The Internet Computer (IC) is a decentralized network built using blockchain technology, launched in 2021 by the DFINITY Foundation1. Its primary purpose is to provide a platform capable of hosting fully decentralized applications (DApps) and services while also competing with the low cost and high speed of centralized cloud hosting. To analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the IC, a DApp of a Supply-Chain management tool was created on the IC in the scope of this thesis.
Dfinity, Internet Computer, Blockchain, Motoko, Cloud hosting
Investigate the Internet Computer by building a Supply-Chain management tool DApp on the IC.
There are still major challenges when trying to build a truly decentralized application on a blockchain. One of them being that reading, writing and storing large amounts of data is very expensive on traditional blockchains, which is why at least some part of traditional Web3 DApps is still hosted on centralized entities. The Internet Computer allows for every part of a DApp to be hosted and ran completely decentralized. However, the scalability and affordability might come with some compromises that blockchain enthusiasts might not fully agree with.
We built a Supply-Chain tool on the IC which can be accessed by any webbrowser and does not require any additional browser extensions. It allows any arbitrary company to be registered as a supplier add "nodes" to a prexisting Supply-Chain or create a completely new one. A node can hold any arbitrary amount of data including text and files, which can be uploaded and downloaded to and from the IC. The validity and immutability of these nodes is guaranteed: Once a node has been created, it cannot be changed by anyone. Furthermore, the user experience on the DApp is very similar to that of a Web2 site: Every interaction and computation with the DApp is "prepaid", just like classical cloud hosting, where the users do not have to pay for interacting with the app. The experience of developing the DApp was very positive, as all the processes from creating a first DApp on the IC to deploying it is very smooth and well documented, despite the technology being very new. In conclusion, the IC provides many sought after quality of life features, that are lacking in technologies like Ethereum: Being able to host everything on-chain, not losing users to paywalls and providing hosting for large data on-chain. However, there are multiple tradeoffs to many of these positives, like data not staying on the chain forever to save computation costs and DApps being able to "die" and shutdown if the owners stop paying for their upkeep. Furthermore, there are much higher funds required to partake in the blockchain. In summary, the IC is a very clean solution with many compromises to combine the concepts of cloud hosting and traditional blockchains, which might be necessary for blockchains to compete or even replace Web2.
1 Semester/360h of work each, 2 People
Institut für Mobile und Verteilte Systeme
FHNW
Bahnhofstrasse 6
5210 Windisch
Valeria Robles Garzon
Luca Lunati
Markus Knecht, markus.knecht@fhnw.ch
Daniel Kröni, daniel.kroeni@fhnw.ch
