January 28th 2025
Kamal Youssefi, President of The Hashgraph Association, and Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of DFINITY, officially announced the collaboration on January 25. The union of these two innovative blockchain platforms highlights their shared commitment to accelerating blockchain adoption.
Key Figures Behind the Partnership
Kamal Youssefi is President of The Hashgraph Association. After a career working at SAP and EY Switzerland as SAP HANA Technical Lead, Kamal founded Swisscom Blockchain, where he undertook several senior executive roles within the Swisscom Group. He worked with global thought-leaders on major Blockchain/DLT initiatives and successfully deployed innovative solutions in Switzerland, such as the Digital Identity, Asset Tokenization, and Digital Asset Custody, contributing to building the Swiss ecosystem for Digital Assets. Kamal was also the first founding member of the Hedera Governing Council in 2018, which today consists of the world’s leading enterprises and organizations in the world. Source: medium
Dominic Williams is the Founder and Chief Scientist at DFINITY, where he leads the development of the Internet Computer. With over 20 years of experience as a crypto-theoretician and serial entrepreneur, Dominic has dedicated his career to advancing Internet technologies and distributed systems. Since 2015, he has been working tirelessly to realize the vision of the “World Computer,” a decentralized platform designed to revolutionize how the internet operates.
To explore more about the World Computer vision and its groundbreaking potential, you can read the following article: The Vision of the World Computer.
Source: x.com/Zero2HeroZombie
Hedera Hashgraph: Leading the Way in Sustainability and Governance
Hedera Hashgraph is renowned for its leadership in energy-efficient blockchain technology. Its consensus algorithm, hashgraph, provides high throughput, low latency, and enhanced security while consuming minimal energy. This makes Hedera one of the greenest blockchain platforms available, addressing growing concerns about the environmental impact of technology. Hedera’s eco-friendly design aligns with market demands and strengthens its relevance.
What do HBAR and ICP have in common? Both are widely recognized as exceptionally eco-friendly and green blockchains, leading the charge in setting new benchmarks for sustainability within the blockchain industry.
A key feature of Hedera is its Governing Council, a consortium of global organisations across sectors such as technology, finance, and academia. This governance structure ensures transparency and reliability, appealing to institutional stakeholders. Through collective decision-making with companies such as Google, IBM, and Tata Communications, Hedera has built a foundation of trust that is crucial for widespread adoption.
Three cases
Kamal mentioned they have identified three areas for collaboration with DFINITY. Although few details were provided, we can speculate on the following possibilities:
Interoperability
In the last cycle, the Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem was celebrated as the golden standard for interoperability. At the time, the blockchain industry was heavily focused on developing DeFi ecosystems, with the future of blockchain technology being viewed through a “cross-chain” lens. However, this vision was disrupted by frequent outages, bridge hacks, and various vulnerabilities related to cross-chain transactions. A critical weak point in this model was the reliance on bridges, which proved to be attractive targets for hackers.
The ICP blockchain has redefined this vision and now represents the new golden standard for interoperability. Its Chain Key Technology eliminates the need for off-chain indexers, relayers, or bridges, offering a truly interoperable solution that is fast , cost-effective , and secure.
ICP’s Chain Key Technology enables seamless interaction between various blockchain networks. This allows applications built on ICP to communicate with different ecosystems without relying on intermediaries. For HBAR, interoperability with ICP means gaining access to a broader ecosystem, without compromising safety.
Smart Contracts
ICP has deployed 295K Canister smart contracts in the last 4 months. The smart contracts running on ICP are a powerful evolution of traditional smart contracts. ICP smart contracts are called canisters and are computational units that combine both code and data.
Canisters host applications and enable efficient scaling, operating without traditional cloud infrastructure. For HBAR, adopting ICP’s canister model enhances its smart contract capabilities, allowing Hedera to better support decentralised application development. The combination of ICP’s canisters and HBAR’s smart contracts provides developers with a broader range of tools for building seamless and secure applications across both platforms.
The Integration of AI
ICP’s capacity for on-chain storage and computation makes it ideal for hosting advanced AI applications and the “self-writing internet paradigm”.
Today, Large Language Models (a type of AI) have already become very good at writing code, and their abilities are continuing to improve rapidly. The Caffeine platform leverages this ability in combination with new specialized SWI infrastructure and technology that is being deployed to the Internet Computer network.
The Self-Writing Internet (SWI) paradigm introduces four key defining characteristics that set it apart as a groundbreaking development in the blockchain and AI space:
Sovereignty:
Applications created within the SWI framework are free from dependence on intermediaries. This ensures immunity from censorship or exploitative practices, such as sudden price hikes. Furthermore, all underlying software and data remain exclusively owned by their creators—whether individuals, organizations, DAOs, or other entities—preventing any third party from gaining undue leverage over them.
Tamperproof Security:
SWI applications are fundamentally secure and inherently resistant to tampering. They eliminate the need for traditional cybersecurity measures, offering unparalleled protection against threats.
Real-Time Updatability:
Owners of SWI-generated apps and services can evolve their products almost instantly by providing additional natural language instructions to the AI. Updates are applied in real time, allowing owners to refresh and adapt their applications effortlessly by simply reloading the app’s URL.
Trustless Web3 Integration:
SWI applications can securely manage and process tokens from multiple blockchains without relying on cumbersome traditional crypto wallets. This seamless integration enhances user experience and ensures trustless functionality, removing vulnerabilities typically associated with wallet-based systems.
Source: x.com/dominic_w
For HBAR, integrating AI with ICP offers opportunities for real-time data processing and computational power, further enhancing Hedera’s ability to support AI-driven solutions.
Interoperability, smart contracts, and AI integration create a robust ecosystem in which both ICP and HBAR can thrive. Interoperability enhances cross-chain functionality, making both networks more accessible to developers and users. The combination of smart contract innovations and canisters boosts scalability, supporting complex dApps and next-generation decentralised services. Meanwhile, AI integration offers vast potential for revolutionising industries such as finance, healthcare, and autonomous systems by decentralising the infrastructure that powers AI applications.
Conclusion
The partnership between Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) and DFINITY (ICP) marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of blockchain technology. By merging Hedera’s commitment to sustainability and institutional adoption with ICP’s expertise in decentralisation, scalability, and smart contract functionality, the two platforms are creating a powerful ecosystem poised to transform the blockchain landscape. With both platforms dedicated to minimising the environmental impact of blockchain technology and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in Web3, this collaboration is set to drive the next wave of blockchain innovation. Indeed competition is good but collaboration is better.
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