Friends, you are about to go through a step-by-step Internet Computer Protocol tutorial. If you love the Internet Computer like I do, and you see that the future of crypto and the future of the internet is being built on chain, and that the Internet Computer is the only place to build fully on chain, then you might be wondering: okay, Jerry, I've done that research, I agree with you, now what? How do I get my Internet Computer off an exchange? How do I stake it and earn the 16% APR reward you keep telling me about? Please help me get started. If that sounds like you, this is for you.
Why the Internet Computer is the only crypto I hold
The executive summary is that the Internet Computer is the only crypto platform where you can build a website, a database, NFTs, pictures, videos, and games — up to 400 gigabytes of code in a single smart contract canister. This is breakthrough technology. Nobody else has it, and nobody else is even trying. That is why, to me, the Internet Computer is the only crypto that is interesting, and it is the only crypto I hold in my portfolio: the Internet Computer and things built on the Internet Computer. This is my own opinion and experience, not financial advice.
So if you're thinking, okay great, what's next? If you want to buy, I buy on an exchange — I buy on Coinbase — and then I withdraw to the Network Nervous System wallet. That is what we're going to focus on: how to do all of that. If you're ready to join me on the Network Nervous System, this is the wallet. Internet Identity is the wallet you use to hold your Internet Computer and stake it. You do not need any other wallet, and I'll explain why. If you want to go deeper on the bigger picture of why I'm so convinced, I keep all of these conversations going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Step one: do your own research, and then do even more
Step one is to do a lot of your own research, and then do even more research than you think you should, so that you actually understand why the Internet Computer is different. Once you truly get why it's different, the rest of these steps make sense.
Step two: create your Internet Identity wallet
To create an Internet Identity, go to the official internetcomputer.org website, go to "Use," and click "Create an Internet Identity." This is meant to be the big-picture view of how to do everything, so I'm not going to spend half an hour walking you through creating an Internet Identity and everything you need to know about it, because I already covered all of that in detail separately. I strongly recommend that if you've never created an Internet Identity, you go through that detailed walkthrough first, because if you mess up your wallet and your Internet Identity creation, you can lose everything. Here's the quick version, and then ideally you'll watch the detailed version too.
The key things are these. One, you create an Internet Identity with that button. This operates based on the device you're using. So you should first create an Internet Identity on your phone, or a computer, or a tablet, and then immediately authorize another device. That way, if you lose one of your devices, you can still access your identity on the other one.
Then you need to set up a recovery phrase. For the best security, lock your recovery phrase down and keep it absolutely secret. Even if you lose your recovery phrase, as long as you still have access to your devices and keep authorizing devices, you still maintain access to your wallet — and nobody who doesn't have your devices could take your wallet away from you.
You do not need a hardware wallet or any other kind of wallet. In fact, a hardware wallet can add significant complexity and could even lead to you losing your crypto. So once you've created your Internet Identity from internetcomputer.org under "Use," it takes you to identity.ic0.app. After you've got your Internet Identity set up, your recovery phrase set, and at least two devices authorized, your wallet is prepared. Now you can pull your tokens off an exchange.
Step three: take your ICP off the exchange
You should never, ever hold your tokens on an exchange. In addition to them not really being your funds — they're the exchange's funds — this is where many people in crypto have gotten ripped off, by having exchanges go down that were doing very shady business practices behind the scenes. Even if your exchange isn't shady, you still might be stuck and unable to withdraw or sell your crypto in certain situations. You don't have real custody of it. So always take your Internet Computer off of exchanges. That helps everybody in the whole ecosystem except the exchanges — and who wants to help them anyway?
Once you've created your Internet Identity, go to the same "Use" menu and click on "NNS and staking." This is your wallet. You don't need any other wallet for the Internet Computer. Go into "My Tokens," then "Internet Computer." You send your Internet Computer from your exchange wallet to this wallet. Click the copy button and it brings up your wallet address.
