My friends, today we're going to look at Constellation DAG versus Internet Computer Protocol, because this is what you all asked me to review. Constellation DAG right now has about a $100 million market cap, compared to ICP's market cap, which is about 30 times higher. But let's take a look at the technology, see if we can even find the team, and compare. Because the question I'm really asking is simple: would I want to have my money in this versus ICP?
Why I compare every crypto to Internet Computer
Why do I compare it to Internet Computer? Because when you're comparing something in crypto, the crypto you choose to compare to is the most important metric. If I compared Constellation DAG to Bitcoin, you might think it's a good investment. But I compare it to Internet Computer because, in my opinion, Internet Computer has the best technology. It is the only third-generation blockchain where you can run a real world computer, where there are thousands of transactions a second, where the on-chain computation has been tripling every year since it was released. It has the largest research and development team in blockchain. So when I look at DFINITY and Internet Computer, the point is to see how Constellation DAG stacks up by comparison.
This is the same reason I keep saying that crypto market caps on their own are a distraction — the comparison you pick is what actually tells you whether something is worth holding.
What Constellation DAG actually is
Now, if you look at what this actually is, Constellation DAG is a protocol that uses a directed acyclic graph architecture to achieve consensus that is, in theory, capable of infinite scalability. However, it's not — at least not in the way that matters. Scalability in what, exactly? Can it do fully on-chain computation, like how JerryBanfield.com is hosted on Internet Computer? Can it do an application like OpenChat, fully on chain? Is it scalable in that respect? No.
So Constellation DAG is definitely not the most advanced technology in crypto. In fact, there are a bunch of directed acyclic graphs across crypto. If you just go to CoinMarketCap and search DAG, you've got Casper, Hedera, IOTA — there are several different DAGs. And there are some, like Casper and Hedera, that already have kind of market dominance in the DAG area. Casper is appealing to people on the fair-launch, proof-of-work narrative. And Hedera has the corporate proof-of-stake narrative covered. So really, those two have the DAG market locked down, and they're not going to get knocked off easily.
Which, in my opinion, is really bad for Constellation DAG. Because even as a DAG, it's not leading. And the question is, is it going to go down further from here, or is it going to go up? If you look at the price chart, it has literally lost all of the bull run gains from the 2020 run. It's down right around where it was before it pumped. It's up a little bit, depending on the price, but it's pretty much lost almost all the gains it had and went nowhere in six years. And unfortunately, this is the story of most things in cryptocurrency. Based on what I've seen, I believe it's probably going to continue on this same trajectory, and if not, go down further — whereas Internet Computer, to me, is in the best position to 100x out of all the big market cap cryptos, and to stay there and get up to where Ethereum is. That's my opinion and where I've put my own money, not advice for yours.
The DAG explorer looks like a ghost chain
So let's look at some critical flaws I found on the DAG Explorer, and how it compares to ICP. When I went to the DAG Explorer, the latest DAG snapshots showed there had not even been a block in three minutes. Not one single block in the last three minutes. There hadn't even been a transaction at all in six minutes, and very few meaningful transactions in the last 20 minutes — like where somebody actually sent something besides a block-reward equivalent. So the Explorer looked almost completely empty. You could hardly see anything happening on there.
And that's a bad sign, because when you compare it to Internet Computer, ICP is doing almost 5,000 transactions a second. It has gone up to 25,000 transactions in a single second, 40 blocks a second. And these are real transactions: every time somebody posts a message, that's an update; every time somebody pulls a message, that's a query. There's a lot actually happening — there's a ton of computation on Internet Computer. You can see this in the cycles burn rate. On average, the cycle burn rate has tripled every year, and this is real computation constantly being done on the network — thousands of update and query transactions every second, and the transaction count has consistently gone up. So looking at the DAG explorer versus ICP, the DAG looks like a ghost chain.
What about the AI hype?
But what about the hype people are talking about with AI? This is why you always need to do your own research and look for people who just present their research and lead by example. There's a creator, Dagnum PI, who has done some video recently hyping ICP more recently than this one, and this DAG post was recommended on Twitch for me to check. There's been hype about DAG for a partnership, supposedly with Forward Edge AI, which apparently has a partnership with Microsoft, and people have been hyping this up on X. But one of our viewers left a comment pointing out that he can't see any evidence of the AI being on chain. And if the AI isn't fully on chain, then it's decentralization theater. It looks interesting — apparently DAG is being used by the government — but then why is there only an $80 million market cap? If there really were government operations running on DAG, more than likely everybody would know about it and it would have a big market cap.
So when you combine these two things and actually go look at the Forward Edge AI account on X, it's following one person, it has 173 followers, there's one single video, and there's not one other post. This is the problem we see all over crypto. Dagnum PI has 23,000 followers on X, including maybe 30 people I follow, and he posted about this partnership — but did he get paid to post it or not? We don't know. Did bots push the post? We don't know. But what we do know is that this partnership, if it even exists, and even just the things we can easily observe, don't look trustworthy. This is exactly the kind of AI-partnership setup I warned about with BankrCoin being an AI trading trap — the AI branding does a lot of heavy lifting that the actual technology doesn't back up.
