"Dfinity is well funded for the next 3 years..."

General DFINITY
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I was watching a recent interview to Jan Camenisch (CTO at dfinity). He mentioned that the Foundation has funds to grow “quiet a bit for the following 2 years” and “It is well founded for the next 3 years and then let’s see what comes…”:

Minute 39: https://twitter.com/klever_io/status/1514604508424425472?s=20&t=CVVWV6CR3OiaTadZd7OD9w

That make me wonder about what will happen after 3 years. I personally think is a bit too optimist to assume the foundation can just delegate the project development/maintanance/support/growth effort after just 3 years to the community.
Maybe this has been explained but I cannot recall where/when/how. Could you guys shed some light on what will happen with the Dfinity Foundation after 3 years? what role is expected to play the Foundation? How Dfinity is going to be economically maintained?

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I’ve just created an account to express some thoughts on this topic. I’m a supporter of and investor in the IC, and I would very much like to see the project succeed. I’ve been following it since Genesis, and invested fairly heavily early on and ever since.

From what I can tell, the technology is very solid. In fact, ALL of the numbers (developers, blocks, canisters, speed, etc) look very promising… except for the token price. I have some criticism about the governance philosophy and a few lesser concerns about other things, but the elephant in the room to me has really been the lack of marketing and production.

I was first alerted to this problem when Raoul Pal asked Dominic how he would explain the IC to his own aunt, and the response was something almost nobody’s aunt could understand. This is emblematic of Dfinity: focusing intently on the technology with no apparent concern for how the wider community views the project.

There’s not much to find on YouTube either, with just a couple regular bloggers speaking over some graphs from their bedrooms. When I heard about the new marketing hire and saw the Hackathon event advertised, I was excited to see what the Dfinity team could put together.

Suffice to say it was painful to watch. For a team so focused on technology, there seemed to be virtually ZERO production value in the live stream, which was essentially a work-from-home Zoom session. There were technical problems throughout, speakers seemed unprepared, backgrounds and staging were lame, sound quality was poor, and the overall feeling was boring. Yes, the winning projects looked interesting when I could discern what they offered, but imo this was simply not a fun event to watch, and I can’t imagine it winning new converts to the cause.

I understand that technology is the focus at Dfinity, and I really am on board with that. I also don’t mean to disparage anyone’s efforts. And I think that after a slow start, Dominic has been doing an excellent job on Twitter this year defending the IC and promoting it.

This is only an attempt to help the project along by pointing out a serious void in its marketing that could be greatly improved with relatively little effort. How much that matters to Dfinity of course will be up to its management to decide.

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Firstly, welcome to the forum Jonathan! I’m also fellow newcomer to the scene.

I have nothing substantial to add to your remarks; other than – I thoroughly agree. Your comments stating, “…Painful to watch” especially resonated with me. Your additional comments on the video with Dominic and Raoul is SO spot on. Like water and oil.

Such a promising hackathon event was utterly degraded by an apparent lack of care on the production front… Even the very ‘cut’ of the video was haphazard at best. Take that back – it was completely absent. Nothing panned, no cuts of the voice feedback during the beginning, an hour plus of stagnant video, presenters not being aware of their presentation slots…

I’m honestly extremely disappointed and my sentiment 100% echoes the very remarks you have made. The team needs to take a more concerted approach when structuring presentations, marketing, advocacy, etc.

If this post is of no value, let me leave you with this:

Our community depends on voices like yours. You bring a refreshing, holistic perspective to our community. (Predominantly run by tech heavy geniuses who are perhaps a bit myopic on the EQ front)

Though salt is the foundation of flavor, the spice cabinet isn’t merely filled with salt. Salt acts as the foundation for flavor. But when you combine salt w/Pepper, Garlic, Onion Powder, Chilis, Herbs – you create something beautiful. A liquid SOUPmocracy. (Sorry :sweat_smile:)

I love this community. I love the Kyle and Jesse Podcast. I love Dominic’s persevering character. Most importantly – I LOVE THIS TECH. Please Dfinity team, I beg of you, allocate additional resources to the Marketing/Production/Advocacy front. Stop the emphatic tech, tech, tech with a total disregard for marketing and production value. It is neglectful to the very technology you have created.

P.S – Sorry for the redundant use of words. Much Love ICP fam.

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Thank you for the welcome, ICP :relaxed:

I do fear that the presentation of the IC to the public has so far done more harm than good.

It is one thing to simply ignore advertising altogether, relying on word of mouth through technological superiority (a la Google in the late 90s). It is quite another thing to summon an audience and thoroughly disappoint them.

As you suggested, this product deserves a packaging that doesn’t demean it’s value.

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Perhaps the target audience was different than what you were expecting? I , for one, really liked the tech laden presentations. I learnt a lot without the marchitecture. The glitches, some omissions…par for the course…for me.

I wasn’t expecting to watch Hamilton. If I was, I would be at Broadway. It was a hackathon!