For best results, send a small amount first — one to ten ICP, or whatever a small amount is for you — as a test transaction, so you don't mess up and lose all your ICP trying to withdraw it from the exchange. Then, after you've confirmed you have the right wallet address, send all the rest of it in the next transaction and load up your main wallet. I'm amazed how many of you haven't done this yet. It is essential.
Step four: stake your ICP in a neuron
Once you've got it in the Network Nervous System, if you want the sweet 16% APR rewards I go on and on about — and you can check them anytime on the ICP dashboard at dashboard.internetcomputer.org/governance — you have to lock your Internet Computer. Not just for eight years, but then leave it locked indefinitely if you want the maximum rewards. You can lock it for as little as six months, but you'll only get about 8.5%, and as soon as you start unlocking you'll get zero until it unlocks.
The reason I lock for eight years is that I've noticed the biggest gains come from being in on something early and then staying committed to it. So you can see what I've done for myself: I have 2,907 ICP that I bought and locked up here, and I've also staked 89 more that I've earned out of maturity. That's a lot of money. I'm doing this myself, and I'm going to show you how to do it yourself.
Once your tokens are here, click on "My Neuron Staking" on the left, then click "Stake Neurons" at the bottom. You take whatever you want to lock up — I'm going to put the max on here because I'm doing this as a demonstration. This takes it out of my main wallet and puts it into a neuron. A neuron is like a brain cell in the ICP network. One important detail on your Internet Identity: make sure you keep the number it gives you for your Internet Identity, because you have to have that number to access everything else. If you lose that number, in theory you could guess it, but that might take a while. So keep your Internet Identity number, the one you get when you create your wallet, as well as your recovery phrase.
Dissolve delay and voting power
So to stake neurons, go to "My Neuron Staking," click "Stake Neurons," put in the max, and click create. Keep in mind I have not locked anything up yet. The moment where you lock things up happens with what's called the dissolve delay. The dissolve delay is how long it takes from the moment you click "dissolve" until you get your money liquid again, and the dissolve delay is what gives you voting power. For example, if I click max, my 1.72 ICP translates into 3.44 voting power, and it's voting power that actually earns you the rewards. That's why I lock up.
You set your dissolve delay here. The dissolve delay does not start unlocking until you click "dissolve." You can skip setting a delay, but then you won't get any rewards, and you might as well just leave it in your main wallet if you're going to do that.
Locking up for eight years
Here's how you lock up your money. You set the delay to eight years and click "Set Delay." Once you click that button, it says "Confirm and Set Delay." This is final. Once you confirm and set the delay, you cannot get this money back by any means. The only thing you could do is sell your entire Internet Identity, and you'll generally get only a fraction of the locked-up ICP when you sell it — and to me that's not safe, not something I'd engage in. So think long and hard before you click "Confirm and Set Delay," because this sticks it in there indefinitely.
Click "Confirm and Set Delay" when you want to make a serious commitment to the Internet Computer, get the maximum rewards, and be in this for the long term — which, to me, is where all the return is. Once you do that, it's locked in there, and there's no getting it back out. And boy, how I wish I'd done that with Bitcoin — I wish I'd locked my Bitcoin up for eight years in 2014, or even 2017.
Step five: follow a neuron so you actually earn rewards
The second essential step: you must either vote manually or follow other neurons, or you will get nothing in rewards. The simplest thing to do is to follow. Read the categories: it says "All except Governance and SNS & Neurons' Fund," then "Governance," then "SNS & Neurons' Fund." The easiest thing you can do is click "Add Followee" and follow the DFINITY Foundation. DFINITY invented the Internet Computer — they're the team behind it — so it makes sense to just follow their votes if you want passive income and to support the network. If you follow DFINITY, you'll get about 90% of the voting rewards. So that's 16% times 0.9. And you must follow on all three of these categories — everything except Governance and SNS — so you need to follow one, two, three, like this, in order to get 90% of the rewards.
