You're about to learn how to do your own research in crypto for real, based on my 10 years of experience in it. I want to build a world full of wealthy people. I'm tired of you all getting ripped off by crappy, useless, paid liars and people who don't know what they're talking about in crypto. So you really need to do your own research and learn how to do it. So many of you have asked me, Jerry, how do I do my own research? This is my honest answer.
Start with the technology, not the metrics
The first thing you really need to do, in my opinion, is come back to the technology. What makes doing your own research hard in crypto is when you don't understand the technology, and that's where almost everybody in crypto is wasting their time. You're wasting your time trying to look at all these metrics and narratives, because a lot of that stuff doesn't matter. What you need to start with is: which cryptocurrency has the best technology? Which has the largest research and development team? Which is doing something that nothing else is doing?
If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book, what you need to start with is thinking about outliers. You need to think about what is fantastically different in crypto. For me, the biggest thing in doing my own research was before and after I found the Internet Computer Protocol. So I'll take a look at the internetcomputer.org website, because the biggest thing that changed for me in doing my own research in crypto was before and after I discovered it, which you all told me about when I was doing my live streams.
Why I start my research with the Internet Computer
So the first thing I really look at in crypto is the Internet Computer, because to me it answers all of those questions I just set up. The Internet Computer Protocol is the only real-world computer where you can build everything fully on chain. You can build something like my website entirely on chain on the Internet Computer: the website, the storage for the files, the code, and it all runs in smart contracts. In my experience there is no other technology like this in crypto. The reason it could be created is that the DFINITY Foundation, which is a major contributor and which launched the Internet Computer blockchain, has the largest research and development team in blockchain.
This is what I think you really need to know before you even research anything else. Because before I found the Internet Computer, crypto was very confusing to me. I couldn't figure it out. I would go through CoinMarketCap, click all the market caps and the explorers, and try to figure out, well, why is this one worth this much and that one that much? Why does this one have that narrative and that one another narrative? It all felt very confusing, because most of the rest of these are, technologically, basically copies, and some of them are actual copies of Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, sometimes with small innovations, but really they're built the same way.
So the starting point for your research is to understand what's different about ICP. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and it has accumulated the most value in large part because it was first, which was a massive breakthrough. Ethereum was a massive breakthrough technologically too. It was trying to be a world computer, but they went a different direction and it became the first platform with smart contracts. And if you had simply bought Ethereum eight years ago and done nothing else, you would have got a thousand X. I found Ethereum when it was at like $9 or $10 when I started buying it, and I didn't pay enough attention to the underlying technology, because there's a lot of hype and talk in crypto. But eventually it's going to come down to business fundamentals. Which crypto has technology that is truly worth building on, and which don't? Which cryptos do something that nothing else does?
How most crypto actually works under the hood
The way every crypto except the Internet Computer works, in my view, is this: they have a blockchain similar to Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, where the blockchain is a collection of nodes that send transactions and have very tiny amounts of data actually on the chain. Then the majority of everything else you use is built right back on centralized hosting. There's even a guide on Amazon Web Services on how to launch an IPFS node. Those are often hosted on AWS or other centralized hosting sites.
The other key thing is that they have a centralized infrastructure, which means there's a centralized point of failure in almost every single crypto application you use. So even if you're using something like Bitcoin and Ethereum, ask: is the website you're using it on, or the wallet, subject to a centralized point of failure? Yes. Can that centralized point of failure be hacked and have your crypto stolen, even if you're on the official website using the official wallet? Yes. And that's exactly how this has happened.
Then, when you try to actually make these different chains work together, you run into more problems. Bitcoin and Ethereum can't talk to each other, because they're blockchains where all they do is talk with themselves. So you get centralized bridges and wrapped tokens, and those are subject to being hacked and to centralized parties. And then projects say they're built on chain. Many of these other cryptos will do anything, even some stuff you'd really be bothered by. They'll pay huge amounts of money to get a partnership with a company, and then silently terminate that partnership because there was no real substance to it to begin with, except publicity. When all this other stuff says it's "on chain," in my opinion it's not really. There's almost nothing on chain. Almost everything of importance is off chain. And once you know that, it changes how you research everything.
