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<aside> <img src="/icons/infinity_purple.svg" alt="/icons/infinity_purple.svg" width="40px" /> Introducing ICP
The Internet Computer (IC) is a decentralized global compute platform which uses ground-breaking blockchain technology to achieve consensus within subnets. It is globally distributed in numerous independent data centers, is tamper proof and unstoppable. ICP refers to the Internet Computer Protocol, and it's also the name of the native token used within the Internet Computer ecosystem.
It can serve applications fully on-chain without needing any centralized frontend layer. It is extremely efficient and is several orders of magnitude cheaper to run and store data than most other blockchains. It uses a reverse-gas model so computation and storage costs are paid by the app/service providers rather than users.
Applications on the IC are composed of canister smart-contracts organized into subnets. A subnet can contain 100,000s of canisters and is composed of (typically 13) node machines each of which runs in a different independent data center around the globe such that the nodes within each subnet are as geographically and jurisdictionally diverse as possible. Canisters can communicate securely with canisters on other subnets allowing the IC to scale horizontally.
A canister runs on a virtual machine (as a WASM) that is replicated across a subnet. It implements the actor model, and so is single threaded, processing a queue of input messages one at a time, optionally sending messages to other canisters, and adding a response message to an output queue.
It can be called by clients (or other canisters) using queries or updates. A query can be served immediately from any node but cannot change state. An update can change state and goes through a process of consensus for the nodes to agree on the same result before responding to the caller. Achieving consensus is where the blockchain comes into play but is beyond the scope of this document.
Canisters have the property of orthogonal persistence, which means as a programmer you just write data objects to memory and they are automatically persisted by the system. This removes the need for a database and is one of the reasons writing and running applications on the IC is simplified compared to traditional IT stacks.
A key feature of the Internet Computer blockchain is the Network Nervous System (NNS), an open algorithmic governance system that oversees the network and the token economics. It’s the DAO that governs the Internet Computer.
Holders of the Internet Computer’s ICP utility tokens can lock their tokens in neurons to participate in governance and contribute to decision-making, such as voting to determine whether or not a new subnet should be added to the network. By participating in governance, voters earn rewards which can be converted to ICP. In turn they can burn ICP to fuel the computation of their canisters.
Read here for more information on the NNS.
The Service Nervous System (SNS) is a framework built into the Internet Computer that facilitates the creation and maintenance of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to govern decentralized applications (dapps). It's an advanced form of a DAO, designed to allow communities to govern smart contracts and dapps running on the Internet Computer completely on-chain.
An SNS consists of an open, permissionless governance system and a built-in governance token that is unique to each SNS. This governance system orchestrates decision making and changes, and the unique token is defined by a ledger. The SNS framework also outlines a process for launching a new SNS, which includes raising initial funds for the DAO and decentralizing the DAO’s voting power.
Any dapp on the Internet Computer can be handed over to an SNS, resulting in the dapp being owned and controlled by a community. The control of the dapp is governed by SNS token holders who submit and vote on on-chain proposals. This means that no single developer or group controls the dapp; instead, it's controlled by voting via tokens.
The core architecture of the SNS closely resembles that of the NNS. It includes a governance canister that enables decentralized decision making and a ledger canister that defines a token unique to each SNS.
Read here to know more about SNS.
Credits: This article is partly sourced from OpenChat and the Internet Computer Docs AI.
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