The Internet Computer (ICP) is a decentralized cloud blockchain that pursues the $1+ trillion cloud market - hosting apps, websites and enterprise systems, fully onchain, where they benefit from extraordinary security and resilience, can do multi-chain token processing, and can be administered in a decentralized way for safety. A core purpose is “self-writing cloud,” where AI creates apps for mass market users, which are sophisticated and secure, in response to instructions they provide over chat. The ICP token is burned powering onchain apps, and is a cryptocurrency used in network governance staking. Users can use Caffeine AI to create onchain apps, or use ICP Ninja, an online IDE to write serverless code themselves.

The Internet Computer works by running canister smart contracts on a network of node machines. These node machines are connected using the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), which enables them to communicate and coordinate their actions. As explained in the MIT Technology Review's profile of the Internet Computer: "Instead of running on a dedicated server in Google Cloud, for example, the software would have no fixed physical address, moving between servers owned by independent data centers around the world." You can think of ICP as a way of converting crypto into processing power — the network will establish a fee based on the amount of computing power required by a developer's project. The website will run on the public Internet as long as the fee is paid. Finally, the Internet Computer network is controlled and managed by a master subnet, which runs an advanced permissionless Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the Network Nervous System (NNS). This system instructs the node machines how to structure the network and verifies that the instructions they have received are genuine.

Popular applications on the web are often closed-source, proprietary, and hosted on a handful of data centers owned by big tech firms. If one critical data center fails, huge swathes of the web can also shut down with it. Another major concern with the web (particularly for privacy advocates) is that centralized, corporate web service providers have the ability to censor or de-platform applications. This is why the Internet Computer attempts to offer a fundamental alternative to the current solution, so that developers can build, host, and serve applications in a more decentralized way — allowing websites to be deployed directly onto the public Internet. Internet Computer can be used to build almost any online system or service, including demanding web applications, without the need for traditional and centralized IT infrastructure, making it possible to create fully decentralized online systems and services that are tamperproof, unstoppable, and that can trustlessly interact with the outside world. In theory, any kind of application can be created and run on the Internet Computer — from social networks similar to LinkedIn and TikTok to software similar to all the familiar applications you know today to new kinds of applications not yet conceived. Because it operates via open standards, Internet Computer tends to reduce the conflicts of interest that can arise when a major cloud-computing provider hosts products that compete with its own services.

The Internet Computer was developed by the DFINITY Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Zürich, Switzerland. The foundation was established in October 2016 with the goal of developing the Internet Computer blockchain. The project's founder, Dominic Williams, first used the name DFINITY in early 2015 to refer to his theoretical crypto work, which he hoped would make a World Computer possible. In February 2017, the DFINITY Foundation ran an early public Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds and scale out its open-source project. This was then supplemented by private fundraising rounds in 2018. By 2025, DFINITY employed 100+ people, in R&D, productization, business, marketing and communications. Researchers worldwide contribute to the foundations' work — including cryptographers who collectively hold around 100,000 academic citations and 200 patents.

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Assets that have a similar market cap to Internet Computer include Worldcoin, Bitget Token, Aave, and many others. To see a full list, see our comparable market cap assets.

The current circulating supply of Internet Computer is 555 million.

Internet Computer ranks 31 among tradable assets on Coinbase. Popularity is currently based on relative market cap.

Currently, 99% of Coinbase users are buying Internet Computer. In other words, 99% of Coinbase customers have increased their net position in Internet Computer over the past 24 hours through trading.

Yes, Internet Computer is currently available on Coinbase’s centralized exchange. For more detailed instructions, check out our helpful how to buy Internet Computer guide.