One viewer told me, "Jerry, I sold all my Chainlink. I was all in until I saw your video about Internet Computer Protocol." I want to compare the two right here, because on the surface you would think Chainlink would be the superior project — it has the bigger market cap and it looks better based on the chart. But this is where I dive deeper and help you see the difference between the two of them.
When this viewer initially found me, I had done a video saying Chainlink was going to zero. They were initially very upset, because they had their whole portfolio in Chainlink. So I'm going to give you my own price prediction for each of these, because in my view you can really only have your money in one or the other. And even if you have money in both of them, my opinion is that you're potentially missing out on 100x on Internet Computer while risking everything for Chainlink.
Comparing the market caps
Let's take a look first at the market caps. Chainlink is a 15 billion dollar market cap right now, while Internet Computer is a 6 to 7 billion dollar market cap. That means Internet Computer is valued at less than half of what the Chainlink token is valued at. But the market cap alone is a distraction — I've gone deep on this elsewhere, on why crypto market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real — so the next key thing we need to look at is: what is the real value of these projects? What do they actually do?
What each project actually does
Internet Computer is a world computer
Internet Computer Protocol is a world computer, where there's no other real, fully functional world computer that you can host most websites directly on the blockchain. You can have applications like OpenChat, where you can have a full conversation directly on the blockchain. It's like Discord or Telegram, fully on chain.
And if you're thinking, "Well, so what? Who cares if it's fully on chain?" Wait — you mean everything's not fully on chain? Yes. Everything else in crypto is basically a token layer or a ledger, and then all the rest of the stuff is back on centralized infrastructure. I know, it's pretty deceptive. Only Internet Computer Protocol actually does everything on chain.
Chainlink is an oracle
Now, what is Chainlink exactly? Chainlink is what's called an oracle. So all Chainlink does is things like provide price feeds. Let me give you an example. If you go to something like Uniswap and you want to trade coins — let's say I want to trade some Ethereum for some USDC — where is the Ethereum? First of all, when I'm on Uniswap, I haven't actually used the blockchain yet at all, because that website is hosted off chain. It just pulls data. And then you have something like Chainlink, which feeds the blockchain the price data.
So what Chainlink is, is a token hosted on Ethereum, and now on some other networks as well. And then they have a bunch of things off chain. For example, they have all these oracles set up where you can pull from web two sources. How, when you go to Uniswap, does Uniswap know what the price of Ethereum is versus the price of USDC? You have something like Chainlink that says, "Hey, the price of Ethereum is $3,600, and this is how much USDC you could get for that." So that seems pretty useful on the surface, right?
The two critical problems with Chainlink
Well, here are two critical issues with Chainlink. First, Chainlink is providing stuff that's off chain. If you go to an explorer like CoinMarketCap, scroll down, find the Chainlink token and click through to the explorer, you'll see it was initially launched on Ethereum, so there are hundreds of thousands of holders. However, these holders do not have any legal ownership over all the stuff that Chainlink is. If you go to the Chainlink website, they'll tell you what they do there: "the standard for on-chain finance." But all the stuff Chainlink is building — the majority of the value, the protocol, all the resources — the foundation has ownership of it, and it pulls and uses resources that are off chain.
Are you seeing the problem here? Because all these people holding the Chainlink token, the token does not give you any legal ownership over the property of the Chainlink foundation. Holding the token gives you no ownership of the website. It gives you no real ownership of the protocol. It doesn't give you any real control by law. For example, if Chainlink were a stock, and you bought the stock and owned it, the stock would give you some real legal ownership over things like the website and all of the resources. But who owns the Chainlink stuff? The foundation owns it, and the token holders don't own anything.
What's even worse is there's no ownership by code either. Now, if this were on Internet Computer Protocol — like OpenChat is on Internet Computer Protocol — then when I'm holding my OpenChat tokens, I'm able to go into the OpenChat DAO and vote on proposals, and my votes on proposals decide what happens. Based on how the voters vote, they can transfer funds, and they could even totally change the OpenChat application or take the existing OpenChat application offline, because on Internet Computer Protocol everything is fully on chain. Tokens on ICP can be built so that you have real control by code. But owning the Chainlink token gives you neither legal ownership nor control by code.
