ICP is the native cryptocurrency of Internet Protocol, a blockchain-based platform that offers faster and more scalable smart contracts in a unique approach to tapping blockchain to build internet applications that give users more control over their data.

Internet Computer features two types of tokens:

Unlike the case with some other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, there’s no supply cap on the total number of ICP tokens. Thirty-eight percent of the initial supply went to investors and 62% to the founders and team.

When ICP was launched in May 2021 following five years of development, its price hit its all-time high of $460.84. But the price swiftly tanked by 95% to $34 in June and then went even lower to $28.01 in July 2021. At the time, the Dfinity Foundation, the nonprofit organization that developed the Internet Computer blockchain, told CoinDesk that the drop was likely because the token started trading at the height of a crypto-wide bull run.

For the rest of 2021, ICP's price stabilized. It climbed to a peak of $84.75 in August, but since that time, it traded between $20 and $60 (as of January 2022).

The creators of Internet Computer want to use blockchain technology to decentralize the entire internet, making tech giants less powerful. They are trying to do so, not by building one massive blockchain, but by arranging the blockchain into a set of "subnets" that hold a smaller piece of the blockchain. The team claims to have invented new cryptography called “Chain Key” that ties these separate pieces together in a secure way.

To create decentralized applications on the Internet Computer blockchain, developers run their programs on so-called "canisters," which each have a storage capacity of 4 gigabytes. The canisters are smart contracts, which is software code enabled by blockchains that makes it easier to remove intermediaries from digital interactions. But the storage capacity of canisters is bigger than that of normal smart contracts. Canisters are also supposed to be more performant than other smart contracts, which generally take a lot of computational power to run.

Computer programmer and entrepreneur Dominic Williams is the founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation, and he has invented many of the technical and cryptographic innovations that are part of the Internet Computer protocol.

Dfinity, which was founded in 2014, has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital and Scalar Capital.It introduced an “alpha version” of Internet Computer in December 2020 and launched its first real version of the platform the following May.