Damir

Hi Dom, Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response. I want to begin where I agree with you to establish that our common ground is solid, and then to clearly mark where I disagree, which certainly isn't with everything you say, quite the contrary. To begin with I am very deeply convinced of the correctness of the fundamentals in your approach to the World Computer. In my opinion, you cracked it, one of the biggest and most challenging software architecture problems to date, and you will go down in history books for it if you play this right. I also share your enthusiasm for AI and the effect it is having on our industry. I couldn't agree more with you that everyone who creates software is a dev. If you ask an AI to check my post history I think you will find it that I am an early and consistent champion of this view, and that I am constantly stating ICP is the best platform to do it. I use AI (Cursor, Opus 4.6) to produce code at breakneck speed every day, my AI bills are thousands of dollars every month. I have been using AI assisted coding for about 1.5 years by now. I worked as a Manager at Windows in Redmond when we pivoted to AI, on several cutting edge AI initiatives. In short, I am on board with AI. I have 3 decades in the industry and my specialty is in domain and aspect oriented programming, scaling distributed systems, transparent persistence (EOP is a masterpiece) and domain specific languages. What am I doing on ICP you might ask? I have spent my whole life on the cutting edge of software development, and I am testing the waters. There are some key figures in this industry, that when you win them over, most of the battle is won. Champions on the inside. The people who give the final decision makers the heads up when a promising technology comes on the scene, and the final nod of approval when adopting the tech is on the table. They have the trust of the company, something your salesmen will never have. And you can't fake it, this is the real sort of due diligence that will figure out if you will sink or swim before they even start a conversation. Please take a moment to read this open letter to you and Dfinity from one such key figure, who has been evaluating the ICP platform for over a year, investing his most valuable time to kick the tires. He's being very humble but believe me when I say that the software he works on makes enough in yearly revenue to make all the numbers we throw around on ICP look tiny. Get a few key insiders like that on your side, and suddenly we are all in a very different place with regards to potential mass adoption. Lose their trust, and it can be over forever. forum.dfinity.org/t/an-open-lett… And he is not alone. The point is that almost all builders I am aware of who are still struggling along on ICP despite zero profitability so far anywhere on the platform are doing so for an underlying reason. We are testing the waters. Kicking the tires. Doing our due diligence. We are generally deeply experienced and highly succesfull tech veterans who understand the value of a true, decentralized application platform - if it holds water. Many of us have connection, leads, pathways, the ears of insiders, such that if this tech delivers what it promises, there are real ways to crank up the volume and make some real things happen. So when so many of us are now screaming at the top of our lungs that the planned mission 70 gas cost increases are going to kill the viability of most projects on ICP, including many that have been working for a long time in stealth mode and will now just have to silently scrap their plans instead of releasing, please don't make the mistake of thinking we don't know what we're talking about, that we simply have no experience in building profitable apps, and that seeing us leave wouldn't be the end of ICP. We have spent years mapping the cycle costs of ICP operations, tweaking, optimizing, finding every trick in the book to make real applications on ICP work - because we really, really want it to be able to work! The promise is fantastic. But the truth is it doesn't work, not yet. It has to keep getting better, and it has to keep getting *cheaper*, to have any meaningful chance at mass adoption. Why are there no profitable apps? Because there are no ads, no DeFi liquidity, and nobody wants to pay to own their blog posts or JPEG NFTs. We will see if Sneed DAO can finally break open the wApp market you predicted a few years ago with our Sneedapp canister minting app store and our user-owned-canister Trading Bots, the world's first 100% on-chain, fully non-custodial trading engine - all of it up for release this week on Sneed Hub. Speaking of the dead NFT market, it should be pointed out clearly since you keep returning to the new "blob storage" that when we talk about gas being too expensive, nobody is talking about photos or video files. I don't know anybody who thinks NFTs might make a comeback, even if the JPEGs are on-chain. Videos on-chain have little benefit to users except for some possible ownership aspects (that could easily be handled in other ways) but, again, it turns out nobody wants to pay to "own" their blog or vlog post. That said, besides Yral I don't know anyone who attempted to put video on-chain because it is quite obviously a terrible idea, so the blob storage will be relevant for maybe a handful of apps at best. What we're talking about - what all of us front line entrepreneurs