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I know dfinity doesn’t do marketing that seems “the cheap”.
It looks like dfinity is trying to market it to be “the expensive”.
I wonder what their strategy is

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I think “well funded for next 3 years” means Dfinity can keep supporting the projects build on ICP for 3 years, which makes sense because the 3 years is enough for a L-1 blockchain bootstrap, then the IC econ approach self-governed and decentralization. Or Dfinity raise the venture round which is a total different story.

Personally speaking, I dont worry about Dfinity funding at all, but concerned about the decentralization. Currently there are very few nodes join IC network, and most of them are controlled by Dfinity. How to scale the network and attract millions miners to join the network? If Dfinity can’t scale the network within 3 years but run out of money, how IC data center survives… I am not working for dfinity, maybe I am over thinking.

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Hi, please can you provide source of information for such statement?

From my understanding:

  • IC nodes are hosted by independent providers
  • there is no problem with interest in becoming a node provider, but the conditions/SLAs are quite hard
  • decentralisation in IC is more about getting ICP into more (voting) hands
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Hi there, reasonable question. I can shed some light here. There are two threads that I can clarify:

  1. Long Term Goal - DFINITY’s is structured as a non-profit and it intends to be an active player in the IC for decades. There is a reason Dom published his 20 year plan. DFINITY sees its funding NOT like a company’s runway, but more like a long-term endowment an R&D university would have (e.g. Stanford or ETH Zurich). I have talked to Jan and the intent behind his comment from April 2022, was less about the long term funding of DFINITY, but addressing a common question he gets (“how will crypto winter affect DFINITY?”). The answer here is clear: Even without selling a single token in its treasury, DFINITY is not concerned with the crypto winter. That is why he put the 3 years number. He did not intend to mean that future was uncertain beyond that… more trying to clarify that DFINITY is protected from short term market forces.

  2. Community involvement - It is also very clear that DFINITY wants to encourage via grants, community talks, tooling, dashboards, etc… to have the community lift more and more of the weight of the development and adoption of the IC. That is 100% the long term goal of DFINITY as well.

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Thank you for the detailed and clear answer

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you are very much welcome!

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I for one am very happy that Jan Camenisch spoke about short-term funding. I am not worried about the long term. We know that Dfinity holds an enormous amount of ICP and should be able to continue working on interest from tokens provided the token has sufficient value. Most of us here are also confident that ICP will gain that sufficient value by around mid-2025. Frankly, if it does not do so, it means we misjudged demand for the tech, and therefore the long term becomes pretty irrelevant. The major question for me was not about the long term, surprisingly, but about the short term, the next three years. I had heard nothing reassuring about Dfinity’s reserves of cash before Camenisch’s comments, and am grateful for his clarification.

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I too really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to clarify the funding strategy. Thank you.

This does, to my mind, take some pressure off the token price as an immediate concern.

At the same time… the IC is going to hit a billion blocks in less than a week, and I hope the marketing team has something planned :slightly_smiling_face:

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Here is some resource. I didn’t verify it but I believe it’s most likely true: 80% of ICPs nodes are held by just 8 separate node provider entities

I do not want to argue with more than 50% means “most” or which VCs bought the nodes are not Dfinity’s stake holders. If IC would like to be more phenomenal than ETH, they must admitted it is a long way to go for governance and decentralization.

Moreover, I don’t doubt the leadership of Dfinity since they did the very good job to onboard community and developers. I hope the decentralization would be realized under Dfinity leadership.

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@Jonathan I agree the presentation of many videos is not reassuring.

But as a software developer the thing I really see is missing is benchmark data. Dom’s claimed IC will compete with and displace AWS. Ok.

Where is the reproducible apples-to-apples benchmark for a realistic Wasm app running on IC vs AWS Lambda vs CloudFlare Workers? I want to see throughput, latency, and cost numbers, plus some commentary on ease of use and security.

Other AWS challengers post this kind of thing.

If I was an investor or board member I’d expect to see that too.

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For example there was a video a few months ago on Youtube. The presentation was not very impressive.

But, more importantly they quoted a storage price which was several times what it would be on AWS, without explaining why anyone should think this was competitive…

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I would say give it some time. The IC still has tons of development to do before it can compare to AWS, which is a fully developed product.

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I don’t expect feature parity. Maybe it’s too early to be cost and performance competitive. But it has been reportedly >100 engineers for 5 years.

I feel like if I spent years many millions building an infrastructure product that directly competes with X on price and performance, my execs, board, and customers would want to see benchmarks against X. In fact they have demanded that of me. Especially by the point I say it’s GA.

CockroachDB, CloudFlare R2, Snowflake, as upstart infra platforms all have benchmarks up on the web.

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To be honest, I really don’t understand what ICP is doing. Ghost, as the first Stormtrooper in the ICP, has an attitude of not caring and not promoting. At the peak of ghost, there were problems with the underlying technology of ICP, which caused the loss of ghost. May I ask why the technology that ICP is proud of failed at this time? I think you think there is no problem with the technology entering the board, but the results are not available, and you do not want to spend money on promotion. I really want to know how ICP is strategically planned?

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IIRC the issue was with the ghost canister, not the IC itself.

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