developing a deterministic API for AI computations on GPUs, creating tooling and libraries to facilitate AI smart contract development, publishing a public specification for GPU-enabled nodes, and establishing AI-specialized subnets equipped with GPU-enabled nodes.
These milestones aim to unlock innovative use cases, such as AI smart contracts that verify identity through video, ensuring a driver’s license matches the person’s face, and smart contracts that analyze Ethereum code for vulnerabilities, offering verification if no issues like reentrancy bugs are found. Another potential use case is enabling users to interact with smart contracts using natural language through LLM AI smart contracts, simplifying the user experience. Moreover, Web3 communities could manage and control AIs via Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and pre-trained AIs might be traded as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
ICP’s efforts to integrate AI on-chain are bolstered by the DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss non-profit and major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain. Last July, the foundation launched a $5 million decentralized AI grant program to support DeAI on the Internet Computer blockchain. Several innovative AI projects, including Kinic, DecideAI, ELNA AI, ICGPT, and Earthstream, are already building on ICP.
Chain Fusion: Bridging the Blockchain Divide
Another key highlight of ICP’s Year 4 roadmap is Chain Fusion, an initiative aimed at facilitating direct interoperability with major blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, other Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs), and soon Solana, without requiring intermediaries. This direct interoperability will enable developers to create smart contracts that span multiple chains, addressing liquidity fragmentation and reducing tribalism within the blockchain industry.
The Chain Fusion development plan includes several critical milestones. The first milestone involves achieving full support for EVM chains, enabling ICP canister smart contracts to hold and transact tokens on these chains, allowing interaction with EVM smart contracts without relying on bridges or centralized intermediaries.
The second milestone focuses on utilizing Bitcoin-native protocols such as BRC20 and Runes. This will enable decentralized support for Bitcoin ordinals and runes, allowing developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) that seamlessly integrate Bitcoin and ICP functionalities.
The third milestone aims to add support for Solana, bridging the gap between the Solana network and ICP. This will allow smart contracts on either network to call and interact with those on the other, creating a more interconnected blockchain ecosystem.
As ICP moves into its fourth year, the ambitious roadmap underscores its commitment to pioneering decentralized AI and enhancing interoperability across blockchain networks, cementing its role as a central player in the evolving blockchain landscape.