The Internet Computer is a new computing platform that uniquely enables developers to reap the benefits blockchain technology offers without sacrificing performance. This article is the first in a series of six articles outlining why developers should build applications on the Internet Computer. This article will first briefly explain what the Internet Computer is, then it will summarize five distinct reasons why developers should build on the Internet Computer.
Canisters can be thought of as an advanced form of “smart contracts”—applications that run on blockchains like Ethereum. Second, unlike traditional software, canisters and smart contracts run autonomously. In other words, the data and logic comprising an application run by themselves, without the need of a company to store and run them. This uniquely enables developers to make strong commitments about their code: including that it will continue to exist even if the company that created it doesn’t.form of smart contracts is because canisters have capabilities that go far beyond that of smart contracts.
Yet when those platforms reached maturity, they all changed the rules surrounding their APIs—throttling the very applications that helped them grow years before. The precedent set by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn means that application developers today think twice before building on top of the new generation of platforms because they know that they are actually building on sand if they do.
Other blockchains, however, are encumbered by constraints that make it prohibitively expensive to store data on-chain or use the blockchain to perform anything but the most basic mathematical computation. By allowing developers—for the first time—to build virtually anything on a blockchain, the Internet Computer uniquely enables developers to build applications that couldn’t have been built before., the Internet Computer greatly simplifies the tech stack for developers.