The Biggest Lie in Crypto
The biggest lie in crypto is that your project actually needs a coin and that the coin actually matters. There are so many projects in crypto where you don't even need a coin, even where there is a legitimate project. Take Chainlink: there is a legitimate business there, but the business can do just fine without the token. Crypto has convinced millions of people that if the technology behind a project succeeds, the coin must somehow become valuable.
XRP is a fantastic example of this. Even if the XRP hype narratives come true, if you do the numbers, the reality is that right now there's only a few hundred dollars a day in XRP being burned. Even if XRP adoption increased 100x, there would still only be tens of thousands of dollars a day in XRP being burnt. That is hundreds, if not thousands, of times away from where it would need to be. And usage has barely moved on XRP in the last several years — it's been pretty flat, with a tiny amount of growth. Even if the usage and all the narratives came true, and the XRP blockchain went nuts and did 100x the transactions it does now, there still would be hardly any fees relative to the gigantic market cap. That means XRP as a token looks pretty hopeless to me as an investment, because Ripple could do great, the XRP blockchain narratives could all come true, and still not enough of the token would be burned and used to actually make the price move significantly.
Big Brands, Broken Tokenomics
This is the biggest misdirection in crypto, because you think you're holding some token like Ethereum. Ethereum has gigantic branding — it arguably competes with Bitcoin for the biggest brand in crypto, and I think Ethereum actually has the biggest ecosystem in crypto, especially when you consider all the layer twos, whereas Bitcoin's ecosystem is much smaller. And yet Ethereum, the coin itself, is not even deflationary anymore. It has gone back to being inflationary, and much of the revenue from Ethereum has been lost to layer twos, which are making the Ethereum revenue for themselves instead of the layer one blockchain. It's another perfect example: yes, Ethereum itself has big branding and marketing, but the actual tokenomics of whether this coin is going to be viable as an investment are drastically different from all the business systems built around it.
Bitcoin gets so much marketing and hype and talk, but the reality is that almost everything involving Bitcoin happens off the Bitcoin blockchain. In some ways, the Bitcoin blockchain is almost irrelevant, because almost everybody is just sitting there on Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin, and MEXC swapping coins — and that's not happening on the blockchain. You're in a centralized interface, taking their word for it that they even have the Bitcoin, and then you're swapping and doing all this trading while the Bitcoin on the blockchain just sits there. The vast majority of Bitcoin is held in a very tiny number of wallets. It's concentrated just as badly as the rest of our financial system, which leaves me questioning: how is Bitcoin any better than what we already have?
Solana is another perfect example. Solana has all kinds of branding — they're linked everywhere. Maybe not everybody in crypto knows Solana, but Solana has succeeded in getting their marketing everywhere. Yet look at the business system behind it: people swapping meme coins, and inflation. Right now, Solana's inflation is incentivizing the entire use of the blockchain. That means you basically have to have the price keep going up to make this sustainable, because once the price is flat or starts going down, people are incentivized to just sell their staking rewards, and it can get into a negative feedback loop. The actual real demand for the Solana token outside of speculation, hype, and marketing is relatively small. The fees generated are, again, not nearly enough to make a real business system outside of the inflation that the blockchain can only sustain because of the price. In my view, if the price continues to trend down, Solana is finished, because the incentives to use the blockchain are all based on an artificially speculated price.
And it's the same thing with Cardano, Binance, and Tron — all the same problems. Now, Tron actually has some better revenue with stablecoin payments, but as we've seen on Ethereum, people very quickly move to something else if there's a better opportunity. And there is a better opportunity.
The Better Infrastructure: Internet Computer
There's better infrastructure in crypto today, and as I say every chance I get, that's Internet Computer — the Internet Computer Protocol. The one simple truth in crypto, as I see it, is that Internet Computer Protocol has the most advanced technology. It solves gigantic world problems. If you want to build with AI, ICP is the answer. I'm building my own total business system at jerrybanfield.com to take payments in fiat and crypto — for calls with me, for selling games, for all kinds of things — and I'm using Claude to build all of that directly on the ICP blockchain. Do you know what a miracle that is compared to the other garbage solutions for this? Using one of these crappy vibe coding platforms like Lovable, you couldn't do anything even close to it. ICP has the dominant infrastructure in the world for building anything to do with crypto, and it is solving huge enterprise problems: how do we get rid of all these software silos and get onto the blockchain with AI? How do we secure our systems and make them verifiable? ICP is a huge solution. When you build on ICP, you don't need these other coins anymore. And once people see that, ICP is the only coin you need that has a real utility.
The Best Website Hosting System in the World
When I want to pay the web hosting bill for my website, I have to buy ICP, then burn the ICP for cycles, which gives the computation a stable cost pegged in XDR. Then I burn cycles to host my website. In my experience, this is by far the best website hosting system in the world — and I am actually an expert in digital marketing, so I know this space. There are no other web solutions I'm aware of in the world that compare. They all suck. They're all basically centralized cloud services, or I'd have to put my own computer in my house — and then my internet provider says they don't even want you hosting servers or anything like that in your house. And you don't want to have it at your house anyway; just trust me on that one. This is the best solution in the world because my website is resilient: it can't be taken offline or censored easily, which is a huge problem with all cloud hosting. And the computation is ridiculously cheap. To get the equivalent of what I have today on ICP, which costs me less than $10 a month in buying ICP, I would need to spend hundreds of dollars a month on other hosts — and I couldn't even do it, and it would be difficult to build with AI.
