How Corrupt Crypto Is: NEAR Marketing Itself as the Blockchain for AI
This is how corrupt crypto is, and Bobby O did an amazing job calling it out. We're going to read the replies here from Vadim of xNearCore, who is building out their layer. NEAR is marketing itself as the blockchain for AI. If you go to CoinGecko and look in the AI category, you will see NEAR Protocol listed right there in the AI category. And yet you might wonder: what exactly does NEAR Protocol do for AI? When you go into the details, it's the blockchain for AI that can't run AI. Bobby O made an amazing 24-minute video about this. If you look solely at the network itself, what can you do on NEAR? Nothing. It's a complementary system. So they market themselves as a blockchain for AI that can't actually run AI. And then the defense against that is, well, running AI on chain is primitive and unnecessary. But then NEAR is fraudulently marketing their tech as if it can run AI on chain.
Then you have a post from Vadim saying "ICP trolls about NEAR running AI," claiming they're optimizing a metric that has nothing to do with what the AI market needs right now, that this is ridiculous, and that NEAR made the opposite choice and optimized for what users and builders actually need right now. Now, I'm no AI expert, but this is absolutely, blatantly false. NEAR AI cloud runs — and this is not on the blockchain — trusted execution environments, which are a "trust me, bro" system that can also be expensive. You might as well use centralized AI. "NEAR AI cloud already runs live production workloads." Well, great.
Dominic Williams Replies: A Straw Man for Misleading Uninformed Readers
So look at this guy's post, and then look at what Dom said. Which one of these sounds like it's true and based on a huge amount of technical knowledge, versus which one is a cheap straw man argument designed to distract? Look at what Dominic says in reply. Dominic is the founder and chief scientist at DFINITY — to me, the number one person to listen to in crypto who actually knows what he's talking about from a technical point of view, who has led the team building the most advanced technology, and who has solutions on a scale that NEAR has to just pretend they can do something like. Look at Dominic's reply: "You missed nearly every relevant part of the ICP AI story, so your article works as a straw man argument for misleading uninformed readers." That is all crypto marketing is about — misleading uninformed readers.
Now, Dominic is being nice, saying "I think you wrote in good faith." I disagree. I don't think this was done in good faith. I think it's very clear that Vadim knows exactly what he's doing and is intentionally misleading uninformed people with an argument designed to shut down anyone who can't see the details. Someone who's holding NEAR reads this really quickly, doesn't understand what any of it was actually talking about, and goes, "Oh, okay, he posted an argument that says ICP didn't build anything valuable. Great, move on, I'll keep holding NEAR." But dig into the details — and you can ask AI to make sense of the details now — and look at what ICP has actually built.
On-Chain AI Inference: What ICP Actually Built
On-chain AI inference runs on ICP. ICP, unlike NEAR, can actually run neural networks fully on chain, and even very basic LLMs too. When I say on chain, I mean actually running on the network — not off the network in a quote-unquote "trusted execution environment," which is not a viable way to use a blockchain. You have some other off-chain environment that's supposedly trusted, that can be expensive to run that way, and that has to be trusted to be putting information back out to the blockchain. At that point, why do you even need the blockchain? I trust ChatGPT is running my stuff in a good enough environment. So when you have NEAR's marketing — "we're the blockchain for AI," as Bobby O pointed out — your blockchain can't do anything for AI.
And this is what's happening. Dominic says, "I never say something's running on chain when it's actually running off chain." This is crypto: they say things to make it sound like something is running on chain when it's actually running off chain. That's called fraud. That's called misleading your viewers and your investors. And it's not even specific to NEAR. Bobby gave a great example with NEAR, but this is what almost every other coin in crypto is doing. When they say it's running on chain, it's actually running off chain. When they make it sound like it's built on the blockchain, it's not on the blockchain. So when you defend that, you're justifying the fact that you're running off chain — for example, on Amazon Web Services — while there's a token that's on chain. This is the truth: other blockchains have tokens on chain and everything else is off chain. And Dominic is in a better position to know this than anybody else. He says, "I understand the rest of the industry does this. And yes, obviously at the current point, running AI on chain in its current form cannot satisfy mainstream AI needs. However..."