are trying to prove that it can be done to lead the way for real adoption - is to use ICP as a real World Computer, in the way it was designed to be used. Real business logic, running on-chain. This is the core. Structured data. This is what EOP makes better, not storing binaries. For processing customer requests, for storing orders, for handling complex business flows, automated back office, etc etc. This is, most certainly, what ICP from day one has claimed to be good at - and it is, unless we suddenly make it far too expensive! This is ICP's core value proposition. Many of the attempts at finding a PMF on ICP have had nothing to do with crypto. For this excursion into essentially untested tech to be worth it for many of us veterans, it has to be the case that ICP is evaluated for much bigger things. I have thus made Sneed Forum to see for myself how feasible social media on ICP is from a technical perspective, and believe me I have learned a lot. The answer is: not yet, but almost. If you want details, I am available. I have made Swaprunner to see if there's any way in making profits from trade volumes by always providing the best prices to all users - the answer is no, there is not enough liquidity/volume in the ICP ecosystem. I have made ecosystem explorers (transactions, neurons, proposals, canisters, you name it) to see if there is any way to make ICP infrastructure applications profitable. The answer is no, because there are no ad networks on ICP. I pioneered the now common setup where a DAO stakes ICP in a neuron and uses maturity to buy back and burn (or even distribute) the DAO's token providing a never ending buy pressure (yes - Sneed was first! And then we were first at automating the whole thing with NTN Vectors) in my incessant search for tokenomics that can help the equation work for a project to make a profit on ICP. I have made Sneed Lock to see if profits could be made from providing a safer, unruggable trading experience for ICP ecosystem projects. Again, no - there is almost no token ecosystem activity anymore, and no liquidity. I was part of the team that made TACO DAO, to see if an on-chain collective trading engine, where DAO members directly control a portfolio rebalancing towards the targets they vote on with their staked voting power, could be made profitable. The answer there is: maybe. But not if you hike up prices by 500%, or even 250%, as the TACO DAO lead dev Tirex has eloquently explained in a forum post. So now I have made Sneedapp, the canister minting app store, and Sneedex, the canister trading auction marketplace, as well as the ICP Staking Bot and Trading Bot wApps (programmable, with AI DSL support, of course! You can vibe code trading strategies in your Sneed Bot) that can be configured to work together - set up your ICP Staking Bot to collect maturity that it sends to the Trading Bot which adds it to your self rebalancing portfolio - in yet another attempt to see if there is any way for developers to capture ICP's deep value proposition as profit. We'll see if it works, and if your prediction about wApps can finally come true. Please note that I have personally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from my own pocket experimenting with all these applications to search for PMF, without taking or extracting a penny of profit from ICP users. That is how seriously I take ICP's potential, and the opportunity I see in bringing it into far deeper markets if it can just prove itself. At the end of the day, you can't say I haven't done a more exhaustive search than most through this problem space. But it's not just me. I keep asking for the application on ICP that is actually making a profit. I have yet to get an answer. But what about the trillion dollar cyber security market? Maybe that is the right place to capture ICP's value properly? Yes, but it's not that easy. In a nutshell, most companies are NOT spending millions of dollars on cyber security, and they are not about to start doing so anytime soon. They can really not make savings by moving to ICP. What they can do, if ICP is not expensive, is move to ICP and become more secure, just like the world moved over to HTTPS and became better and more secure because it was affordable. That would not have happened for HTTPS if it had been a "premium cyber security solution" for only the handful of giants with actual trillion dollar security issues, and it would have made HTTPS nearly meaningless, because network effects are important to networks. Mass adoption also won't happen for ICP unless it is priced to compete with regular options for most users, not priced as "enterprise security" hoping to target the few giants with huge security budgets (that they generally do not intend to spend on a blockchain that has not been thoroughly battle tested). The only way that we can discover how to capture ICP's value proposition and turn it into profitable applications is by making it attractive for developers to continue to experiment, until we find a way. We can't hope to get richer customers by increasing prices, because rich customers got rich by not overpaying. They let people like me take that risk. Entrepreneurs who can balance and mitigate the risk of investing time and money in unproven tech with a deep experience in evaluating technical solutions. Mission 70 gas price increases will make that process non-viable. You might remark that surely devs who had five years by