By design, blockchain technology creates alternatives outside of traditional structures of power. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the inspiration for the Bitcoin network was that a universal, secure, and decentralized digital currency system would eliminate the need for intermediaries like banks. Later, Ethereum pushed this forward by implementing smart contracts and DeFi, pointing the way to a programmable future where finance is simply one variety of blockchain’s application.
This vision of universal and secure computing now extends to the open web, just as the public’s awareness of the power that corporate gatekeepers and intermediaries have over the internet is coming into focus. Building on the principles of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Internet Computer blockchain supports scalable smart contracts that can deliver interactive web content directly to end users without the need for corporate platforms — a fundamental breakthrough with the potential to reshape the web as we know it.
Bitcoin (BTC) showed the world what is possible. The original blockchain is permissionless, because you don’t need a third party’s consent, as well as trustless, because the network reaches consensus via decentralized computation. Peer-to-peer connections replace corporate terms and conditions, and universal access to financial goods and services relies solely on having an internet connection.
Ethereum, the world’s second-biggest blockchain by market cap, innovated on what worked so well with Bitcoin. Ethereum added smart contracts or self-executing software programs to the idea of digital finance. The resulting programmability of blockchain is what made the recent DeFi boom possible.
But significant scaling issues remain. A new Bitcoin block is created roughly every 10 minutes, which produces slow and expensive transactions. Though interoperability via smart contract standardization on Ethereum means that projects and developers can build on previous work rather than start from scratch, the network’s throughput is low and congestion is high. Operating or accessing a program running on Ethereum, such as a decentralized application (dapp), token, or NFT, also requires ether (ETH), the network’s native currency, in order to pay expensive fees to cover the cost of computation.
