We are excited to announce the 2025 update of the ICP roadmap. The DFINITY Foundation will further expand the capabilities of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), enhance developer and user experiences, and further embrace AI, adding over 20 new features across various focus areas, grouped by milestones. With this updated roadmap, DFINITY is planning the route to realize the vision of the World Computer and deliver sovereign software to the world.
New features are defined based on valuable community feedback, the path to realizing the vision of autonomous software, and the latest advancements in AI. They integrate a new self-writing internet paradigm, enabling anyone to become a developer and benefit from the unique attributes of ICP while the overall vision and focus areas remain unchanged.
As the Internet Computer Protocol continues to mature, the DFINITY Foundation will increasingly direct resources towards eliminating friction in the onboarding process for new developers, going beyond the Web3 community and supporting the building of new types of applications. An exciting example is Caffeine, which makes its debut on the ICP roadmap.
The key factor in the success of the Internet Computer is the ICP community, and we want to hear your voice: please share your feedback on the roadmap, what features are missing, and which milestones will benefit you the most. You can submit and upvote DX-related feature requests on the DX feedback board or participate in discussions in the forums. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and further updating the roadmap based on your feedback.
Below, we provide a brief overview of newly added or significantly revised milestones categorized by different focus areas, reflecting their importance.
ICP as a Computing Platform
Smart contracts are an excellent way to build software, enabling secure, tamper-proof, resilient, and autonomous applications. The vision of ICP is that most software in the world will be constructed using smart contracts. The goal of the 'computing platform' theme is to eliminate any limitations on smart contracts, allowing all software in the world to run on ICP.
Flux Milestone
This milestone aims to enhance the computational capabilities of subnets and balance the load among them. The former will require optimizing algorithms for scheduling containers, managing sandboxes, and improving memory efficiency. The latter will be addressed by allowing developers to migrate containers between subnets. Developers will be able to take snapshots of containers, download them, and then upload them to a new subnet. This also has the benefit of allowing developers to back up containers and restore them from backups if necessary.
Magnetosphere Milestone
The second milestone of ICP as a computing platform is to increase the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to improve the integrity and security of ICP. This milestone will allow the use of TEE to protect node states, prevent tampering with replica code, and maintain the confidentiality of key sharing. By ensuring the trustworthiness of nodes, verifiable API BN access logs and secure queries will be unlocked.
Fission Milestone
The method of migrating containers to other subnets to balance load is a very fine approach, best suited for a small number of containers. Another load balancing mechanism solution is subnet splitting. The protocol already allows splitting subnets, but this can lead to container downtime for several hours. The goal of this milestone is to make subnet splitting feasible, minimizing downtime.
Decentralized Artificial Intelligence
AI and ICP have tremendous mutually beneficial potential, a unique combination not found elsewhere! ICP enables uploading and running code on the network, and thanks to orthogonal persistence and other ICP superpowers, dapps can be seamlessly upgraded and iterated in production. Now, AI can realize the vision of a self-writing internet paradigm where everyone is a developer; you just need to describe to build and deploy your own dapp.
ICP can further address the biggest problem of centralized AI: opacity and a complete lack of verifiability, requiring users to blindly trust a single third party.
Decentralized Artificial Intelligence (DeAI) can solve this problem. DeAI involves running AI inference (and subsequent training) in the form of on-chain smart contracts, addressing the trust challenges of AI. Users can trust the integrity of the models they use and verify the inputs of the models, reducing the need to blindly trust them. However, AI training and inference are highly resource-intensive, and the limited computing power of traditional blockchain networks often cannot meet the demand. In contrast, the advanced design of the Internet Computer successfully combines the security of smart contracts with the powerful computing needs of AI.
Vertex Milestone
The Alpha version of the Caffeine platform allows for instant creation of full-stack applications, representing the pinnacle of unique ICP technologies (such as its serverless computing model, enhanced orthogonal persistence, and AI models for Motoko code generation) converging to herald the dawn of the self-writing internet.
