Author: Haotian-CryptoInsight
Unexpectedly, @caffeineai's outstanding performance has brought the long-dormant ICP back into the spotlight. But what are the truly "buried" technological highlights of ICP? Let me briefly share my thoughts:
1) First, let me explain an embarrassing reality to those who are unfamiliar with the concept: Recently, AWS experienced issues, and a large number of web3 public chains also went down. Many people find this laughable—why should blockchain, which claims to be decentralized, rely on web2 cloud service infrastructure?
In fact, many DeFi applications we are familiar with only have contracts on-chain; the front-end relies on AWS, DNS is controlled by ISPs, and CDN depends on Cloudflare... To put it bluntly, the decentralized applications that users perceive can easily "collapse" if a domain name is blocked or a server is hacked, leading many to criticize them as "pseudo-decentralized." ICP is the optimal solution to this problem. Its overall architecture compiles both the front-end and back-end onto the blockchain, allowing the entire application to run on-chain, truly realizing decentralized applications. 2) Due to the significant differences between ICP's technical aspects and current mainstream public blockchain technology paradigms, I will highlight a few key points: 1. Reverse Gas: This changes the user-paid gas model, allowing developers to pre-burn ICP for computing fuel, which users can then use for free. This essentially adopts the mature free + value-added service business model of Web2, where developers, including YouTube, Spotify, and Notion, bear the infrastructure maintenance costs and then recoup them through subscriptions or value-added services. The question arises: why would developers spend money to cultivate users? This is likely the reason for ICP's long-term sluggish ecosystem. However, the emergence of products like Caffeine might be a turning point. The Vibe coding model significantly reduces development and maintenance costs, and the consumption brought by x402 makes "burning money to cultivate users" feasible. 2. Chain-Key technology, through a threshold signature protocol, can directly generate ECDSA signatures, natively holding assets on any chain such as BTC, ETH, and SOL, without requiring any bridges or wrapped versions. In other words, the multi-chain interoperability solutions achieved by other public chains over the years through cross-chain bridges and wrapped encapsulations, along with the costs of hacker attacks and liquidity dispersion, are no longer a problem with ICP. Similarly, its built-in free oracle works similarly. Another question arises: if cross-chain solutions can be solved directly at the cryptographic layer, what is the point of the DeFi Lego building accumulated over the years? I don't think there's a conflict. ICP simply provides a more fundamental solution, and its value still needs the rise of its ecosystem to validate. This doesn't negate our existing foundation in the DeFi world. 3. Large-capacity on-chain storage: ICP's smart contracts can store 52GB of data at a cost of approximately $5 per GB per year. This is key to its difference from Ethereum's high storage costs associated with state machines. This also means that videos, images, and large-scale datasets can be stored directly on-chain, eliminating the need to rely on IPFS or centralized storage. This is why it achieves full-stack on-chain storage, enabling truly decentralized applications. We seem to have become accustomed to the on-chain + off-chain combination model driven by "pure financial transactions." However, to explore potential large-scale commercial scenarios such as AI Agents, full-chain games, and peer-to-peer SocialFi, we must desensitize ourselves to the concept of on-chain storage. I believe that's when ICP will truly shine. 3) In any case, the fact that ICP can return to the mainstream and allow everyone to genuinely appreciate the allure of technological superiority is, in my opinion, a brand new beginning. Caffeine, in particular, has truly instilled confidence in the ICP ecosystem. In the past, when people learned about ICP, they were told it boasted about being a world computer and achieving 210,000 TPS—it sounded impressive, but who cared? Now, let's experience the magic of Caffeine: AI chat generates applications in 10 minutes, all fully on-chain, and users can use it for free. Isn't that more appealing? In short: Caffeine has brought attention and traffic to ICP, and more importantly, a good start for the ICP ecosystem. Moreover, I'm genuinely bullish. If ICP can act as a super facilitator, connecting to the x402 protocol and other chains to achieve ecosystem interoperability, x402, as a similarly decentralized underlying infrastructure, has payment infrastructure and a large on-chain ecosystem, but lacks practical applications. ICP, on the other hand, can generate numerous applications but lacks a stable payment and consumption ecosystem to support it. What kind of extraordinary cryptocurrency will this complementary approach, leveraging each other's strengths, bring?
Weiliang
Miyuki
Brian
Alex
Joy