ICP's cycle burn rate is rocketing up
And here's something even worse for Chainlink by comparison. When you compare it to Internet Computer, the thing you want to look at is: what direction is this going in? Internet Computer is rocketing up. If you look at the cycle burn rate and go to the all-time history, the cycle burn rate when the network was new about three years ago was tiny. Today, at the lowest, it is 10,000 times higher than it was about three years ago on this particular day. On some of these other days, it is hundreds — almost a thousand — times higher.
The cycle burn rate is people essentially paying their web hosting bill on ICP. They're paying reverse gas fees to host things like my websites on ICP, and the OpenChat application in my community. Every time you use OpenChat, you are contributing to the cycle burn rate, because developers have to pay to run the application on ICP. So this is the best metric of how ICP is doing, because ICP is unique in this. This leads me to believe ICP is drastically undervalued in the market right now.
Why I think ICP is drastically undervalued
I think the true value of ICP, if people really understood the technology, is much higher. To me this is the biggest innovation we've seen in crypto since Bitcoin came out. Even Ethereum offering a token layer was a relatively small innovation compared to being able to put every single thing on the blockchain. And I think we're easily going to get 100x on Internet Computer, because if Internet Computer were valued accurately, in my opinion it should be valued higher than Ethereum is today.
Internet Computer is truly the first thing in crypto we've seen where you can do everything on chain, and that's what you really need to make crypto valuable. Right now, Internet Computer has the best Bitcoin layer two, it has the most advanced Ethereum layer two, and it has the only place you can do AI fully on chain. To me, that should be valued at least a third of where Bitcoin is today. If you want to see more of how I think about ICP, I keep putting out my thinking in my ICP Crypto playlist.
What Chainlink has going for it — and why ICP makes oracles obsolete
Now let's compare that to Chainlink. What does Chainlink have going for it in the future? Well — guess what else Internet Computer does. What Chainlink does that's valuable is it can connect web two to web three, as in the Uniswap example. Something like Chainlink is necessary because these old blockchains — and in my mind everything but Internet Computer Protocol is an old blockchain — are basically just a token layer, and they need help to connect to and use the rest of the internet, which is pretty basic when you think about it. You need something like Chainlink to run something like Uniswap... until Internet Computer.
On Internet Computer, you can connect web two and web three without oracles. Read this: "Until now, blockchains had to rely on expensive and slow oracles" — that's Chainlink, even if they don't name it — "to read from off-chain data sources." Like I just said, ICP smart contracts can directly connect to web two APIs. And here's the key phrase: "making oracles obsolete." As soon as people start building on Internet Computer, Chainlink is obsolete. Remember, the token itself doesn't even provide real ownership — and now the technology exists to make oracles completely unnecessary.
Oracles are necessary when people are using these old blockchains like Ethereum and all the Ethereum copies, which is every other layer one besides ICP. But now the developer data tells a different story.
Developers are choosing ICP
If you look at the developer data, people are building on ICP more than any other blockchain. Look at the GitHub, look at any way you want to measure developer activity. There's CryptoMiso, which tracks crypto GitHub activity, and there are tons of other ways to look at this. ICP is the place where most developers in crypto — the number one place crypto developers are choosing to build for the future. And if you look at Chainlink, it has less than a third of the GitHub commits.
But most importantly, people are actually building things on ICP. You cannot build something on Chainlink, because Chainlink is a token, and the token is tracked on different blockchains. As I said, things like the Chainlink website are off chain. You can't actually build on Chainlink, and the technology Chainlink is using is now made obsolete by Internet Computer. So to me, there's no way I would want to build something on Chainlink, and I wouldn't want to have money in Chainlink either — even though I bought Chainlink at one point in 2023.
