Dominic Williams
Founder and Chief Scientist
DFINITY
Dominic is the Founder and Chief Scientist at DFINITY, responsible for building the decentralized cloud platform—called the Internet Computer.
Since the organization’s inception in 2016, DFINITY’s mission has been to transform the public internet into a powerful decentralized cloud to host the next-generation of software and services. The Internet Computer, which debuted in December 2020, is being built by the industry’s leading team of distributed systems and cryptography experts, across several research centers around the world, and backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.
Over the past 20 years, Dominic has had a distinguished career as a crypto theoretician and serial entrepreneur focused on the Internet and distributed systems. Recently, his scientific discoveries across Threshold Relay and PSC chains, Validation Towers and Trees, USCIDs, and The 3 E’s of Sybil Resistance have pioneered new approaches to cryptography and blockchain technology.
The initial concept for DFINITY was incubated during Dominic’s participation in the early days of Ethereum. Previously, in 2010, Dominic founded Fight My Monster, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game with an explosive growth rate with millions of users. During this time, Dominic pioneered several distributed computing techniques to successfully build semi-decentralized systems as a means to scale out the game.
In 2003, he founded and sold System 7, a SaaS platform for creating and operating high-end commercial web portals, which helped bring major publishers and government organizations online. During this time, Dominic pioneered techniques such as decoupling content from presentations for easier sharing, integrating Reddit-esque voting features into community systems, and algorithms for optimizing lists of featured content.
In 2001, he founded Airdocs, a remote file sharing and access product, which connected mobile users to corporate file servers over cellular network connections. Vodafone, owned by Verizon, used the product to help the British government connect over 60 remote offices around the world. And, in 1998, he founded Smartdrivez, an online storage and multi-user file sharing service, which was a decade-early precursor to Dropbox.