The DAOs that aren't really decentralized
All of the DAOs in crypto that aren't on the Internet Computer rely, to actually execute anything that gets voted on, on a centralized developer, somebody with the AWS account or the admin key to the blockchain, to go in and make the changes. So all the other DAOs besides the Internet Computer have, in my view, no actual decentralization executing the real code or the changes the DAO votes on. And in many cases we've seen DAOs where the development team blatantly goes against what the DAO voted on. So once you understand how crypto really works technologically, then you can be prepared to do real research.
For better or worse, once you find the Internet Computer, and it took me months to really understand this (I hope to speed that process up for you), it changes everything. Some of the smartest minds in the world, like Elon Musk, quickly dismissed NFTs that are hosted off chain, because he sees that as inherently worthless. So what happens when Elon Musk finds out there's one single platform, only the Internet Computer, where you can easily build your entire NFT fully on chain? Maybe he thinks that does have value. Some of the other people around the world who are as smart as Elon do think building on the Internet Computer is the only logical place to build going forward.
So to do my own research, I have to start with the Internet Computer. It eliminates the need for oracles. As soon as you know about it, in my honest experience it kind of ruins everything else in crypto. It's like dating. I have a wonderful wife. It doesn't hurt to look at the other women I see in yoga class who are beautiful and be friendly, but I certainly wouldn't want to trade her for anyone else, because my wife provides everything I need: a fantastic mother, very mature, she's everything. Until I met my wife, dating was very hard, because nobody ever provided everything I wanted, nobody was really a grown-up who could deal with my personality. And that's like crypto. Before I found the Internet Computer, it was like trying to compare one turd to another. Well, this one's a little different, there's more of that one. But the way I found the Internet Computer was different is that I actually used it.
The most basic research: actually use it
So if you're not sold on the Internet Computer, that's fine, research it and start there. But here are some other tips that I think will be very helpful. What you need to stop doing, which so many of you are doing, is this: you buy stuff on exchanges, you've never taken it off an exchange, and then you go around thinking you know something about the crypto and promoting it, but you've never even used it. The very first thing I'd do with any crypto you have is actually use it. That's the most basic way to do your own research. Use the tech before you buy it.
Try sending a Bitcoin transaction and tell me that's the future of money, waiting five hours for 12 confirmations so you can feel confident your transaction actually went through. Try paying a $20 gas fee on Ethereum on a slow day, and tell me that's the future of buying NFTs. Or during a bull market, try paying a hundred-plus dollars just to swap two tokens, and tell me that's the future of the internet. Try using some of these other coins, and realize the moment you feel like you've been lied to. Like, I thought this app was on this chain, but it's not, it's on an AWS account, and all it does is connect with and do little transactions on this other network, while all the real value, all the code, all the pictures, lives on some developer's AWS account.
If you want to research a crypto game, play the game, and then think about the technology. Where's that game hosted? Is it on some developer's AWS account? What happens if they stop paying the bill? How much does it cost them to pay developers to interact with the blockchain, and then put all this other stuff on Web2 infrastructure, and then keep it all secured, and then promote the game? Try playing one of these games and watch the community consistently dwindle over time, and think about how the technology actually works. You realize, oh, basically all of crypto gaming is Web2 games that have tried to bring in tiny little crypto features, but it functions the same as a Web2 game at the end of the day. It's not true ownership over an NFT when the game developer has images of your NFT on their servers and can change those images however they want without you having any say in it. That's not real ownership.
How I discovered the Internet Computer was the real deal
What made me discover the Internet Computer was real was when I started using it. I'd played these crypto games on Ethereum layer twos. I'd used these literally trash decentralized social media applications where the founder will show you how decentralized it is when they sell their AWS account that has the bulk of the value on their website, and they sell that website and the code, and then the people in the community create forks of it. They put their own centralized hosting up, and then somebody else creates a fork and backdoors a blockchain and locks tokens. You'll see how decentralized all this stuff is not. And the user experience on these other applications is poor, too. Having to download all these browser extensions is not something the average person is going to do.
But then you go use the Internet Computer with the Internet Identity login, and this is what caught my attention. I actually transferred my ICP off an exchange. I know I'm using a mocking tone, but the foundation of doing your own research is taking your crypto off an exchange, and I'm shocked at how many of you have not done that, who then pay to talk to me and ask, can you help me get it off an exchange? Yes, but you can learn to take it off an exchange yourself. If you're holding $20,000 of a crypto on an exchange and you've never transferred it before, that's a good place to start your research.