Ignition Milestone
AI agents are an evolving paradigm in the software field, and the Internet Computer has a unique advantage to become a home for AI agents. Compared to traditional IT stacks, AI agents on the Internet Computer can securely and easily manage digital assets, trade with one another, be fully autonomous, and be tokenized and managed by DAOs. This milestone focuses on providing access to foundational LLMs and essential tools to deploy agents on the Internet Computer as simply as possible.
Ignition will also introduce AI worker nodes specifically designed to handle LLM prompts, which will have similar security guarantees to the canister smart contracts on the Internet Computer and provide powerful AI models in a service form callable by containers.
Chain Fusion
Chain Fusion leverages chain key encryption technology to achieve direct interoperability with all major blockchains in a decentralized manner. ICP smart contracts can read from and write to different chains, allowing developers to leverage the capabilities offered by ICP when developing applications for other blockchain ecosystems without relying on centralized cloud infrastructure or insecure chain bridges. In this area, we are currently working on the Helium milestone, integrating ICP with Solana, and the next newly added milestone is Meridian.
Helium Milestone
The Helium milestone achieved Chain Fusion for the Solana network, bringing Solana and ICP closer together and combining the functionalities of both networks, making Dapps that utilize both networks feel like single-network Dapps.
Meridian Milestone
Dogecoin's design is very similar to Bitcoin's, so the amount of work needed to integrate ICP with Dogecoin is relatively small. Dogecoin is popular and has a high market cap but lacks smart contract functionality. With this milestone, Chain Fusion extends support for Dogecoin, allowing container smart contracts to hold and transfer Dogecoin and expanding various new DeFi functionalities for Doge.
Privacy
Container smart contracts can be used to implement privacy-preserving dapps, giving users complete control over their data. Leveraging encryption protocols, ICP enables developers to build dapps that allow users to store and share encrypted on-chain data. Advanced encryption protocols will ultimately allow computation on encrypted data.
Niobium Milestone
vetKeys is a decentralized key management service that allows users to obtain encryption keys on-demand in a fully decentralized manner. For instance, this allows developers to build dapps that encrypt user data, thus meeting privacy needs on public blockchains.
Containment Milestone
This milestone enables the full utilization of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), providing an additional layer of integrity assurance and preventing unauthorized access to container states, further enhancing the privacy attributes of ICP.
Decentralization
The security of ICP is based on eliminating central control points. Users interacting with ICP do not need to rely on any one party, and this also includes operational aspects, complementing ICP's DAO-based governance.
Levitron Milestone
This milestone enhances the visibility of the Internet Computer's edge infrastructure by making aggregation and anonymous API boundary node access logs publicly accessible. Developers can gain insights into their dapp usage patterns, enabling traffic analysis and user statistics. To ensure the integrity and verifiability of the logs, this milestone builds upon the Trusted Execution Environment introduced in Magnetosphere.
Knot Milestone
The Knot Milestone will define the next generation (also known as Gen3) node hardware specifications, improve reward calculations, and enhance network topology to increase network performance, efficiency, and decentralization of ICP infrastructure.
Identity
Most dapps on ICP will interact with and authenticate users and may require some identity information about them, such as whether they are human, unique, and their age.
Indeed, security, privacy, sovereignty, and user-friendly identity solutions are the foundational cornerstones for adopting Web3. Users need to be able to seamlessly use their dapps across different devices, recover access when devices are lost, and ensure their security - after all, this is cryptocurrency, and users' assets are on-chain. Internet Identity addresses this issue, making life easier for users and developers.
Pulse Milestone
The Pulse milestone centers on the user experience of Internet Identity, eliminating the need for anchors, supporting OpenID standards, and unraveling the relationship between Internet Identity, wallets, and integrated dapps, removing necessary friction points.
Plexus Milestone
The Separatrix milestone, achieved in 2024, introduces verifiable credentials to Internet Identity. This milestone will fundamentally reform credential solutions for Internet Identity by adopting established credential standards, making the issuance and use of credentials more interoperable.
Digital Assets
DeFi protocols, tokenization of real-world assets, and other digital asset solutions are significant drivers of Web3 adoption. ICP's Chain Fusion capability, unparalleled scalability, and the ability to provide Web assets on-chain open up new categories of digital assets. Additionally, it makes ICP an attractive platform for building multi-chain custody solutions and wallets.