Now, some of you are absolute try-hards like me, and you want 100% of the rewards, not 90%. It gets a little more complicated if you want 100%. The simplest thing you can do is just follow me. If you follow me, I'm following DFINITY, I'm following Tagger, and I'm following a couple of other people who vote 100% of the time, and there are rules for all of that. So for the simplest path to your maximum rewards, you'd do this. Instead of following DFINITY directly, you can follow my neuron through my OpenChat channel. I host my website on the Internet Computer — way cheaper and more scalable than WordPress hosting — so you can join my community and connect with me there, find the OpenChat, go to neurons, scroll up to the one at the top, and copy that number. It's the same number you'll see in your view. Then go into your neuron, click follow, click "Add Followee," and paste my neuron in there. Every time my neuron votes, yours will automatically vote the same way.
Mine is set up to get 100% of the rewards passively. I've manually voted in the past, and I've just followed DFINITY in the past, but I'm very interested in getting 100% of the rewards and participating. Right now my neuron votes 100% of the time — maybe 99-point-something occasionally, if a vote is missed unexpectedly here or there — but I've set mine up to get the max rewards totally passively. I could go completely AFK, come back, and the rewards are in there. So you must follow my neuron on all three of these categories if you want the full rewards, or you won't get those votes in. Once you've done all the neuron following, you're set up to earn. You can mix it however you like — follow DFINITY on one and mine on another, whatever — but the easiest way is to follow DFINITY, or to follow my neuron in OpenChat.
Why I leave mine locked indefinitely for the age bonus
Once that's set up, here's what I'm doing: I am not dissolving. If you do not dissolve your neuron, you are not unlocking it. So my neuron has an eight-year dissolve delay, but it's effectively unlocked indefinitely — it will not start unlocking until I click "Start Dissolving." Once I click that, the eight-year countdown starts and I lose my age bonus. So if you do want to dissolve, you should do it as soon as you create the neuron — unless it's a six-month neuron, in which case you'll get nothing, because under six months you don't get voting rewards. If you've locked up for eight years and you want your money back in eight years, you need to start dissolving immediately.
I'm leaving mine indefinitely, because to me this is something that could provide income for the rest of my life, and I don't want to touch it anytime in the foreseeable future. Because I'm doing it that way, I keep getting an age bonus. The age bonus goes up to 25% and is multiplicative — so times 1.25 on top of the other rewards. This means that even as the total rewards on the network go down, according to the ICP voting rewards supply, and even as staking participation goes up, my rewards should stay relatively steady because I have that age bonus. So I'm locked, I'm leaving it indefinitely, and I'm getting that age bonus.
Estimating and compounding your rewards through maturity
Once you understand the dissolve delay, you decide whether to start dissolving or not. And if you locked for less than eight years, you can always increase your delay, up to a maximum of eight years, at any time.
Your voting rewards come in the form of maturity, and you can estimate them at any time. For example, with my main neuron, I can go into the dashboard, search my neuron, and see the exact rewards I'm going to be paid out. Keep in mind the rewards for a new staker are 16%; I'm getting a little higher because of my age bonus — my estimate is about 16.3%. Here's the key thing: it shows daily rewards as maturity. Right now I'm getting, on average, 1.34 ICP a day in the form of maturity, which then has to be converted to ICP over a seven-day process. Just imagine when the price of ICP goes over a thousand dollars — I'll be getting over a thousand dollars a day without touching my principal. That's the vision. That's what we're really doing here.
Stake your maturity, or spawn it to sell
The maturity comes in, and there are two options. One, you can stake your maturity — this is the best option if you want to accumulate more. If you want to increase your position and compound your interest, and you're in a phase where you're buying ICP, the best move is to stake your maturity, and to set it to automatically stake new maturity. I'm doing this automatically right now. Every day, when my maturity comes in, it's compounding. That's why my voting power is up to 6,090 — I essentially have the equivalent of about 3,000 ICP. The best part is that because this is maturity and not ICP, I do not have to pay tax on it. We've discussed that a lot, and I feel confident that I do not owe tax on staked maturity (again, that's my view, not tax advice). Staked maturity also keeps my full age bonus, whereas when I merge a neuron it takes the age bonus down. So it's most economically efficient, if you want to increase your position, to stake your maturity and to automatically stake your new maturity.
