The Internet Computer, a project by Dfinity Foundation, is a platform that allows its users to deploy smart contracts and build scalable decentralized applications. This network is the world’s first web-speed blockchain that can host frontends, backends, and data, with smart contracts.
There have been more than 158,000 smart contracts, also called “canisters” currently running on this network. These canisters can host frontend web interfaces and backend coding.
Deploying canisters on this platform is like deploying a traditional web application with an advantage. Since canisters are essentially smart contracts, developers on this network can integrate blockchain technology into their decentralized applications for enhanced secure authentication and tokenization.
The aim of this platform and its team is to make networks and their constituents more open-sourced, transparent, and decentralized. Today, most of the internet is heavily centralized, and if a critical data center fails the entire system goes into a shutdown. Dfinity wishes to avoid these critical issues by integrating blockchain techniques.
The Internet Computer provides developers to easily create their applications in a decentralized form and directly upload it to the public internet network. They would incentivize open-source and transparent software development.
Developers require to compensate for using canisters by consuming “cycles”. They use it to store data and run codes. These cycles are pegged to ensure the development costs are predictable, stable, and proportional to the dapp usage.
Recent reports have shown a steady increase in the cycles burned in the past few months. Through this, it can be inferred that the Internet Computer ecosystem is expanding as it represents that the user activity of developers on this network is increasing. The Internet Computer in 2022 alone, has witnessed an exponential growth of +400%.
Additionally, reports on network issues and their severity has been having a consistent downward trend. This illustrates that the growth of activity in the network is reducing these issues.