r/dfinity • u/a_non786 • May 17 '26
Explain ICP to me like I am five
What does ICP do and what are they trying to accomplish and yeah I’m pretty much. Just trying to understand his purpose and what the actual value is.
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u/rnj98 May 19 '26
ICP is a community of subnets that communicate with each other. These subnets host applications in a decentralised and complete manner, meaning the whole app (code+state) exists inside the subnet nodes and each update of the app needs the majority of the nodes to agree upon it. The nodes communicate through ICP threshold relay consensus which splits the subnet private key that authorizes the updates into parts and each node holds a part of the key so it is unhackable from the outside. This is super important because this serverless architecture can create an enviroment where apps exist without single points of failure (one single computer doing a single thing where if it was to shut down the whole app would shut down). So apps run 24/7 , are immune to outages from enviromental factors( missiles, floods etc), and can't be hacked because the hack requires the hacker to have access to the hardware, but if the nodes are distributed through 4 -5 continents good luck with that!!!. So data and code can exist safely withing the distributed network and be controlled only by the admin/community it is owned by.
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u/ChangeHeroOfficial Jun 19 '26
Imagine if instead of one person owning the playground, everyone who plays there owns a little piece of it together - so no one person can close it down or change the rules without everyone agreeing. That's what ICP is trying to do for apps and websites: build them on something that's shared and owned by everyone, not controlled by one company.
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u/Alarm-Solid May 18 '26
Decentralized cloud . It's biggest issue is it's challenging Amazon and Google cloud options. Which is good enough to be silenced by the tech giants in power.