Tether Buys $200M Majority Stake in Brain-Computer Interface Company Blackrock Neurotech
The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the company's medical devices.
24H Price
The Internet Computer price is $12.06, a change of 2.21% over the past 24 hours as of 2:05 a.m. The recent price action in Internet Computer left the tokens market capitalization at $5.60B. So far this year, Internet Computer has a change of -11.57%. Internet Computer is classified as a Smart Contract Platform under CoinDesks Digital Asset Classification Standard (DACS).
ICP serves as the native cryptocurrency for Internet Computer, a blockchain platform aiming to revolutionize internet applications. It achieves this by offering faster and more scalable smart contracts. Internet Computer employs a hybrid proof-of-stake consensus, combining permissioned and permissionless structures. Governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), it seeks to harness the efficiency of permissioned networks and the decentralization of permissionless networks.
Notably, ICP's smart contracts have the ability to store data, perform computations, and serve web pages directly on the blockchain. This innovative approach eliminates the reliance on third-party cloud or private hosting services. In essence, Internet Computer functions as a decentralized, blockchain-based internet, providing users with increased control over their data.
DACS Sector: Smart Contract Platform
Internet Computer features two types of tokens:
Unlike the case with some other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, there’s no supply cap on the total number of ICP tokens. Thirty-eight percent of the initial supply went to investors and 62% to the founders and team.
When ICP was launched in May 2021 following five years of development, its price hit its all-time high of $460.84. But the price swiftly tanked by 95% to $34 in June and then went even lower to $28.01 in July 2021. At the time, the Dfinity Foundation, the nonprofit organization that developed the Internet Computer blockchain, told CoinDesk that the drop was likely because the token started trading at the height of a crypto-wide bull run.
For the rest of 2021, ICP's price stabilized. It climbed to a peak of $84.75 in August, but since that time, it traded between $20 and $60 (as of January 2022).
The creators of Internet Computer want to use blockchain technology to decentralize the entire internet, making tech giants less powerful. They are trying to do so, not by building one massive blockchain, but by arranging the blockchain into a set of "subnets" that hold a smaller piece of the blockchain. The team claims to have invented new cryptography called “Chain Key” that ties these separate pieces together in a secure way.
To create decentralized applications on the Internet Computer blockchain, developers run their programs on so-called "canisters," which each have a storage capacity of 4 gigabytes. The canisters are smart contracts, which is software code enabled by blockchains that makes it easier to remove intermediaries from digital interactions. But the storage capacity of canisters is bigger than that of normal smart contracts. Canisters are also supposed to be more performant than other smart contracts, which generally take a lot of computational power to run.
Computer programmer and entrepreneur Dominic Williams is the founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation, and he has invented many of the technical and cryptographic innovations that are part of the Internet Computer protocol.
Dfinity, which was founded in 2014, has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital and Scalar Capital.It introduced an “alpha version” of Internet Computer in December 2020 and launched its first real version of the platform the following May.
The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the company's medical devices.
The investment firm sold 237,983 BITO shares worth $6.7 million at Thursday's closing price of $28.22 from its Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW)
Just three cryptos in the index posted losses, led by Avalanche's 7.5% decline.
ARK sold Coinbase shares from ARK Innovation ETF, ARK Next Generation Internet ETF, and ARK Fintech Innovation ETF.
Thomas Hogan, Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, discusses the current state of U.S Read more...
CoinDesk’s Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Calculator determines the exchange rates between major fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies – including BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP to USD, EUR, GBP, IDR and NGN – with up to six decimal places of accuracy. Conversion rates are based on CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index and the price indices of other digital assets. World currency prices are based on rates obtained via Open Exchange Rates.
Diving in deeper on cryptocurrency.