Even Bitcoin Runs on Inflation
All these coins are facing AI, and AI hacking has so much to ruin for the rest of these coins. All these coins besides ICP are extremely vulnerable, because their prices are artificially based on speculation. And fundamentally, even where some of them have huge businesses built around them — like Bitcoin does — the token itself is questionable in terms of how much real usage there is. Even Bitcoin relies totally on inflation from mining today. I know there's a fixed supply, but a huge amount of Bitcoin is handed to Bitcoin miners constantly. Let me get the numbers right: I think it's around $40 million a day, because every Bitcoin block pays out something like $180,000 and there are six blocks an hour, block after block, every single day. So you're getting millions and millions of dollars of inflation every day in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, there are absolutely tiny amounts of fees on every single Bitcoin transaction, which means miners can't support themselves off Bitcoin fees. Even Bitcoin is still running off an inflation-based model. Even though there is a hard cap on the supply, you are still having to print tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin every day and hand it out to miners. And you see the problem with that: it only works if the Bitcoin price goes up forever.
That's especially a problem when people find ICP by comparison. I don't see why somebody who has done their research would hold Bitcoin instead of ICP. Bitcoin is already a thousand times bigger than ICP, so there's so little upside possible for Bitcoin compared to ICP — and it's the same thing with these other coins. They're too big to give people serious returns, but they're not low enough risk to merit holding. All these coins have a huge amount of risk attached to them, and yet the upside on all of them is extremely questionable, because most of these coins have already been speculated to the moon. People are buying them not because of what you can do with the coin today — they're buying based on the theory that the price will be higher in the future. And how sustainable is that? How many times are you going to get people to keep buying something just because they think the price will go up? What happens when the price stays flat or goes down for years and people lose hope?
Ego, Attachment, and Opportunity Cost
I've talked with people who found me at jerrybanfield.com and scheduled calls with me, and they show me their crypto portfolios. They often hate some of the cryptos in their portfolio — like Dogecoin. They say, "I hate Dogecoin. Why am I holding this?" And I tell them: because you've become attached to it. It has become part of you, your ego, and your story, and you just want to be right about it. All you care about at that point is trying to sell it at a profit so you can validate the decision you made to buy it. But what you're not considering is opportunity cost. If you're in a coin that doesn't perform as well as another coin, that's opportunity cost — you've missed the chance to be in something better.
So to me, crypto is all about one question: can I find the one coin that's an outlier, that's way undervalued, that's less risky, that has more of a floor, more of a real business, and more of an upside than anything else? I've done huge amounts of research to find that, and that simple truth, that simple coin, is ICP. Since ICP exists, it puts all these other ones into question: why do you even need their tokens? If ICP didn't exist, I would be more bullish on the rest of these coins, because without some looming threat of something much greater than all the other coins, those coins might have more of a real business case. But when ICP can do everything all these other coins can do — and better — plus all kinds of things they can't do, there's just very little reason to hold these coins outside of speculation. And speculation depends on people not knowing there's something better. Once people realize there's something drastically better to hold than Bitcoin, XRP, Solana, Dogecoin, Binance, Cardano, Tron, and Ethereum — something so far superior — it makes all of these seem useless.
But even if ICP didn't exist, there's still the threat of AI hacking the infrastructure that all of these are built around. I'm not talking about the blockchains — I'm talking about the websites. Bitcoin, XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin can't host websites. Ethereum cannot: you can't practically put a picture on Ethereum, and even if you could, it would cost you millions of dollars. And Tron — you can't host something like a gambling website on Tron.
The Coins Don't Match the Businesses
It's all off-chain. Cardano can hardly do anything besides send transactions and run ultra-basic smart contracts. Binance's coin is basically a copy of Ethereum, and then it's tied to the Binance exchange — but you don't actually hold any Binance stock. The Binance exchange and CZ could continue to get richer all the while Binance's coin goes to zero. That's the problem: most of these projects don't even need a coin. There's no real business system supporting the actual coin that would give you confidence the price will go up in the future. The only thing holding most of the money in these coins is the idea that the price will go up — and if that idea comes seriously into question, or if there's obviously a better option, then it's finished.
Even setting ICP aside completely, AI destroying the infrastructure — the websites, the bridges, the crypto wallets that these things are built around — puts gigantic risk on all of them. Plus, eventually there's quantum computing to consider. All of these coins carry gigantic risks that most people aren't aware of, and very limited upsides, especially when compared to ICP. I hope this information is helpful.
Who Sees the Crash Coming?
A collapse like that could happen in a single day. You've seen great crashes in the past — the 2008 crash, the stock market crash in 1929. There were people who could see those coming way ahead of time, pulled all their money out, and were filthy rich, while the masses got caught, got destroyed, and had to go through a Great Depression. So it pays to have the information. Now, this isn't financial advice, but all I hold is ICP. I've held all of these coins before, and I sold all of them when I discovered what I've come to believe is the one thing you need to know in crypto: ICP. I discovered how weak all these coins fundamentally are in terms of their business systems.
People with large amounts of money tend to care about business systems. Sure, some people will just throw money into Bitcoin and hope they can beat inflation. But the smartest money tends to look at where the real business system is. XRP has no real business system in terms of the coin. Dogecoin — no real business system. Solana, Ethereum — these don't have real business systems. They're speculative tokens that are not making nearly enough revenue on the coin itself to justify their existence. And someday, either that's going to have to change, or these coins are going to lose a lot of value when investors wake up and pull their money out — especially when they see something better, or when they see a hack destroying their trust and their faith.
If you found this valuable, come let me get to know you — join the Jerry Banfield Family and message me there, or schedule a call with me. I've also got all kinds of other stuff on my website I think you'll enjoy — and know that it's hosted directly on a blockchain with ICP.
For more of my research on coins like these and where I believe the real value in crypto is, you can find all of my breakdowns in my Crypto Reviews playlist. Thank you for reading.