Dominic Williams,founder of ICP

Dominic Williams founded Fight My Monster, an online multiplayer game where players create, collect, trade and battle their own monsters. It passed one million players by 2012 — an early achievement that shaped his experience building digital worlds and online communities long before DFINITY.

Before DFINITY, Dominic Williams was already deep in distributed systems and cryptography. Around 2013–2014 he built Pebble, an experimental cryptocurrency exploring novel consensus and scalability ideas — the first public sketch of the thinking that would later become the Internet Computer.

Working through Pebble's limits, Williams focused on the core obstacle facing every chain of the era: throughput. The question that drove the next decade of his work was simple to state and brutally hard to solve — could a blockchain run at web speed without sacrificing decentralization?

Williams founded the DFINITY Foundation in 2016 to build a decentralized cloud. Backed by a research team and early supporters, the foundation set out to replace the traditional IT stack with a public network that could host software directly — no servers, no cloud vendor, no gatekeeper.

DFINITY introduced its threshold-relay consensus and a chain-key cryptography roadmap, letting a network of independent nodes produce randomness and signatures together. It was the technical foundation for a chain that could scale horizontally instead of bottlenecking on a single validator set.

Williams began describing the goal as a "World Computer" — a single, infinitely scalable public compute platform that could run any application, from social networks to enterprise systems, entirely on-chain. The pitch reframed blockchain from a ledger into a general computing substrate.

In May 2021 the Internet Computer mainnet went live, with the ICP utility token launching alongside it. For the first time, developers could deploy web-serving canisters to a public network and run them at web speed — Williams' decade-long thesis, shipped.

The Internet Computer now hosts thousands of on-chain apps, and the World Computer idea continues to evolve through the DFINITY Foundation's research. This page is an independent tribute to that story — built on Soon, for $DOMINIC, and not affiliated with DFINITY or the Internet Computer.