My price prediction for Chainlink vs ICP
I did my research on Chainlink, and once I realized what Internet Computer could do, I see for the future that the probable outcome — in my opinion — is that any money I have in Chainlink, I am going to effectively lose. Even if Chainlink has a relatively small bull run where it might 2 or 3x, Internet Computer is looking, to me, like we could 100x in this bull run. (This is my own speculation and experience, not financial advice.) I've shared more of this kind of speculation in detail in my post on how ICP can pump to $100 anytime.
So I'm not going to buy Chainlink. Whether it's this bull market or the next one, my belief is that by the next bull market — say, 2029 — Chainlink is gone. It's no longer needed, everybody's sold out, and it's a dead project. Because the more people build on Internet Computer, the more oracles are finished. And with Internet Computer being a Bitcoin layer two and an Ethereum layer two, people are building all over it for free.
Confirmation bias and doing real research
So if you're wondering, "Well, why doesn't everybody see this?" — it's because most people aren't doing this kind of research. Most people are just FOMOing into stuff, seeing one or two videos, watching people talk about price charts, and then throwing their money into something and getting sucked into what's called confirmation bias. When I bought Chainlink, I wanted Chainlink to go up because I bought it. That's confirmation bias. You don't want to be wrong.
One of the most valuable things people can do in crypto is tell you you're wrong and say, "Hey, the research you did on this coin was ineffective. You didn't find out what you really needed to know about it." What I've told you here is what I think you really need to know about Chainlink, and the basics of what you really need to know about Internet Computer. To me, anything that's in Chainlink, you're going to miss out on potentially 50-plus X gains versus having your money in Internet Computer. If you like this style of coin-by-coin breakdown, I do a lot of it across my Money playlist.
Why I think ICP has the most to gain
This is, in my opinion, a very limited-time opportunity, because people are watching my videos. I just talked to a guy whose holdings are a lot of Bitcoin, and the only other coin he's got is Internet Computer. He looked at all these other coins and spotted that they were crap — they were copies. He's a developer. The more developers get into crypto, the more people with technical experience look at it, the more they can tell the difference between something with real value and something that's just copying or not delivering real value.
To me this is a really limited time with Internet Computer, because there's no coin in the top that has more to gain from price action. Internet Computer is down the most from its all-time high in the top, aside from Pepe — and Pepe is a meme coin, so it's not even really worth talking about. Internet Computer is down about 96% because, in my view, it was manipulated at launch. It was so scary, the technology so incredible, that people invested in these other copied blockchains intentionally tried to destroy it using the easiest way possible to destroy it: manipulative price action. So Internet Computer has more to gain by its price appreciating than anything else, because the main critique levied against Internet Computer is the price action.
And the price of ICP, in my opinion, is going to push up and up and up, just based on the token burn. Because in order to pay your hosting bill on ICP, what you need to do is burn ICP to get cycles, and the cycle burn rate has recently exploded. Now we're burning thousands of ICP a day. We're only like three to five times the usage on ICP away from being deflationary. So that means you're going to have constant buying pressure on ICP all the time from people who are burning ICP to use the network — which no other crypto functions like. All these other cryptos, they're burning just for transaction fees, and they're paying centralized web hosting to run their actual applications. That's why something like Chainlink is expensive to maintain, and if they don't have constant money coming in all the time, the whole token will collapse. This is also why I think about how I accumulate so carefully — I've laid out my ideal ICP accumulation strategy separately.
Try Internet Computer for yourself, for free
So if you appreciate this information, which comes after previously doing my own deep research on both Chainlink and Internet Computer, then I'd invite you to come use Internet Computer. You can use Internet Computer totally for free. Can you use Chainlink totally for free? Well, if you look at a price feed, sort of — but how sustainable is that? You can use the entire Internet Computer blockchain, and by using OpenChat totally for free without buying any ICP, you can see how good this tech is for yourself.
And if you want to talk to me directly about any of this, you can join me in the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what I'm watching in real time and you can ask me anything.