Killer App Matters

Developers
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Killer App Matters — and How One Can Be Built on ICP

Today, there are many blockchains.
Most of them claim to be technically better — faster, cheaper, or more secure.
But history has shown one hard truth:

Technology does not win. Usage does.

This is exactly why a Killer App matters.

What a Killer App Really Is

A Killer App is not just a “good app.”

It is an application that:

  • People use every day

  • Users don’t care what technology it runs on

  • Creates demand for the platform itself, not just a token

  • Turns infrastructure into something indispensable

Windows didn’t win because it was an operating system.
It won because Excel became unavoidable.

Ethereum didn’t succeed just because of smart contracts.
It succeeded because DeFi worked with real money.

ICP’s Situation Today

ICP is one of the most technically advanced blockchains:

  • Full backend + frontend on-chain

  • Web2-level performance

  • Serverless architecture

  • Unique capabilities for AI integration

Yet one problem remains:

People don’t feel the need to use it.

Not because ICP is weak —
but because a true Killer App does not yet exist.

Why a Killer App Is Critical for ICP

ICP is at a transitional moment:

  • The technology is ready

  • Developers are already here

  • Mass users are not

From this point, there are only two paths:

  1. Remain an “engineers’ blockchain”

  2. Become invisible infrastructure for millions

A Killer App is the only thing that decides between these two outcomes.

What a Killer App on ICP Must Look Like

An ICP Killer App:

  • Must not feel like “another crypto app”

  • Must not require seed phrases

  • Must not force users to think about blockchain

A properly built Killer App:

  • Opens in a browser

  • Uses email or passkeys

  • Is fast, cheap, and simple

  • And only later do you realize it runs on ICP

Realistic Directions for ICP

1. AI Applications
On-chain AI assistants or agents that:

  • Are censorship-resistant

  • Do not harvest user data

  • Work like normal web apps

This is where ICP is genuinely unique.

2. Social Platforms
Identity and content on-chain,
but UX on the level of Twitter or TikTok.
People come for the content, not for crypto.

3. Silent Killer Apps (Backend-as-a-Service)
Applications that don’t advertise being Web3 at all.
Just cheap, secure, and stable backend infrastructure.

Conclusion

ICP’s success will not be decided by whitepapers, presentations, or code.

It will be decided by a single question:

Is there an application people can’t live without?

If such an app appears,
ICP becomes essential infrastructure.

If it does not,
ICP remains technically brilliant — but niche.

A Killer App is not an addition.
A Killer App is survival.

3 Likes
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Y-Combinator invests in startups 200–300M USD annually. Just replicate this model. If you don’t - don’t expect same results.

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@dariuszdawidowski I like the direction you are going in.

What would you say is the key difference between the model Dfinity has employed and those used by Y Combinator or other successful startup launchpads and incubators in the crypto space?

Dfinity’s approach has included elements such as:

  • SNS

  • Hubs

  • Developer grants

  • Community grants

  • Neuron Fund

  • Hackathons

  • Event participation

While many of these initiatives appear to be paused at present, they formed the core of Dfinity’s strategy at one point.

Do you believe that allocating an additional $200 million USD annually could have led to greater success under this model?

Additionally, Dfinity’s model has encompassed:

  • Recruiting a large number of academics, including PhDs and professors

  • A philosophy that paying for content indicates weakness, given the superiority of the technology

  • Limited oversight on fund allocation, where some inefficiencies were apparent

  • A stance that, as a foundation, it is not responsible for providing liquidity or engaging market makers

  • Viewing decentralized finance as a temporary trend

  • An expectation that the Internet Computer’s sustainability depends on enterprises shifting from services like AWS to canisters

  • Encouraging the use of a proprietary language over established ones like Python or Rust for IC development

What do you anticipate will be Dfinity’s new approach, and what, in your view, should it entail?

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Yes, I believe. Those initiatives you mentioned are really great and I’m conviced it is a stronger ecosystem than the “ordinary” one. But I need 2-3 years to create a good startup. I cannot eat grass in the meadow during this time and live in a tent.

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Just make an actual casino. This will be the most used app on ICP.

These are the only use cases of crypto atm: Leverage trading, shitcoin speculation, gambling. I suppose porn would work too.

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I have the same feeling, but I’m pretty sure that author of the post also said the same but in other worlds. There are no real everyday apps.

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Rust is the other main language for the IC and is the ideal one to use for speed – that’s why Taggr is so efficient. And didn’t someone make a Python interpreter/compiler for the IC?

