The first step to breaking the monopoly of high-tech giants, Dfinity launches open-source version of TikTok - CanCan

Dfinity has released "decentralized TikTok (Douyin)" - CanCan, a product built with less than 1000 lines of code. However, CanCan is not a complete product; its main purpose is to serve as a development example for third-party developers and companies to build their applications on Dfinity's Internet Computer.

Dfinity is a large ICO project born in 2018. Led by renowned venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Polychain Capital, and KR1, it raised $102 million at a valuation of $2 billion. The project claims to be a decentralized cloud computing system capable of infinite scalability, purportedly more efficient, secure, and available than Amazon AWS. At the time, it was a highly anticipated project.

Breaking Monopoly, Reshaping the Internet Ecosystem

Since its fundraising, progress on the mainnet development of the project has been slow, and the official team rarely discusses blockchain or its token (DFN). Nonetheless, Dfinity occasionally releases new products. In January of this year, instead of discussing blockchain, they showcased an open-source social platform called "LinkedUp."

This product is an open-source version of LinkedIn, limited to a beta demonstration and not officially launched. Although LinkedUp was not yet a complete product and did not leave a deep impression on the market at the time, the platform could operate without servers, databases, or firewalls, and even achieve high operational speeds, which is quite a remarkable technological breakthrough. Dominic Williams, founder of Dfinity, stated in an interview with Forbes in January: Interview:

"The Internet Computer is designed to run cloud services (and all data) on an open and independent system to decentralize the internet... and encourage others to create open versions of apps (like WhatsApp, Facebook, eBay, etc.)."

In other words, Dfinity's ultimate goal is to enable third-party developers and businesses to create next-generation applications on their "Internet Computer" system, breaking the framework of the internet and disrupting tech giants like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Release of the Open-Source Version of TikTok, "CanCan"

As a demonstration of this concept, the project announced the release of an open-source version similar to TikTok called "CanCan" yesterday. Because this product is built on Dfinity's latest programming language, Motoko, CanCan only requires less than 1000 lines of code to build, compared to Facebook's 62 million lines of code.

As CanCan's code is open-source, the foundation does not own the product, with the aim of allowing all third-party developers or businesses to build their own TikTok. Dominic Williams stated in the announcement that this allows developers and organizations to experience a new cloud computing paradigm for the first time. Interested developers and businesses can start submitting requests to access the Internet Computer via dfinity.org from July 1, 2020. Developers can upload their applications directly to the network, allowing the applications to run on the global network in a tamper-proof environment.

However, despite Dfinity's advancements and updates in product development, investors are perhaps most concerned about when the tokens will be released. The project received a $6.1 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz and Polychain Capital in February 2018, followed by a private sale in August of the same year, totaling $195 million in investments. However, the tokens have not been released to date.Currently, Dfinity's IOU futures price in the market is $8.88, but the price reference is relatively low before the tokens are released. [Note: IOU stands for I Owe You, referring to futures products issued by exchanges for tokens not yet online]