Dominic Williams

Founder and Scientific Director

Dominic Williams is the Founder and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, a non-profit research and development organisation headquartered in Zurich, with additional operations in San Francisco and Palo Alto. He founded DFINITY in 2016 with the mandate to develop the Internet Computer, a decentralised computing infrastructure designed to host applications directly on the internet without reliance on traditional servers or centralised cloud providers such as Amazon or Google. The Internet Computer operates on a global network of physical nodes run by independent providers on sovereign hardware, and integrates an advanced blockchain as both a decentralised consensus layer and a distributed computing platform capable of executing code with low latency and high scalability. Williams has also contributed to the development of concepts including the Threshold Relay and Probabilistic Slot Protocol blockchain consensus mechanisms, the Blockchain Nervous System for algorithmic governance, and cryptographic research spanning Validation Towers and Trees, USCIDs, and the 3 E's of Sybil Resistance. He has been a contributor to CoinDesk, writing on topics including the intersection of AI and blockchain and the potential for AI-driven development of Web3 applications.

Prior to founding DFINITY, Williams served as President and Chief Technology Officer of String Labs, a Palo Alto-based incubator focused on open protocol projects. He founded Fight My Monster, a massively multiplayer online game that reached millions of users, during which he developed distributed computing techniques for scaling semi-decentralised systems. Earlier ventures include System 7, a SaaS platform for commercial web portals founded and sold in 2003, and Airdocs, a remote file sharing product connecting mobile users to corporate file servers over cellular networks, founded in 2001. He transitioned to working full-time in cryptography in 2013. Williams holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with First Class Honours, completed between 1992 and 1995.

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Dominic Williams (DFINITY): "We're going to have AI agents that are both autonomous and auditable".

Raphaël Bloch

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