Crypto today is basically 1999 all over again — the start of the dot-com bubble. Nobody knows how to value coins and projects properly, so everything gets dressed up in narratives: AI, real-world assets, layer ones, ETH layer twos, on-chain infrastructure, AI agents, the metaverse. This is my honest opinion as someone deep in this space, not financial advice. And in my view, almost every coin besides ICP is a dot-com-bubble company with no real infrastructure underneath.
The dot-com casualties
Think back to the companies that raised hundreds of millions and IPO'd during the bubble — Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, Boo.com. Huge names, huge funding, and some, like Pets.com, collapsed within a year because there was no real business model or infrastructure behind them. That's what most of crypto is today: smoke, mirrors, and vaporware. Even big investment firms couldn't accurately evaluate these businesses then, and they can't accurately evaluate blockchains now.
The survivors built real infrastructure
Look at who survived. Amazon built real infrastructure and kept building it, creating a system that genuinely satisfied customers. Its stock had rough stretches, but today a huge share of the web runs on Amazon and most of us use it without even thinking. Google survived by organizing the internet better than anyone and relentlessly building its technology. PayPal and eBay solved real problems — I remember how sketchy paying online was before PayPal existed. The lesson is simple: the winners solved real problems with real infrastructure, even while investors were throwing money at the Pets.coms instead.
Why ICP is the Amazon, not the Pets.com
In blockchain, ICP is the only chain I see giving complete solutions to huge real-world problems. So many projects talk about AI but just slap an interface on top of ChatGPT, or claim "decentralized AI" while actually running centralized. ICP has the infrastructure in place to actually solve these things — running full applications, signing in, and sending payments securely in real time, with a wallet you hold directly on your phone that authorities can't simply unlock and snoop through. I'm using this today.
It's also personal for me. I'm building jerrybanfield.com directly on ICP with Caffeine AI — I'm on version 109 right now, working through things like withdrawals. I'm building the kind of platform you'd otherwise rent from Teachable or Kajabi for hundreds of dollars a month, completely dependent on their infrastructure and able to be banned at any time. Instead I'm building it with AI on the blockchain, secured, with Internet Identity sign-in. You cannot do anything remotely close to this on any other blockchain. I've wanted a platform like this — memberships, posts, discussions, payments — for over a decade, and ICP is the only way I can finally build all of it. If you want to follow the full case for the Internet Computer, you can watch my ICP playlist here.