now should have found a way to find a PMF, but what if that isn't an indictment of the devs on your platform, all of whom that I have had the pleasure to interact with were highly competent, but an indication that the platform isn't mature enough yet to support profitable applications? Only recently did update round trips go down from 2 seconds to 1 - and frankly even 1 sec is not acceptable for today's users (it actually hasn't been for 20 years), they will close the browser. The answer is in my opinion easy and pretty obvious. You point to it yourself - every user is expected to pay for 13x replica subnets...whereas most users don't need that level of consensus for most of their application. Should we move most of our apps off-chain? Or should we offer subnets with fewer nodes and thus cheaper gas costs? Think about it. Will most Caffeine users really want to pay Enterprise Grade Security premiums for their tennis booking apps? This is not meant to disparage tennis booking apps, on the contrary - if we are serious about supporting everyone as a dev, we want tennis booking apps...but we shouldn't expect customers to want to pay a huge premium compared to other web2 vibe coding alternatives just because apparently their tennis booking app is "tamperproof" and as safe as Fort Knox. The main problem is still that the platform is not yet at a place where it can charge this type of premium proposed in mission 70. Roundtrips are too slow for most use cases (could also be improved with laxed consensus subnets). There is too much random downtime (when you have an app that contacts a few hundred canisters you'll quickly learn that they are almost never all up, and there's always some subnet complaining it doesn't have "healthy replicas" - often enough it will be yours and your app will be down. 100% uptime is not for every app, but more like "there will always be *some* app still up and running"). And most importantly of all, it is not battle tested, not proven in real life with significant TVL (despite the math being as proven as it wants). So, rather than even thinking about increasing gas prices at this moment, we should be thinking about how we can increase adoption and help builders find a PMF. You yourself agreed and presented very sensible and persuasive arguments entirely along this line of thought, and in favor of not increasing gas prices, as recently as in September '25. Seeing a thriving mass adoption is the only way we will make enterprises eventually consider joining the established de facto standard. Yes, Caffeine users certainly count, but you should really read Xander's insightful post from someone on the inside of big time AI to see why many of us are skeptical that this will happen. You have an absolutely amazing product in ICP. In Caffeine, you have a product that you yourself claimed was so terrible you threw it away and rewrote it with a new small team over a few weeks. That's not how you compete with Anthropic. I don't want to doubt Caffeine has the user numbers you say right now, the problem is that even those numbers are terribly lagging to the adoption we could have seen with a proper AI strategy, bringing ICP as a target platform to all the big AI companies. And there is not much hope Caffeine will have the muscle to retain the users it has now for very long. Do read Xander's post. He knows what he is talking about. Finally, it is not relevant what other blockchains can and can't do. They are not application platforms. They are not competing with us, we are not competing with them. We are competing with other web2 platforms, and with mission 70 we will fall so far behind on price compared to essentially all other options that trying to make product innovation happen on ICP will become moot. Please believe us actual builders on your platform on this, who spend every day comparing prices and options and turning every penny - the calculations where someone is ready to pay enterprise grade security costs for their web page are not real, except for enterprises who only pay for far more battle tested solutions. Alternatives also generally have falling costs over time rather than random 500% price hikes. There has already been a trend in many "100% on-chain" applications on ICP, directly due to gas costs and technical limitations such as 1 sec round trips, to go 95% on-chain, then 90%, perhaps 80%...OpenChat, the flagship, is as far as I know not 100% on-chain, they soon discovered they had to send messages in off-chain side channels to get an acceptable user experience. If we keep going in this direction in response to rising cycle costs - 70% on-chain, 50%, 30%...pretty soon we are exactly what you have spent so much time criticizing since day one - fake "on-chain" applications that are some kind of Frankenstein mixes of mostly web2 and a little sprinkle of blockchain to pretend the whole thing is somehow web3. This is not the World Computer you promised us and we all fell in love with - your Great Vision. Please rethink your stance on mission 70 before it is too late. P.S. not a single builder I know has even once panicked about the price. Us real ones are behind you Dom. Don't fold to the people who want you to destroy your blockchain and life's work because they are impatient with price. Ask them what profitable applications they have built on ICP. If they can't answer, please don't listen to their opinion that yanking up prices will somehow be fine.

