In the Spring we announced a final DFINITY “Presale” funding round, and today I am delighted to announce that it has been completed, raising a further 102M CHF (Swiss Francs) for the Foundation’s operations. Returning investors Polychain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (deploying capital from their new a16z crypto fund) were joined by names such as SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, Wanxiang Blockchain, Amino Capital, and many other specialist funds and accredited community members. We are very pleased to have our ongoing efforts validated by illustrious investors and to receive so much support from the community.

DFINITY places tremendous emphasis on the development of advanced novel technologies that apply innovation to solve fundamental problems. We have been aided in our progress by some of the brightest minds in the industry who have chosen to join the team developing the “Internet Computer”. Since the Presale round was announced earlier this year, our team has doubled in size, and we are opening new research centers and seeking to double in size again within a few months. We also have our eyes on the launch of the network. The Internet Computer is designed to host the world’s next generation of software and services, which implies immense responsibility. Our approach cannot be solely technological, and we believe that the right strategy is to have a large team of hundreds of the world’s best researchers and engineers continuously furthering development and standing by to solve problems. For this reason, our aim is to build out what we term a “NASA for decentralization” to stand behind the network. The new funding will enable us to push forward with even more confidence.

Airdrop Recap

Since not everybody was able to participate in the Presale due to accreditation requirements, in June we ran an “airdrop” of 35M CHF (Swiss Francs) worth of DFINITY tokens to our earliest community members. This was a huge success and has ensured that many tens of thousands of community members will be able to start experimenting or building on the Internet Computer as soon as it launches. As stated during the KYC/AML portion of the airdrop, participants can expect to receive their tokens in conjunction with the launch of the network, which is currently scheduled for the end of 2018 / early 2019.

The Future

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the coming weeks. We expect to reveal major new hires, new partnerships and provide new demonstrations of our latest test network — which is now regularly running using thousands of nodes distributed around the Internet. We may also provide first looks at some of our newest language technology. The future is bright!

Please follow us as we continue reimagining how software and Internet services are built and hosted, and you can read more on today’s announcement at Forbes, CNBC, Fortune, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, CoinDesk, and other relevant outlets.