Nexus Milestone
This milestone expands the ICRC ledger standard suite to support the CMTAT (Capital Markets and Technology Association Token) framework to meet enterprise needs. It will unlock key use cases such as stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets, driving the future of trustless digital asset management on the Internet Computer.
Echelon Milestone
Orbit is a secure solution for managing digital assets and smart contracts. This milestone will expand its asset management capabilities through seamless integration of native tokens from other blockchains, starting with ETH and ERC-20. This will create a unified fund management platform allowing users to securely sign and send transactions across multiple chains. Additionally, we will introduce automatic smart contract upgrades to ensure users always have access to the latest security updates and features with minimal manual intervention.
Neutron Milestone
To further enhance the usability and accessibility of Orbit, we will improve the user experience through intuitive approval processes, enhanced onboarding processes, and a comprehensive documentation center. These enhancements will ensure that the Orbit platform is efficient for individual users and teams managing digital asset management needs.
Dynamo Milestone
This lays a new foundation for a decentralized software marketplace, providing developers with a clear path for their applications to achieve adoption without relying on centralized platforms. By integrating transparent deployment processes and seamless discovery tools, this plan lays the groundwork for a sovereign software ecosystem where developers can easily package and distribute applications, while users retain complete control over the installed applications.
Apex Milestone
From Zero to Degen-Hero: This milestone aims to promote the development of the ICP DeFi ecosystem by simplifying the discovery of new tokens, increasing transparency for ledger controllers, and providing a more streamlined user experience between DeFi dapps.
Governance and Tokenomics
ICP has two built-in governance systems: the NNS, which manages the ICP protocol DAO, and the SNS framework, which is a toolbox for creating DAOs to manage individual dapps. Both are open to everyone and facilitate decentralized decision-making. Tokenomics incentivizes voting participation and ensures that DAO decisions align with the long-term interests of the ICP community and the governed dapps.
Neon Milestone
Neon Milestone
Nucleon Milestone
This milestone is dedicated to increasing user participation in governance. It aims to foster a sense of belonging in the DAO community and encourages users to contribute to the fluid democratic process. The SNS community can easily apply their decisions through proposals.
Nucleus Milestone
This milestone integrates Orbit's multi-party approval framework with the Network Nervous System (NNS), designating the NNS as the root of trust. By having the NNS 'bless' new versions, the Orbit platform gains a powerful, decentralized governance layer without each council having to implement its governance from scratch.
Developer Experience
The developer experience is a key factor in developer adoption, which includes low-friction container development and operations, expressive smart contract languages, testing frameworks, and a rich library set. Beyond container development, the developer experience also encompasses inclusive and quality-assured protocol development.
Thorium Milestone
This milestone improves the Cycles management experience on ICP by introducing Cycles Ledger, allowing end users to seamlessly hold Cycles and manage their container Cycles balance more easily.
Additionally, by publicly sharing a set of key metrics, you can gain better insights into how your containers are performing, especially being able to see the breakdown of your Cycles usage and which endpoints have the highest call costs.
Atlas Milestone
The second milestone of ICP Ninja introduces several AI-centric features, such as the ability to guide projects using AI via the Caffeine platform. Additionally, it aims to foster more community engagement and collaboration by releasing community projects and templates.
The DFINITY Foundation also plans a comprehensive reform of the CLI toolchain used for developing containers. We are not yet ready to share detailed plans, but significant updates are expected later this year.
Conclusion
This updated roadmap represents another bold statement of the Internet Computer's technological leadership and vision for the World Computer. We invite the entire community once again to share your thoughts and suggestions in forums, on X, and at numerous events around the globe.
For more details about the roadmap and an overview of what has been deployed in the protocol, please refer to the ICP roadmap. For in-depth discussions about this roadmap update, join the DFINITY Foundation live stream with VP of Engineering Samuel Burri and Head of Research Björn Tackmann on March 7, 2025, at 3 PM CET on our YouTube channel.
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