Dominic Williams, DFINITY, and the Internet That Writes Itself

ICP soared then tanked. But Dominic Williams didn’t flinch. He’s back with a plan to let AI write the internet – and leave Big Tech behind.
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In May 2021, the crypto world watched with awe as a new token stormed into the top ten by market cap, valued in the tens of billions. It was called ICP. Behind it was a Swiss foundation called DFINITY. And behind DFINITY was a British cryptographer named Dominic Williams, promising nothing less than the reinvention of the internet itself.
Within weeks, ICP’s price collapsed by 95%.
Even in crypto, that was spectacular. Shiba Inu, a meme coin created as a joke, held value better. The New York Times ran a story: insider transfers, buggy token claims, retail holders left out in the cold. Analysts at Arkham Intelligence traced billions in ICP sent to exchanges from addresses linked to insiders. A botched ICO? A planned dump? DFINITY said the transfers were to safeguard tokens, not sell them. But the damage was done.
From Davos darling to Reddit piñata in 30 days.
Was this the story of a failed vision – or one that came too early for the world?
The Dream: A World Computer
The Internet Computer is a paradigm shift. People will just talk to the internet and it will build out their own corner of the ecosystem,
Williams told a journalist at Davos 2025.
That’s the vision: not just hosting a smart contract or a dApp, but replacing the entire backend of the modern web (cloud services, databases, servers) with a public blockchain. One where software lives on-chain, runs on-chain, scales on-chain. Where websites, financial systems, games, and enterprise apps are not hosted on the internet but inside it.
Williams calls it the World Computer. The next layer of the internet. And he’s been building toward it for more than a decade.
The Architect
Born in the UK, Dominic Williams graduated with top honors in Computer Science from King’s College London, winning multiple awards for algorithms and distributed systems. Before crypto, he built Smartdrivez – a file-sync platform that predated Dropbox – and an MMO game called Fight My Monster that hit a million users in a year.
But what set him apart wasn’t just business. It was an obsession. Around 2013, he fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. He read Wei Dai’s b-money paper, then started writing his own. In 2014, he released the Pebble white paper: a 98-page design for a scalable blockchain that used asynchronous Byzantine consensus and sharding. It never launched, but insiders like Vitalik Buterin and Nick Szabo read it.
Pebble was Williams’s first stab at a general-purpose blockchain – before Ethereum had even launched. But where Ethereum went full-speed into crypto-economics, Williams veered another way: toward math, cryptography, and system design.
From Pebble to DFINITY
The idea that a blockchain could act as a “World Computer” was in the air during Ethereum’s early days. But Williams took it literally. He believed smart contracts shouldn’t just orchestrate apps – they should be the apps.
In 2015, he coined a new brand: DFINITY, from “decentralized infinity.”
He also introduced a novel consensus concept: Threshold Relay. It used BLS cryptography to generate random numbers and select committees of nodes to create blocks. Ethereum researchers liked it. Years later, their Beacon Chain would incorporate a similar design.
By 2016, Williams was ready to go solo. He launched a Swiss foundation to develop the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), designed a ledger architecture, and in early 2017 ran a “seed donation” round that gave early investors ICP at 3 cents apiece. That round raised $3.9 million.
Then came the talent. Ben Lynn (the “L” in BLS), cryptographer Victor Shoup, WebAssembly co-creator Andreas Rossberg, and Jan Camenisch from IBM. They didn’t just want to scale blockchains. They wanted to replace IT.
Genesis & the Crash
In May 2021, after years of quiet building, the Internet Computer launched. It was the most technically ambitious blockchain ever conceived: a sovereign network of dedicated node machines, governed by an on-chain DAO called the Network Nervous System.
ICP hit exchanges. It rocketed to a $45 billion market cap.
Then it collapsed.
Small investors who had waited since 2017 struggled to claim their tokens. Meanwhile, according to Arkham Intelligence, “probable insider addresses” moved $2 billion in ICP to exchanges. Was it dumping? Custody? Miscommunication? DFINITY insisted the tokens were transferred for safekeeping.
The backlash was brutal. The token crashed harder than any of the top 100 coins. A project that promised to liberate users from Big Tech looked, to many, like an insiders' game.
Williams went quiet. But he never stopped building.
The Comeback Code
In the years since, DFINITY doubled down on R&D. Its Zurich research center became the largest employer of ex-Google staff in Switzerland. It recruited cryptographers from ETH Zurich, EPFL, and IBM. It released a new programming language, Motoko. It built the first non-interactive distributed key generation (DKG) protocol for use in a decentralized network.
Then, in 2025, Williams reappeared – with a message.
He called it the self-writing internet.
According to Williams, here’s how it works:
- AI builds, updates, and manages websites, web apps, and services from natural language prompts.
- Everything runs natively on the Internet Computer – no AWS, no Google Cloud, no centralized databases.
- Applications are tamper-proof by design and immune to traditional cyberattacks.
- Anyone who can speak natural language becomes a potential developer.
The platform doesn’t yet support AI training but does enable secure inference. The promise: apps that are unstoppable, unhackable, and wholly decentralized.
The Big Bet
DFINITY remains a non-profit. Its only mandate is to develop and support the Internet Computer. Williams says the network grew over 500% in 2024. He wants that growth to compound.
“People should have a choice,” he said in Davos. “Right now, you’re captive to the cloud. We’re building public infrastructure for the digital world.”
Already, some services on the Internet Computer run under digital governance systems – managed, updated, and owned by their communities. It’s the DAO dream, but in production. And if the self-writing paradigm works, the number of creators explodes from a few million devs to anyone with a voice.
Williams sees it as economic liberation. But it’s also deeply personal.
Ten years ago, he bet his career on an idea no one believed in. He was mocked, memed, and nearly erased.
Now, he just might get the last word.
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