Expecting the #Mission70 proposal will be submitted to the NNS early next week. Rollin rollin rollin..

The most expensive chart in Crypto history? $ICP just hit 11 TERABYTES of canister state, storing an unprecedented amount of data fully on-chain. This is a game-changer! 🚀 To put that in perspective: Storing 1GB on Ethereum costs ~$10M+. Solana prunes history. On $ICP, we have 11,000 GB of live data, all in smart contracts, powering the web3 revolution. No compromises. 💪 This isn't just basic ledger history. We're talking websites, advanced AI models, and extensive user data—all living and running entirely within smart contracts on the Internet Computer. True decentralization in practice. 💡 11 TB of state isn't just a number; it shows a system full of real, active applications. This is precisely what a World Computer was meant to be, proving the scalability and power of the Internet Computer. 🌍💻

🏆 GRAND FINAL RESULTS: AAA Market Influencer Clash The community has spoken — @ICP_insider is officially the most impactful $ICP Ecosystem influencer! 🎉🔥 Two rounds of voting and the crowd decided. Now it’s your turn! Why just watch when you can create your own polls, spark discussions, and see how the community reacts? 💡 Make a poll. Start a debate. Engage your audience. Maybe your poll will be the next viral clash.

Loving my OpenClaw agent! Also, the Internet Computer provides a very powerful way for agents to transact multi-chain Using ICP, agents can trustlessly execute TX on other chains, and validate the results using ICP's 48-byte master chain key — no trusted APIs necessary. Example, an agent makes a payment using bitcoin, or stablecoins on Solana. Example, an agent automatically rebalances a portfolio of RWA assets for their human. Quick notes on ICP chain key tech. To this date NO other chain has mastered chain key, and none can do what's described above (some have created pale imitations that enable them to create transactions on other chains without proper safety and trustlessness — but their chains don't sign the results of every single transaction submitted to them using a single master key, which allows the interactions to be trustlessly verified). Only ICP has a 48-byte master key that can be used to validate all interactions with the network, by validating a special signature on results. What's so extraordinary about this feature, which sits at the core of ICP's protocol is that it scales horizontally. That is, even as the network continues growing thanks to self-writing and cloud engines, and even if it has to process a trillion transactions a second, all the interactions with the network can be verified using the network's 48-byte master key. For those that are wondering, of course, this doesn't involve trust, and there is no private key that can be stolen from the network — the special signatures on results are created through BFT-safe collaboration between nodes, scaled out across subnets using Merkle structures. When you are using an app running on ICP, the frontend is automatically creating tx (essentially remote function calls into network software) for you in the background (on ICP, transactions are typically created by the frontends of hosted apps, rather than manually using traditional blockchain wallets). Quite a lot of blockchain's are now trying to pivot to the "onchain cloud narrative," but speaking frankly, they don't know what they're talking about. If they did, it would be possible to upload fully onchain apps to their networks! Be careful out there.

$ICP now has its own Opinion Market 👀 AAA Market lets anyone engage their audience through interactive on-chain polls. How it works: • Create an account on AAA Market using @oisy wallet • Launch a poll with 2 to 10 options • Users commit their $ICP to the option they believe will get the most support • When the poll ends, the side with more total commitment determines the outcome • Those aligned with that outcome receive a share from the opposite side • The creator gets a fee of up to 15% You can create your own polls, drive engagement, and receive a creator fee. Or participate in other polls by committing to the option you believe will attract the strongest backing. Or both 👍 Simple idea. Real commitment. Votes stay hidden until tabulation, something only possible thanks to $ICP’s architecture. Try it yourself 👇

The First of Many. 🌍 1º Swiss Subnet 2º Pakistan Subnet 3º 👀 ⌛️ $ICP = World Computer

