Dominic Williams' Ambitious Plan to Replace Cloud Servers with Blockchain
Dominic Williams is a British computer scientist and entrepreneur who founded the DFINITY Foundation and serves as its President and Chief Scientist. He aims to prove that blockchains can replace traditional cloud servers, rather than just process payments.
Williams' goal is what he calls the 'World Computer,' a network where websites, apps, and backend systems run entirely on-chain instead of on servers owned by companies like Amazon or Google.
He has a strong background in computer science, graduating with a first-class honors degree from King's College London. Before moving into crypto full-time in 2013, he built and sold earlier ventures, including System7, a web portal platform sold to Ordovic in 2011, and Fight My Monster, a children's MMO game that reached millions of users.
Williams' interest in cryptography dates back to 1998, when he used Wei Dai's crypto++ software library, whose documentation referenced Dai's b-money proposal, an early precursor to Bitcoin's design. In 2015, Williams coined the name DFINITY, short for 'decentralized infinity,' and founded the DFINITY Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2016.