The distributed ledger technology startup, DFINITY, which is based out of Switzerland has raised $102 million in capital to help fulfil its mission of creating a ‘internet computer.’ DFINITY aims to provide a network based on the blockchain to sustain and promote the new generation of mega-applications.
DFINITY has coined its public network, ‘Cloud 3.0’ which it aims to launch by the tail end of 2018. The internet computer being created by the blockchain project aims to utilise the millions of nodes scattered worldwide and combine them in an effort to create a public and low-cost computing resource.
The funding that DFINITY acquired has been a joint effort with Andreesen Horrowitz’s A16z crypto and Polychain capital, who were also involved previously with DFINITY’s last fundraising effort that resulted in $61 million being raised.
According to Chris Dixon, a venture-stage investor at Andreessen Horowitz, “Decentralized computation networks like DFINITY stand to bring us closer to a world where digital platforms can be constructed from trustless, autonomous, and open source software that is owned and governed by communities of users and developers, rather than companies.”
Were DFINITY to succeed in its mission of creating a internet computer, it could possess a serious threat to large corporations along with the current leading blockchain protocol, Ethereum. Although DFINITY aims to resolve Ethereum’s scalability issues with its platform, Chris Dixon negated any claims of competition between the two and stated that the services should instead be viewed as being complementary to one another.
The reason why DFINITY having raised such a huge chunk of capital is noteworthy when compared to its competitors is that Andreessen Horowitz has opted to receive DFINITY tokens rather than traditional private shares. A key difference between the two at this stage is that DFINITY token would be a standard of equity that the firm wouldn’t be able to divest for at least three years.
