DW
Dominic Williams is a British programmer and entrepreneur who founded the DFINITY Foundation in October 2016 and serves as its chief scientist.
A computer science graduate of King's College, Cambridge, he conceived the Internet Computer in 2015 out of ideas circulating in the early Ethereum community about a world computer that cannot be shut down. He set up DFINITY while in Palo Alto, and the organization became a Swiss nonprofit foundation with its main base in Zurich.
DFINITY raised about 195 million dollars in 2018 from backers including Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital, and the Internet Computer network and its ICP token launched in May 2021. Williams remains the project's main technical and public voice.
Since 2025 he has concentrated on Caffeine, an AI platform that builds and hosts applications on the Internet Computer from natural language prompts, and on positioning the network as a sovereign cloud for AI. In January 2026 he authored the Mission 70 whitepaper, which proposes cutting ICP inflation by about 70 percent.
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Latest interview · Jan 27, 2023Dominic Williams on building a decentralized internet with DfinityWatch the episode →
Key points
- Internet Computer is a third-generation blockchain designed to run smart contracts with efficiency comparable to traditional IT infrastructure.
- Most Web3 services claiming to run on blockchain actually rely on centralized cloud providers like AWS for user experience and data storage.
- Internet Computer enables smart contracts to serve web experiences directly to browsers and process HTTP requests without centralized intermediaries.
- Dfinity developed novel cryptography allowing blockchain code to create signed transactions on other blockchains without private keys.
- Decentralized applications like social networks can only be truly community-controlled through DAOs if the entire service runs on-chain rather than in cloud infrastructure.
In their own words
“If you run something in the cloud, someone has put their credit card into that account.”
“Web3 is going to beat Web2 through network effects and by co-opting users as founders.”
