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ALT FBI public service announcement with Department of Justice seal in the background on a gold gradient.
Built on the Internet Computer Protocol, Inkwell Publish is a decentralized long-form platform where your words live on-chain, not on a company’s servers. Canisters hold the pages. No single gatekeeper owns the feed. Independent voices claim their place. inkwellpublish.xyz/article/4…
The Internet Computer (ICP) network just turned 5 years old. To mark the occasion, the team is previewing something called “cloud engines” — a new way for people (and AI) to create their own highly secure, independent cloud environments.
What is a cloud engine?
Think of it as a custom cloud you control. You pick which computers (nodes) on the Internet Computer network will power it, who operates those computers, and where they are located. The result is your own private, mathematically secured cloud that can run apps and services.
Why does this matter for regular people?
The main goal is to let AI build and update online apps and services for you, with far less risk and hassle:
- Harder to hack: Software runs inside a secure network protocol instead of on ordinary servers. Even if someone physically accesses some of the machines, the apps and data stay protected (as long as enough of the network stays honest).
No constant security team required.
- Keeps running on its own: As long as enough of the chosen nodes are working, the apps stay online. AI can create software without needing human system administrators to babysit it.
- Smarter, safer AI coding: A new programming approach (used in the Motoko language) helps AI avoid accidentally deleting or corrupting data when it updates an app. It can catch “lossy” mistakes before they happen.
- Easier for AI to build complex software: The design lets AI create more sophisticated backends faster and more cheaply.
- Build by conversation: You can talk to AI tools (like Claude, Perplexity, or Caffeine) and have apps appear or update on your cloud engine automatically.
Sovereignty and control
A big theme is true independence:
- You choose the operators and locations of the computers, so you can keep everything inside a country or region (for example, for privacy rules like GDPR).
- You own the source code (AI helps you create and update it), so there are no hidden backdoors or vendor lock-in.
- You can swap out the underlying computers (even mix ones from AWS, Google, Azure, etc.) without interrupting the apps running on top.
Cloud engines can also include special AI hardware you control, with extra checks to verify that AI models are behaving correctly and results haven’t been tampered with.
Scaling and extras
Apps can grow by simply adding more nodes (or upgrading them), without rewriting the software. They can also handle things like accepting digital payments/stablecoins, and there’s support for storing large files.
The bigger picture
The cloud industry is already huge (around $1 trillion a year, heading toward $2 trillion). These cloud engines are aimed at the part of the market where AI creates traditional online apps and SaaS services — and eventually helps replace old, expensive legacy systems. They’re not trying to replace everything (for example, they’re not ideal for massive big-data workloads yet).
In short: cloud engines are designed so non-technical people can use AI to build secure, reliable, and truly independent online apps and services, with less need for technical teams, less risk of hacks or lock-in, and more control over where and how everything runs.
A massive theft happened through a compromised laptop and internal systems, Binance is covering the losses and freezing what it can, and Elon used the moment to say that unknown security holes are now a constant fact of life in software. inkwellpublish.xyz/article/6…
If Binance had used ICP infrastructure properly for its hot wallets, this specific hack would have been far harder (and likely prevented). inkwellpublish.xyz/article/5…