This is also shared on the Constellation network page, and the Constellation account on X says "the future of web3 is collaborative" and that "Constellation network connects web3 communities with a revolutionary DAG-based network." I've got to say, it doesn't look revolutionary to me, because I've researched over a thousand cryptos since I got into crypto in 2014. If you go look, Caspa has a DAG, Hedera has a DAG, IOTA has a DAG — there are plenty of other chains that have DAGs. If you want more honest, side-by-side coin reviews like this, I keep them all in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Is the DAG itself even revolutionary?
The DAG itself — the directed acyclic graph — is not revolutionary by itself. It's basically a little bit of a technical infrastructure difference versus what's going on in the world right now. Things like Ethereum started doing this, and then you've got Solana and all these other networks. They're focusing on an element of the technology, through the directed acyclic graph, that doesn't seem that important.
What does seem important is: can your blockchain store a gigabyte of data on chain? On Internet Computer, for five dollars a year, you can put a gigabyte of data on chain. You could start your own YouTube for five thousand dollars. You could put a terabyte of data directly on chain on ICP. Can you do that on a directed acyclic graph the way they're set up now? No. And this is just not different enough from the others.
I checked the docs — you can't even do an NFT
Unlike a lot of people who claim they're doing their own research, I actually checked the docs, and I had a good laugh. I wanted to find where this would mention pulling in IPFS to do NFTs. So I looked around in the docs, and it turns out you can't even do an NFT on this. So let's go back to that post where Dagnum PI is talking about AI and a partnership with DAG, and then go to the developer docs. I don't see any documentation about how to put an NFT on this — not even off chain using IPFS, and not even a regular old NFT. This is insane when you compare what it looks like from the outside versus what's actually in the developer documents.
Now, that doesn't mean there is no way to do it. But if there were a way, the documentation for it would be in the developer documents. There's a DAG token, and there are metagraphs, which are apparently independent networks — but where can I even put an NFT on this? I don't even see where. And the marketing talks about 80,000 transactions in seven seconds, which makes me ask: why not just say 10,000 transactions? This is benchmarked with six nodes, but who cares what's theoretically possible when you're empty? There's not even a block on the actual explorer. It claims 80,000 transactions per seven seconds, and meanwhile not even a block has happened recently. I hit refresh — maybe there's one now — nope, still no recent block. Just empty.
So this is why you need to compare things in crypto. You need to compare your investment, one against another.
Comparing cryptos is how I won at crypto
This whole approach of comparing cryptos played a big part in my victory over crypto. There was a week where I realized that if I followed my own investment advice, I would be doing very poorly — but as a content creator, I was succeeding. I had bought 50 different altcoins, hyped them all up, told everybody how smart I was, and showed them data when the altcoins went up. I did great as a content creator, but as an actual investor myself, I realized I was doing very poorly.
So I committed from that day forward that I would first and foremost be an investor. And the most important thing, if you want to be a successful investor, is to find outliers — find things that are not like everything else. I've gone through thousands of altcoins, and ICP is the only thing I see in the top 100 that's not like everything else. Bitcoin and Ethereum are at the top because they have first-mover advantage. And Internet Computer, to me, will in the future be up there at number three. Constellation DAG, I think, will continue to plummet and lose all its value — especially the more that things like Casper and Hedera sustain, because that comes at the expense of DAG. If you want to talk through any of this with me directly, that's exactly what I do inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
Why ICP doesn't need an AI partnership
Here's the thing that ties this whole comparison together. JerryBanfield.com is hosted on Internet Computer, so when you visit it, you cause a transaction on Internet Computer Protocol and I pay a small gas fee — fractions of a cent. OpenChat, where I chat with people, is fully on chain on ICP. And ICP can actually do real AI on chain. It's the only crypto that can do real AI on chain, so it doesn't need a partnership for AI on chain the way DAG does. The protocol itself can run AI models fully on chain — basic ones at this point — and there are $120,000 nodes coming soon that will be able to run more advanced models directly on chain. If you want to go deeper on where on-chain AI is heading, I broke down how Dominic Williams explained the future of AI on ICP.
My verdict on Constellation DAG vs ICP
So that's my honest crypto review. Constellation DAG, to me, is a ghost chain with an empty explorer, an AI partnership that doesn't hold up to a few minutes of scrutiny, and a directed acyclic graph that isn't doing anything other DAGs aren't already doing better. Internet Computer, by direct comparison, is running real on-chain computation every second, can store real data on chain, and can run real AI on chain without borrowing anyone else's logo. Unlike the majority of crypto YouTubers, I'm not out here first and foremost to make myself money — I'm here to lead by example and share my research with you, so you can compare your investments one against another and decide for yourself.