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Yeah gambling is one and someone is hiring devs to make one I saw. The idea being that the users can be the “house” essentially via DAO and share in the house’s take along with a “trusted” open source and secured piece of software that can be audited for fairness so people can be confident there is no cheating involved?

Honestly I don’t know how anyone can trust online gambling sites. It is too easy to want to skim or steal or cheat by the developers/owners/inside users.

Having said that I remember “PokerStars”, “FullTilt” and some other poker sites had grown very large and I had a professional poker friend who regularly made bank weekly on these types of sites. He would beat out like hundreds of players with a $200 buy in and cash out 14k - 21k pots regularly before the US gov’t shut down these sites.

The people who lost are the same people who lose at the tables to the undercover professionals and then complain to the government to shut you down. This is why the industry is “regulated” and owned by a corporate monopoly now instead of the mob.

But to be honest, why hasn’t someone made an ICP version of Ebay?

The smart contract acts as an escrow device.

It’s perfect.

That’s how the internet got built. Basically Ebay, Paypal, and Amazon.

Crypto is good for merchants to save on the annoying 2.9% + 30 cents and now higher b.s. of these companies → percentages they will never budge from as middle men dealers for the Visa and Mastercard and the banks. Also to eliminate the ridiculous bank fees like charge back fees of $38+ no matter if you win or lose. The merchant is always forced to lose money. Crypto flips the script as it is essentially a cash payment. Let the merchant decide not the bank or middlemen. PayPal is notorious for favoring consumers over merchants as is Ebay. If you cut out these middlemen, you can offer lower prices to consumers and eliminate a lot of consumer fraud. A lot of what we’re paying for at stores is due to losses.

At the same time, buyers want to be protected.

We should already have an “Escrow dot com” via ICP smart contract as well. Another killer dapp.

This is really not rocket science.

E-commerce, Crypto Website payments, AI agents, Escrow services, etc.

An Amazon that is community owned and operated!

An Airbnb and Uber that are community owned and operated.

A Doordash and Uber Eats that are community owned and operated.

Seriously. ICP can solve all of this for good reasons.

Don’t be afraid to take on “BIG TECH”

By the way, Doordash and Uber Eats UI’s are not great! This is not futuristic ordering by a long shot.

Paying at the grocery stores is a good one too. OISY Pay in Swiss grocery is a good start but they need to allow for ICP to be used as well as BTC, ETH, and USDT.

Since ICP is essentially a stablecoin, it’s perfect for payments! :slight_smile:

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Are you sure that ICP can handle it. I remember someone told that every subnet has rotation query like thing with all canisters. If subnet has too many canisters, they cant handle huge amount of user activity that is coming from single app/canister.

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can’t … there fixed it .

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I think we all agree.

You forgot the most important part though.

:white_check_mark: Solves a real world problem that hasn’t been solved yet, and can’t be solved elsewhere. (or atleast not as well)..

That’s the hard, part. All the money in the world won’t make a killer app if you don’t have that ingredient.

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@SmartMonkey

Thanks for your comment — I appreciate the enthusiasm!

The idea of building a full-blown casino / iGaming platform on ICP has been floated many times, and I completely agree that it could be one of the most popular and high-volume use cases for the chain in early stages.

I’d like to add some context and nuance to why it’s not quite as simple as “just make an actual casino,” while fully acknowledging the massive potential.

Key distinctions in the space:

  • Traditional Casino → Often refers to land-based or nationally regulated gambling.

    iGaming → Online gambling, typically international/global in scope.

  • Finance → Regulated speculative activity (often national).

  • DeFi → Decentralized speculative finance (global, with increasingly favorable regulatory treatment in many jurisdictions).

  • DeFi + Gaming/iGaming → The “Goldilocks zone” where blockchain, finance, and gambling intersect — potentially meeting minimum financial regulations while enabling gamification features.

The core challenge:

iGaming is a heavily regulated activity that sits on top of financial (also regulated) infrastructure.

It requires both gambling-specific licenses and full compliance with financial regulations (AML/CFT/CPF, KYC, payment processing, responsible gaming, etc.). This creates significantly higher barriers than pure DeFi (gamified) applications.

