Progress Over Milestones: DFINITY's New Roadmap Approach

The entire Internet Computer community seems to be heading into a new era of cooperation. While DFINITY employees like Andrew Chepreghy have never been shy about interacting with the average $ICP holder on Twitter, official communication with the DFINITY Foundation has been largely one-sided.

This seems to be changing as of late. The late July decision to change the Internet Computer Protocol roadmap approach demonstrated a genuine desire to make the Foundation’s progress and priorities more transparent. Additionally, DFINITY’s monthly global R&D calls, which are open to the public, is heading into its third month.

Metal Clarity

The “metal milestone” approach is officially obsolete. Instead of measuring progress with bundled sets of features, DFINITY now sorts lists of features under different categories. Feature releases will be rolled out incrementally instead of in one major update (like with the Titanium milestone). The community will be updated with a status report every single month instead of milestone announcements.

This change was made for many reasons. For example, the Bitcoin integration developer preview provided valuable feedback to the DFINITY team, and the Foundation wants to create more opportunities for development strengthened by feedback. Another strong reason was that the milestone approach led to confusion, and DFINITY wants to be transparent about its priorities and resource allocation, as well as provide progress updates.

On The List

The new roadmap is divided into the following six categories:

1. Core Protocol: revolves around making the Internet Computer Protocol verifiably decentralized, efficient, scalable, and interoperable with other blockchains; this category includes the system, the networking layer, the execution environment, etc.
2. Boundary: edge infrastructure, such as boundary nodes, SEO (search engine optimization), custom URLs, and streaming support.
3. System Utils & Dapps: features under this category include the NNS front-end dapp, the Internet Identity, and token standards.
4. Governance: all things relating to governance, such as the NNS, the largest working DAO in all of Web3.
5. Developer Experience: features that make it easier for new developers to build on the Internet Computer, such as toolkits.
6. Infrastructure & Operations: includes operational features like replica node storage upgrades.

New & Now

The latest update packed a big punch. Some highlights from the August/September update:

• The SNS is due for release very, very soon. You can see a demonstration of the SNS in the last global R&D call (linked below).
• Bitcoin Integration and Threshold ECDSA are officially in open Beta, which means that developers can start building now.
• All boundary nodes were switched to Internet Computer OS Virtual Machines; this upgrade was a necessary precondition to eventually handover control of boundary nodes to the NNS.
• Official developer-facing documentation is being opened up so that the Internet Computer developer community can add SDKs, Agents, and other tools themselves.
• There was also a progress report on the ICRC-1 fungible token standard (that InfinitySwap is proud to have contributed to). A second draft version of the token standard was overwhelmingly approved. ICRC-1 is coming soon and we couldn’t be more excited.

The new monthly updates and video calls make the development of the Internet Computer much more community-oriented. Instead of sporadic announcements, we are now given regular insight into what the DFINITY team is working on. This also obviously gives the community monthly opportunities to offer suggestions and other feedback… so let’s keep building together!

Project Outreach: Bringing it to the table

Here at InfinitySwap, we were also delighted to be at the kick-off dinner for DFINITY's ICP Lab initiative helping to grow the IC ecosystem further through mutual collaboration. We believe this is a testament to the talent of our team and what we can bring to the table for DFINITY.

This is further evidence of DFINITY's outreach that will strengthen the Internet Computer via projects that can bring their own unique skill set to the table. We will be stronger together.

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