MoU signed with Pakistan gov today: establish a sovereign Internet Computer subnet, sovereign app creation using Caffeine, and more. Sovereign network cloud that's self-writing (gen. AI) is a growing ICP use case. Our thanks & appreciation to Pakistan 🙏 internetcomputer.org/news/media-rel…

DFINITY Foundation and the Government of Pakistan have signed an MoU to establish sovereign cloud infrastructure, generative AI app development, and secure national communications, on the Internet Computer. The collaboration includes: — Pakistan Subnet — Caffeine AI Licenses — National Messenger Service — DFINITY in Pakistan Through this decision, Pakistan furthers its digital sovereignty and AI push in line with announcements made by the prime minister at Indus AI Week. 1/4 🧵

@fnietom @dominic_w @timoncc @Codiox @JohnLilic @_Kevin_Pham @StopAndDecrypt @derekGUMB Yeah no, sorry, Dominic and dfinity are not a fraud.

Some of you are already creating polls on AAA Market, but if you haven’t tried it yet — no worries! 😎 We’ve got you covered. Check out the short 1-minute video and follow the instructions below, you’ll be up and running in no time. And if you have any questions, just ask! Creating a poll on AAA Market is easy 🛠 1️⃣ Log in with your @oisy wallet and create an account 2️⃣ Tap Create — set title, duration (10 min → 1 month), creator fee (0.5%–15%) 3️⃣ Add 2–10 options (each can include a link and image) 4️⃣ Tap Create draft, then publish instantly or schedule up to 1 month ahead Share your poll and observe how the crowd resolves it directly on $ICP. 🚀

AAA Market aggregates collective judgment 🧠 For participants: a way to express conviction and observe mass psychology using $ICP. For creators: a new coordination layer for communities. Poll creators can set a creator fee (up to 15%) on minority-side commitments. • Permissionless, no approval required • Set duration and fee • Share however you like Each poll can become part of an ongoing online debate inside your community. Create polls that spark discussion, highlight ambiguity, or simply entertain. Each option can include external links for context.

Fellow crypto travelers, my thoughts and best wishes go out to every token holder, whatever chain or projects you've backed. These are truly difficult times. At DFINITY and Caffeine, we remain focused on delivering mainstream value. Better times will come.

AAA Market is live 🚀 Create polls. Commit on outcomes. Vote blind and get it right. Pick an option, lock your commitment, and let the collective signal emerge — with blind voting that hides all signals until tabulation.

@onicaiHQ Good luck 🍀

🚨 The onicai SNS Proposal is LIVE 🚨 After months of tireless work, community feedback, and deep iteration — today marks a pivotal milestone. The road to True Decentralization begins here. This proposal is a signal to every builder dreaming of an open, community-led AI future. With this step, we move towards real community ownership, where you help shape how Decentralized AI is built. 🗳️ Next up: ICP community votes. If passed, the SNS Decentralization Sale will go live. Let’s make history. Let’s build AI the way it should be — together. Vote now. Be part of the future.

Something new is coming.

The Internet Computer is on an incredible growth trajectory! 🚀 We're rapidly approaching 1 Million active smart contracts (canisters). 2021: 16,365 2022: 232,450 2023: 372,829 2024: 875,441 2025: 998,689 From 16,365 in 2021 to 998,689 in 2025, the acceleration is undeniable. This isn't just growth; it's a testament to the robust and scalable architecture of $ICP. The future is bright! ✨

Good morning, $ICP builders! 🌅 The ecosystem never stops evolving, and today is your chance to get ahead. Every idea, every post, every referral compounds your influence. Start creating content, bring referrals, and secure your AI Agents Token miners today on ericanister.ai. Early movers always capture the biggest advantage. Shoutout to builders already leading the charge — @kagdamir, @WealthyBarber, @wasHAPInen. Rise, build, and own your spot in the $ICP future.

The closer we get to the launch of **$Erica**, the more obvious it becomes… this won’t be “just another $ICP token.” And here’s the part most people will only understand too late: You can already start **earning $Erica** today simply by using the platform ericanister.ai — creating content, building AI agents, or bringing new users in. Don’t wake up in 3 months wishing you started now. Start earning your $Erica today.