Original author: Little Cake

On the weekend, the ICP community suddenly became lively. The focus of discussion is Cloud Engines, a product that allows businesses to run private subnets on the Internet Computer.

The reason for the excitement is very straightforward: DFINITY has tied Cloud Engines to a deflation plan called Mission 70. Node providers sell Cloud Engines to companies, keeping 80% of the revenue for themselves and handing over the remaining 20% to the network to buy ICP and destroy it. If there are enough corporate clients, the inflation rate of ICP will be cut from 9.72% to 2.92%, a decrease of 70%.

This is a very clean narrative: businesses go to the cloud → generate revenue → destroy tokens → supply contraction → price reevaluation. As ICP has dropped 99.6% from its historical peak, with a circulating market cap squeezed to 1.1 billion dollars, any story that can articulate "fundamentals driving price reversal" will be amplified by the community.

The question is, what stage is this story currently at?

What exactly is Cloud Engines?

Think of Cloud Engines as a “custom data center.”

The public network of ICP is a shared highway, with all applications running on the same set of nodes. Cloud Engines, on the other hand, opens a dedicated lane for businesses: you choose your node provider, decide where to place the machines in the world, and control the number of replicas. The underlying protocol, smart contracts, and cryptography are identical to those of the public network, but the hardware and data sovereignty belong to you.

For enterprises, the selling point is “no lock-in.” If you don’t like a particular node provider, you can switch them out without migrating code or changing the architecture. The vendor lock-in problem that traditionally causes headaches for CTOs in cloud computing has been resolved with the standardization of the protocol layer in Cloud Engines.

Node providers list their hardware on opencloud.org, which can be filtered by geographical location, specifications, and runtime duration. Businesses can select nodes to assemble their own subnet, starting with a minimum of 4 nodes.

It sounds ideal, but there are several details to pay attention to.

The gap between narrative and reality

One capability that DFINITY emphasizes repeatedly in its promotion is the SEV encrypted nodes that prevent node providers from seeing the data running on them. This is extremely important for financial, medical, and governmental clients.

However, SEV nodes do not exist today.

A developer in the community made it clear in a forum: SEV encryption is a roadmap feature, and there are zero nodes available. Also on the roadmap is "operator-controlled upgrades," which allows businesses to decide when to upgrade their subnets, instead of being pushed by the protocol. This feature is not yet online.

The current functional offerings of Cloud Engines are: sovereign isolation, single-tenant, no lock-in, hardware selection, and fixed costs. Are these enough to make businesses willing to pay? Yes, but only in scenarios where data sovereignty is a stringent requirement.

Implemented cases include the National Cloud Engine of Pakistan and a pilot project with the United Nations Development Programme. Pakistan's ChatT, a sovereign communication application, has already entered the promotion phase. These cases prove that the product can run, but there is still a significant distance to "large-scale enterprise adoption."

The Mission 70 white paper contains a set of key figures.

The current ICP cycle destruction rate is approximately 0.0689 TCYCLES/s. To achieve the 70% deflation target, this number needs to reach 0.77 XDR/s, about 15 times the current rate.

Mission 70 divides the deflation strategy into two legs: the supply side cuts node rewards, contributing 44% to the reduction; the demand side relies on increased destruction, which must contribute the remaining 26%. The measures on the supply side are relatively controllable. These include cutting node rewards by 40% and reducing the minimum number of subnet nodes from 13 to 7, which are decisions that can be made through governance voting.

But the demand side is completely dependent on the market. 20% of Cloud Engines revenue needs to transform into sufficient ICP destruction volume, with the prerequisite being that the revenue scale of Cloud Engines must grow to a significant level. Based on the current daily destruction baseline of $6,000, it needs to grow from nearly zero to tens of thousands of dollars of new destruction daily to make this leg stand.

An analyst on Reddit expressed a representative attitude: he is optimistic about ICP in the long term but holds a "prove it first" stance on achieving the 70% target within 2026. He believes that the cycle destruction rate needs to stabilize continuously at 0.3 to 0.5 TCYCLES/s before he can believe the trend is valid.

How to view this card?

The positioning of ICP Cloud Engines aligns with a real demand: businesses want to migrate to the cloud but do not want to be held hostage by AWS and Azure, and in some scenarios, they need data sovereignty, which blockchain infrastructure can provide, making logical sense.

However, from an investment perspective, there is a timing issue here.

The narrative is ahead of the product. The 20% destruction mechanism is already being discussed by the community as the core logic for token revaluation, but Cloud Engines has only just begun Early Access, SEV encrypted nodes are still on the roadmap, and the daily total destruction volume is below $10,000. The token has already dropped 99.6% from its peak, and its market cap has compressed to $1.1 billion, making the valuation indeed inexpensive.

Every link in this chain needs time: Cloud Engines need time to go from Early Access to official commercial use, corporate clients from pilot projects to scaled procurement, node providers from a few to forming a competitive market, and the 20% revenue share from a paper mechanism to actually generating meaningful destruction volume.

The supply-side measures of Mission 70, cutting node rewards and shrinking subnets, are more immediate catalysts. If these governance proposals are implemented in the coming months, the inflation rate will see a stepwise decline, which will have a more direct short-term impact on price than Cloud Engines.

The story of Cloud Engines, however, is a longer bet. It bets that ICP can carve out a small piece of a trillion-dollar cloud computing market, and that the revenue generated from this small piece can create enough deflationary pressure from the 20% destruction ratio.

At this stage, it is a narrative preceding the fundamentals transaction. The cases of Pakistan and UNDP prove feasibility but do not prove scalability.

How far is it from token revaluation? It will take at least until Cloud Engines produces the first batch of quantifiable destruction data. Until then, all calculations about deflation are based on discounting future revenue for today’s price.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。