Why iGaming has been slow to adopt ICP (despite interest):

iGaming companies that seriously explored building on ICP — for things like:

  • On-chain wallets

  • Provably fair RNGs

  • Prediction markets

  • Player account management

  • Streaming servers

  • Tokenized revenue sharing

  • High-APY DeFi mechanics to subsidize player rewards
    (50–200% APY on USDT is realistic when backed by house edge)

Companies could bring substantial funding, development teams, marketing budgets, and real volume to the ecosystem.

This could solve valuable problems for them, f.ex responsible (sustainable) gambling but it may have been seen as early messaging and priorities from the foundation appeared to de-emphasize or discourage any financial transactions (especially iGaming) on the chain.

The focus seemed to be on non-financial applications, e.g., hosting games without money movement like Boom Dao. (Dfinity favored games on-chain but rejected game related transactions?)

For iGaming operators, even a small pilot with real financial flows is a prerequisite — if the chain can’t reliably handle millions of financial transactions, they won’t trust it with billions of non-financial game transactions.

The opportunity still exists

ICP’s tech stack (fully on-chain frontends, low-cost canisters, reverse gas model, AI integration potential) is uniquely well-suited for innovative iGaming/DeFi hybrids:

  • AI-driven personalized gaming experiences

  • True provable fairness

  • Sustainable high-yield player rewards funded by house edge

  • Global, borderless access with decentralized identity

If the ecosystem becomes more open and supportive of financial use cases (even regulated ones), I believe iGaming could still become one of ICP’s killer applications — driving massive adoption, liquidity, and developer activity.

Gambling (iGaming) is not simple -

It’s a highly regulated industry, and for them it’s hard to operate (raise funding) here when not wanted.

Imagine a world where they go through the licensing, bring in their own funding, investors, developer teams, and marketing, and then are denied a SNS because they want to record financial transactions on-chain.

Clearly, they will go the route of less resistance, going with the flow and not against it :rocket:

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I like that blockchain foundations are giving grants…..
But 2 - 3 Years of runway seems like a lot of grants :thinking:

Normally, don’t start-ups raise funding over and over to survive the burn while they are scaling and working towards profitability?

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Yes, can be broken down into rounds. The technical details of funding sources are a different matter. The point is more that the question of why such applications don’t exist is simple: The teams are not lack skills, imagination or ideas but funding. In the same time typical VC funding is toxic.

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This really resonates with me. The “killer app” framing is spot on, users shouldn’t need to care (or even know) that they’re using blockchain at all.

I’m currently building CheddaBoards, which is very much aligned with this idea: a normal, fast web app for games and creators (leaderboards, achievements, player profiles, dashboards) where ICP is purely the invisible backend. No tokens, no seed phrases, no crypto UX, just something people use every day.

Curious to hear more thoughts on what people here think actually drives daily usage on ICP. I think infra-level apps that quietly power lots of products might be just as important as one big consumer-facing hit.

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#1 is surprising that it even computed. It shows a complete ignorance of how corporates make decisions, particularly in areas where they have already committed 100s of millions, and years (or a couple of decades) on the grinder. There is absolutely 0 chance that shift will happen in any reasonable timeframe. No critical infrastructure will be substituted by any major corporate from whatever it runs on to canisters. Thinking otherwise is overdosing in magic mushrooms.

And then expecting to compete head to head with AWS or Google. On what? On ideology? Because, pound for pound, they are so many orders of magnitude bigger that even thinking about it is really insane.

Speaking of which: if they believe your tech stack is so superior at scale, they would have already attempted to acquire you. I know this from first hand experience with Google (in our case: we rejected an offer from Google for $220 million, and the next day they announced they were buying our direct competitor; within a year we sold to Neustar for $190 million more… but that’s how they operate).

Concerning #2, again look at Google and their GCUL solution. Tailored for financial services, what did they realize (well, you don’t need to be Einstein to figure it out)? 95% of the back office folks on Wall Street use Python; in fact, much of the proprietary stuff run by Jane St., Blackrock, you name it, is coded in Python because their quants use Python as tool of choice. Did they try to push, dunno, Go? Some proprietary stuff? Nope, GCUL runs in Python, meaning that integration chores, dedicated staff, training, all of that, is out of the table. Plug and play. And I’m not saying Motoko is a waste of time (hey, I’m coding on it) given the tech stack it’s optimized for, but that becomes a barrier to adoption. Google was smart and shipped a product their intended customer base can use pretty quick.

Just my 2c.

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I like this sentence :rofl: :rofl:

Anyway… AI bubble is a good example why only money matters not a tech:

Many of these successful startups could have been founded 20 years ago and used OpenCV (an AI library from early 2000’s). But they wouldn’t have gotten funding because nobody was interested in AI back then.

