There’s a moment in every long experiment when the evidence is so overwhelming, yet the crowd continues to believe the opposite. For Dominic Williams, founder of DFINITY and chief architect behind the Internet Computer, that moment came—again—at the Crypto Valley Conference during a live demo of “Caffeine,” the new AI-powered, onchain app-building tool running natively on the Internet Computer.
“The audience was entranced & clapping as it unfolded,” Dom noted. But what stuck with him wasn’t the demo’s reception. It was what came before it—a casual audience poll to test a basic understanding of what it means when something is said to be “onchain.”
“I asked the audience about their understanding of the phrase ‘onchain’ and what it meant for an app or service to be built ‘on’ a blockchain,” he explained. Then, he offered two choices: one where the blockchain functions as a decentralized cloud actually hosting the app, and another where the app is running on Big Tech infrastructure but is linked to a token on a blockchain.
“More than 90% of the audience raised their hands for Choice 1,” he said, with a level of weariness. “But, of course, Choice 2 is what the prevailing Web3 vernacular means.”
To Dom, this gap in understanding is not just an educational miss. It’s a structural flaw in the narrative architecture of the crypto world—a flaw he’s been calling out for years. “The massive misunderstanding obviously remains fully intact,” he said, “despite the fact I was fighting this 3–4 years ago.”
The Internet Computer was designed to be a decentralized alternative to cloud infrastructure, a network where actual computation and data storage take place on the blockchain. This isn’t metaphorical; it’s literal. Dom has tried, often fruitlessly, to bridge that cognitive gap with examples. “I posted the theoretical cost of storing a single phone photo on different blockchains… The costs on other blockchains ranged from the millions to tens of thousands of dollars… to fractions of a cent on the Internet Computer.”
That line of reasoning didn’t go over well. “I was widely attacked and derided as lying… Eventually I gave up and took the view that people would get to the truth without me making enemies.”
But the truth still hasn’t stuck. Dom recounted a bruising interview with the crypto editor at a major media outlet. “I spent the first 15 minutes explaining the Internet Computer vision,” only to be cut off: “So what’s new!?.. isn’t that what Solana and Ethereum are… decentralized clouds?”
Therein lies the sticking point: most blockchain networks aren’t designed to serve as decentralized application platforms. They’re transaction networks, built to process and secure token flows, not host fully-functional social networks or tamperproof AI-based tools. “These networks… cannot provide cloud functionality where online apps and services can be hosted,” Dom insisted. “They are token-processing networks.”
He argues that this misconception isn’t just accidental—it’s perpetuated. “When the leaders of major projects participate in promoting these untruths, even if just by subtly encouraging the misunderstanding, at the least they are guilty of a serious lie of omission.”
There’s no resentment for other blockchain projects doing what they’re actually designed to do. “There’s nothing wrong with blockchains that are primarily designed to host and process tokens and DeFi,” Williams said. “They… are valuable things in their own right.”
But he’s scathing about what he sees as a culture of deception. “People look at price as a kind of social proof of value… They lap up narratives that they are completely unequipped to verify for themselves… and supportive crypto media owned by people with vested interests.”
It’s not just reputations at stake—it’s the progress of the entire sector. “Technological innovation within our industry has suffered greatly,” he said. Gresham’s Law—bad money drives out the good—has never felt more applicable, he argued. “Web3 has rewarded deliberately misleading fast-money narratives, and lies and misrepresentation is not punished.”
The result, he says, is that many networks now amount to “complete vaporware,” while their tokens function as “memecoins in disguise.”
Still, there’s a sliver of optimism. The Caffeine demo was not just a crowd-pleaser; it was, to Dom, a proof point that might finally reset the terms of engagement. “Caffeine will put one of the most powerful crypto technologies ever developed into the hands of anyone who wants to give it a try,” he said. “They can experience it directly… removing the need to evaluate a complex technical story or narrative they cannot easily verify.”
What’s more, Caffeine isn’t just building apps—it’s building confidence in what Web3 can do when it escapes its own myths. “The sophistication of these apps far exceeds what can currently be created using ‘mostly hands-free’ Web2 vibe coding platforms,” he said. They also retain crypto’s defining strengths: tamperproof data, guaranteed uptime, and built-in security—without needing a cybersecurity budget.
Perhaps most importantly, the product is usable. Not just by developers or crypto-native technophiles, but by anyone with a smartphone. “There are 5 billion people with internet-connected smartphones… There are also a gazillion entrepreneurs and startups… Caffeine has almost unlimited use cases.”
He’s even thinking of dropping the “Web3” label altogether. “Outside our industry, anything Web3 is now often viewed with distrust,” he admitted. “We want outside people to experience the power of the self-writing internet without Web3 baggage.”
So yes, the Internet Computer will still run DeFi protocols. It will still support NFTs and tokens and multi-chain architectures. But it also aims to be something far more grounded: an internet where apps actually run on the chain they’re linked to—where claims match reality.
“The self-writing internet will be its own sector,” Dom concluded. “Here’s to a better future.”
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