Saying Whatever It Takes to Get Paid
This is what you've got to cut through — all this BS. Almost everybody in crypto is just saying whatever they need to say to get paid. They don't care about you. They don't care about the technology. They're saying whatever they need to say to protect themselves, their paycheck, and the people they're feeding. Their number one thought is not you, or how they might do something useful for the world. It's: I'll say whatever I need to say to get paid. To be fair, that's how I see what everybody like Vadim is posting. He's doing his job. He's saying what he needs to say to get paid. And in his mind, he probably believes it, because he believes what he needs to believe to say what he needs to say to get paid. Because if he actually looked into all this stuff, it would undermine his position. He might have to quit doing what he's doing and totally change his life — and that would probably ruin his whole paycheck, wouldn't it?
And who out here is courageous enough to ruin their own paycheck to speak the truth? I would hope more of you would say yes to that. I've been willing, multiple times, to ruin huge paychecks and turn down huge amounts of money so I could get out here and tell you the truth. Because I'd rather sleep at night and be a person of integrity than just say whatever I need to say to make money. I've said whatever I needed to say to make money before, and it's disgusting, and I'll never do that again. What I'm reporting here, in my view, is some of the best information in crypto — and it's drastically hidden from you.
"Nothing to See Here": How the Misdirection Works
So this is an example of how these arguments work, and when you look into the details, you can see how weak everyone else's argument is. Vadim — am I saying that right? who cares — focuses on one thing, then pivots, enumerating a tiny fraction of the story, trying to convince the reader that there's nothing to be seen here. This is all of crypto. "Oh look, ICP — look at a price chart. Nothing to see here, guys, move on." "Oh look, ICP AI — nothing to see here, guys, move on." Because if people stopped to take the time to look at what was going on with ICP, they'd dump all those other crappy, useless tokens — inflated garbage spreadsheets secured with cryptography. They'd dump all that other crap and pull it off crypto exchanges, where your entire account can easily be locked at the push of a button if you piss the wrong person off. And nobody in crypto who's making money off of you being naive, confused, and trusting them with your money — nobody in crypto getting paid off of that — wants you to look at ICP. This is the whole story: there is something to be seen with ICP.
Now, this isn't financial advice. I only have ICP because of the huge amount of research I've done, and because I've come to see myself as one of the few in crypto with integrity, willing to say what is true and what needs to be seen in exchange for much less money and fewer views than I would get lying. Do you understand how much more money and how many more views I would get by lying to you and promoting garbage like NEAR? I know, because I did it before. If I promote NEAR, all the NEAR followers pump my video. If I promote XRP, all the XRP people and bots push my video. That's what other crypto YouTubers do — they push all these coins, they don't care what they're saying, they're just printing money. And you're the one letting them do that. You have to stop letting them do that. You need to level up and learn. You and the other viewers are the ones letting all these people rip you off and lie to you. Don't be a person who gets ripped off and lied to. And to do that, you've got to do your own research.
Knowing Who to Listen To
This is an example of why you need to know who to listen to. Dominic, to me, is the one person I listen to in crypto who totally changed how I saw crypto — the one person in crypto in the best position technically to know what he's talking about, and then to expose the system. This post is a perfect example. And Bobby O is another fantastic voice to listen to. When I want to know the technical stuff and understand it beyond the surface and the hype, Dominic and Bobby are who I listen to. If you want to get on the ICP AI story, there is something very interesting here — and the goal from everyone else is to misdirect. CoinGecko removed ICP from the AI category when, in my opinion, it's doing the most advanced AI by far in crypto. Everyone is trying to mislead people into thinking there's nothing interesting technically. All they have is straw man arguments at NEAR, because they don't have the truth in their favor. This is what it's all about: disinformation. The truth is out there. If you can be a person who is true and authentic yourself, you'll be able to see the truth — and then you'll be able to see what's disinformation.