In many cases, they don’t need a modern LLM at all really. Worse still, it’s even a hindrance. I recently saw a very successful round from a startup that predicted floods. What the f*** do they need an LLM opinion on this topic instead of train OpenCV (or whatever) on flood and terrain data? But the money is rolling in, because who cares about technology…

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But to be honest, why hasn’t someone made an ICP version of Ebay?

We already got an ICP version of something that’s competitive with its Web2 alternatives, that being OpenChat. On top of being a fully featured chat app (videos calls, spaces, etc), it has the security property of DAO-governance, plus extensive crypto-specific features like p2p swaps. If the killer dapp thats gets ICP mass adoption is just a superior alternative to Web2 counterparts, OpenChat should’ve done that already.
Why hasn’t it? Well, people are pretty cozy where they are.

I think the killer dapp would need to be novel and controversial.
ICP has cool security properties, but do people really care that much? A sovereign network should host something that’d be not-so-easy to host on Web2.

We need something that we can tell our friends about, our friends having reason to check it out and try it and having reason to tell their friends about it.

Do we have that?
uhh yeah you should try openchat its like a super secure chat app and you can trade crypto on there
clown is like this social mining utility protocol where people can pay people to post about what you want
taco dao is this experiment in asset management that relies on some wisdom of the crowd theory
this gambling app is fully on-chain so you know the code is running as it should

i don’t think any of these are quite there yet.

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Openchat has the biggest chance to penetrate the market in a world where chat privacy is endangered, I’m rooting for them.

I just hope their revenue model is sustainable until they get some traction outside of ICP.

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@EdSalazar

An expectation that the Internet Computer’s sustainability depends on enterprises shifting from services like AWS to canisters

Encouraging the use of a proprietary language over established ones like Python or Rust for IC development

Circling back, my argument is not that this cannot be done or should not be attempted.

But it may make sense to focus first on the lowest-hanging fruit — areas that generate value earlier and help fund and achieve longer-term goals.

@TrickyVik

ICP has strong security properties, but do people really care that much?

I’ve spoken with individuals in IT security - vendors, distributors, resellers, and developers.

In most cases, there needs to be a clearly packaged product that can be delivered and sold.

Most users will not choose software vendors that is not recognised or promoted by established distributors in their nation, and regional resellers are unlikely to offer products they cannot easily install, manage, or upgrade together with local partners.

This raises questions about how easy it actually is to deploy, maintain, and upgrade systems like Utopia, and whether this requires Motoko.

But something that people do care about is crypto financial infrastructure.

Bitcoin has been the best-performing asset class for close to 20 years, and growth continues as sovereign wealth funds, central banks, payment companies, and Wall Street increasingly enter the space. With a market capitalisation of around $3 trillion today, many expect this sector to continue growing exponentially over the coming years, potentially reaching $100–300 trillion in value, with quadrillion-dollar annual transaction volumes over the longer term.

The old financial system is gradually merging with the new.

I believe that when ICP’s price previously exceeded $600, it was largely driven by speculation that best-in-class blockchain technology would play a major role in crypto financial infrastructure, not replace firewalls, Rust or Python.

When I first learned about ICP, I did not expect such a strong emphasis on being a “world computer,” serverless cloud, security, AI, or related areas. It was my understanding this could be one of the best tech for financial infrastructure.

I expected infrastructure scaling financial applications on other blockchains

The NNS is amazing
The SNS is good and can be amazing
MultiChain, ChainFusion, ISO 20022 support

I remain very open minded, I do not have a crystal ball or inside knowledge
Just one person talking his book, and expressing my wants and beliefs

But I do believe that quadrillion dollar volumes are coming down the road - when it comes, it probably comes to those blockchains which we said “WILL GO TO ZERO”. Those blockchains with less good technology which are now up hundreds of percent related to ICP.

It was never about them having better technology, but people vibes with things they care about and understand and having stronger ecosystems does allow companies to scale and grow.

Its like football, you love and support your team even if they are ‘ship‘ -

Price is important for ICP, as it is not a 1:1-backed stablecoin but an elastic utility token with supply expansion and contraction mechanisms

I think NNS / SNS is ‘a’ killer app and many would appreciate it when they learn about it. Perhaps in the future when the technology is safe enough you can have Caffeine Integrating with the SNS, and the SNS integrating with exchanges and liquidity pools.