The News

The Internet Computer’s tokenomics are stepping into a new era.

Proposal 140538 has officially introduced Mission70, an ambitious campaign that targets a reduction in ICP inflation of at least 70% by the end of 2026.

This drastic reduction will be based on a combination of supply-side measures and demand growth. The demand side will be driven by new mainstream functionality and partner ventures. However, the immediate action item in this first proposal is a significant supply-side adjustment: the proposal recommends immediately increasing the price of replicated subnet memory by 2.5x.

Why the 2.5x Price Hike?

If you are an active builder, a sudden price increase might catch your attention. But it’s a crucial correction for the health of the network.

Right now, replicated subnet memory on the Internet Computer provides incredibly high value. This resource should be repriced to better reflect its strong security guarantees, redundancy, and operational costs. By raising the cost of this premium on-chain storage, the NNS ensures that this initial adjustment to network economics shall begin to turn up deflationary pressure.

The Savior for Builders: Low-Cost Blob Storage

DFINITY isn’t just raising prices without providing a path forward for developers.

At the same time as this price hike, forthcoming low-cost blob storage will offer a more cost-efficient alternative. This new storage tier is designed specifically for applications that need to store large volumes of mostly static data.

The strategy here is efficient resource allocation: reserve expensive replicated memory for high-security, mission-critical application state, and offload static assets (like images or front-end files) to the cheaper alternative.

Protecting the Builder Advantage

While memory costs are increasing, computation and network cycle pricing should be subject to further review.

A key requirement for any future configuration of increases is that changes only minimally affect the Internet Computer’s competitiveness as a novel onchain cloud platform. Adjustments must be evaluated against the platform’s unique value proposition. This includes its ability to host tamperproof and unstoppable applications, and its support for a serverless architecture that fuses logic and data.

This architecture specifically fuels the modeling power of AI agents building systems, which can also greatly reduce the overall cost of creating and owning applications. To ensure the ecosystem is protected, a process of continuous consultation with ecosystem projects, such as Caffeine, and enterprise users of cloud engines will inform future adjustments.

What Happens Next?

Because the Internet Computer network is directly configured and orchestrated by the fully autonomous Network Nervous System, it is highly adaptive. This autonomy means it can upgrade rapidly, and adjust key parameters dynamically, to meet challenges.

This proposal is just the beginning. Further elements of Mission70 will be presented in a subsequent proposal. For those who want to dive deeper into the roadmap, a detailed description of the suggested changes is available in the Mission70 whitepaper.