"Bottom-Scraping Behavior" and the ICP AI Story
Once you can see what disinformation looks like, you'll just know that this is BS. And I like Dominic's politically correct line: "I'd like to believe NEAR wouldn't engage in that bottom-scraping behavior." I'd like to see an example of anyone outside ICP that's not engaging in bottom-scraping, doing-anything-it-takes-to-get-paid behavior. So if you want to get on that ICP AI story: running on-chain inference is incredibly significant. Take the facial recognition demo in 2024, which ICP got a nice price pump after — one little demo that didn't even get that much publicity, because the rest of the industry doesn't want you to understand what's going on. Here's the truth: recognizing a few faces consumed more compute than NEAR or any other blockchain processes in an entire year. It reflects the fact that while traditional blockchains are stuck at pocket-calculator level — including NEAR, including Ethereum, including Solana, especially XRP — where they can only store tokens and little bits of data, and process DeFi updates to numbers, the Internet Computer has progressed to offering cloud functionality. In this regard, it is orders of magnitude more capable, and it's a testimony to the army of engineers and researchers who've worked on it.
In my view, this is the most damaging information for the rest of crypto, because almost everybody else in crypto is corrupt — lining each other's pockets, bribing, doing anything, paying anyone to say anything to hide ICP from you and get you to buy their token instead.
Caffeine AI and What's Impossible on Other Networks
If you want more perspective on this: creating a service like Caffeine AI, which builds apps on the Internet Computer using AI, is out of the question on any other network, because it's not possible to build apps on these other ones — only to give them tokens. And Cloud Engines is going to take that to the next level. You can't run a frontier LLM inside normal code on Amazon Web Services, and the fact that the inference runs on the Internet Computer is impressive. But that's something Vadim seems to have missed — and this is the thing: it's missed intentionally. Whether it's just trying to write something to defend NEAR as fast as possible, or it's willful ignorance — "I'm just going to criticize this and I'm not actually going to look at it at all."
You would think somebody who's in AI would want to know what the best of the competition is doing. But would it be naive to assume there'd be integrity and honesty about exactly what that looked like? Or do you think self-interest would stop people from telling the truth, or even looking at it? Because maybe the guy from NEAR doesn't know the truth. Maybe he's closing his eyes and covering his ears and saying, "There's nothing interesting on ICP. I don't see anything interesting happening on ICP." And he could be telling the truth about that, because he may have intentionally never looked at anything going on with ICP. Because what happens if he does? Then all of a sudden he has to deal with his conscience telling him: why are you working on this stuff? It's useless next to ICP. This is how people are operating.
The Too-Long-Didn't-Read: Pioneering the Future of AI
This post by Dominic Williams continues, and I think we'll cover it further another time, but here's the too-long-didn't-read: the Internet Computer system is pioneering the future of AI, which goes beyond securely running inference for somebody into questions about how services and platforms will run the world and be updated in the future. To me, this is the most important information in the world of AI. If you're holding NEAR and they're promoting themselves as a blockchain for AI that can't actually run AI — if running AI on chain is primitive, then stop fraudulently marketing your tech as if you can run AI on chain. I agree: there need to be some crackdowns on these cryptos that are fraudulently marketing their capabilities. It is some of the most misleading false advertising we've seen in the world — saying that you run AI on chain and that you're an AI coin, when the fact is you do almost nothing except hand out tokens, create tokens, and incentivize tokens, and then maybe put a little report of a bunch of stuff that happened off chain onto the blockchain. That's useless.
And if you want to ask more questions, if you want to have the best experience, if you want me to know your name, if you want to be a part of the movement, join the Jerry Banfield Family.
I know it, and I'm not the only one who knows it. Dominic Williams knows it. Bobby O knows it. I'm broadcasting this to thousands of people out here, and I keep digging into stories like this one on my ICP Crypto playlist. I hope y'all can handle the truth, because either the truth is going to win and all these fakers and liars are going to get destroyed, or y'all are going to just keep getting ripped off indefinitely by frauds, liars, and cheaters.