My take on when I'd sell
Many of you have asked when I'm going to sell. My outlook is that at any price under $100 for ICP, I want to increase my position — especially since I don't have anything better to invest in than ICP. So as long as ICP is under $100, I'm going to keep accumulating. I'll even set up wallets for my children and dollar-cost average into their wallets. When the price gets over $100, I want to start taking profits — but not off the principal. I want to start taking these rewards. Once the rewards hit over $100 a day, I want to start selling, and then indefinitely take my profits, or until the price goes back under $100. This is just how I'm playing it for myself, not a recommendation for you.
So once it goes over $100, or if I think it's getting close, I might uncheck the auto-stake and start accumulating my maturity instead. Then, when I want to sell, I'll click "Spawn Neuron," and a week later I'll get a brand-new, unlocked neuron from my voting rewards. Then I can sell that neuron — I click "Dissolve" and that neuron instantly goes back into my main ICP balance.
Some of you have asked, well, what if you can't cash it out via crypto exchanges? There are tons of ways to use crypto. I could buy gold directly with crypto, for example. If ICP were blocked on exchanges, I could swap it directly to ckBTC and swap that over to Bitcoin or ETH. So I'm not worried about being able to get this into some kind of value off of ICP, no matter what happens. That's what you really need to know to get started and be completely successful on ICP. If you want my fuller thinking on building a position over time, I laid out my ideal ICP accumulation strategy separately, and I also walked through how much ICP I think is enough.
Getting fancy: voting on proposals and merging neurons
There's a lot of other stuff you can do to get fancy. For example, you can vote on proposals manually to have your own input, which is definitely a good idea. If you're following people, they usually won't vote before you, so you can always check the proposals — whether you want to create a Service Nervous System DAO, for instance — and manually vote on it. My manual vote will go through even if my followers haven't followed yet.
Keep in mind that if you've just locked up your ICP, you won't be able to vote on anything yet — only an older neuron can vote on proposals that already exist, because a brand-new neuron can't earn rewards on proposals created before you locked. So it takes about a week to start actually earning rewards. You have to wait for new proposals to be made after you've locked your ICP, then have the votes go through, then wait for the maturity to settle. So it can be about a week between when you lock and when you start getting maturity in your account. After that, it's very consistent — occasionally you'll miss a day, but most of the time I just get maturity every day. If you want to learn more about buying before you ever stake, I compared buying ICP on spot versus buying accounts on IDGeek.
The last thing I'll show you is how to merge neurons. I don't want to have two separate neurons floating out here, so I want to merge them into one — I want to add this 1.72 ICP neuron into this 2,900 ICP neuron. The issue is that this new one has no age bonus and the old one does, so merging will take my age bonus down slightly, in proportion to the amount. With this small amount of ICP, it'll basically be nothing. You select the first one you want to merge into the second one, so we take this new one and stick it into the old one, click "Merge Neurons," and it shows you the result. The dissolve delay stays the same, the ICP stake stays the same, and it shows you the expected voting power and merge result. The new neuron I created will disappear and fold into the old one, and this is irreversible. So I click "Confirm Merge," and now I'm back to one single neuron — a little more ICP, a little stronger, and a slightly smaller age bonus. Everything is all set.
Where to get help
So, finally, if you're wondering, okay, I did all that, what next — or you need help — go to jerrybanfield.com. I've walked people through this on one-on-one calls, which is part of why I decided to make this guide. You can always schedule a one-on-one video call with me if you'd like to chat through your setup. You can also come into my OpenChat and ask questions; I always check the VIP channel first and reply there, then the diamonds channel, and then, if I have time — which I often do — the free-for-all. Join, ask for help, and connect with the community. I really appreciate your time here.