What you'll notice is that with the Internet Computer, it is harder to set up an Internet Identity than setting up some of these other wallets, for sure. But once you get it set up, it is so easy to use, so much easier than any other crypto wallet I've ever used. I've used a lot of different wallets on a lot of different blockchains, and nothing is as easy and as fast as the Internet Computer's Internet Identity, and nothing else is set up so you can both protect your crypto and also be safe from losing it.
Look at real usage, not inflated transaction counts
If you want to talk about breakthrough performance, I've seen YouTubers present blatant lies to their audience about the Internet Computer's performance. If you go look at the dashboard, in my view it absolutely shreds anything else in crypto. It's doing over 5,000 transactions a second consistently. But you need to think: what is the value being done in these transactions? What exactly is going on in them? Are these meaningless transactions designed to inflate the transaction number, which some cryptos absolutely do, just like exchanges inflate their volumes? On the Internet Computer, these transactions are serving the web. My website, when I go to jerrybanfield.com, pulls a transaction on the network, which burns cycles. The only way you get cycles, which are pegged against a basket of fiat currencies, is by burning ICP.
Right now we're seeing the cycle burn rate do something. It's up like six times as much as it usually is. One of the best ways to research a crypto, in my opinion, is to look at how much real use and adoption it's getting. The actual amount of cycles burned on the Internet Computer is equivalent to somebody with an AWS account paying Amazon their hosting bill, so there's real value and real technology being used here. Depending on how you count it, since the network launched two and a half years ago, its use is up anywhere from 10 to 20-plus times on average. And these transactions are smart contracts moving gigabytes of data around on the chain and serving pictures, video, and much more directly on chain. Canisters are kind of like containers for the smart contracts, and thousands of canisters were created today alone. To me, this is the real deal in crypto.
I wish there were several other things I could compare with the Internet Computer and say, well, this one's really good and that one's really good too. But there's not. I've done hundreds of altcoin reviews. If you want a specific review on an altcoin, just search "Jerry Banfield" and then the coin, I've reviewed hundreds of them, and you can find more of my coin reviews in my Money playlist. And in my honest opinion, ICP is so far better than anything else that there's no comparison. It even has the first Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two on the same infrastructure.
Be careful with your time
Here are some more tips. Be careful with your time when you do your own research, because you could go down the list of every coin and spend an hour watching videos about each one. You could spend 100 hours watching deep dives and basic videos about all of them. But that 100 hours would end up being a total waste of time if you didn't understand the underlying technology behind it. Ultimately, if a crypto is going to be valuable, it needs a strong team of people behind it who are innovating the technology and doing the work. Who's making your blockchain better? Right now, in my view, the Internet Computer is so far in the lead, and it has the largest research and development team in blockchain. There's nothing else even close to catching it.
You might expect me, when I talk about doing your own research, to ask, well, why aren't you talking about diluted versus fully diluted market caps and tokenomics? I've covered those in other videos, but you really just need to understand the technology. Almost everything else is a waste of your time, because it doesn't matter. Many of these other cryptos have done anything they can, paying huge amounts of money, paying people. That's a whole other video. I made one called "Insane Crypto Creator Conspiracy," where the point is that most crypto creators are either paid to talk a certain way or they're just copying other creators. Long story short, some of these cryptos pay huge amounts to get people to relentlessly promote them and to not talk about ICP, because once you find ICP, in my experience it kind of ruins the rest of crypto in terms of any kind of serious potential.
You can't trust price charts or narratives
Another thing you need to understand when doing your own research is that you can't trust things like price charts. Price charts and exchange volumes are, in my opinion, blatantly manipulated. Prices are manipulated, narratives are controlled and manipulated. So paying attention to narratives and technical analysis is, to me, a complete waste of your time, because you're looking at what's happened in the past. You don't know about the manipulations and the lies coming up, the diversions. If you're not researching the actual technology, you're missing the only thing that matters.
You need to pay attention to people who would actually know about the technology and can compare it. There's a channel I want to shout out specifically: you need to pay attention to what developers who've seen ICP and who've seen other cryptos are saying. One example is Cityscape. He's a developer, and he understands from a technological point of view how amazing the Internet Computer is. From what he sees as a developer, actually building stuff and getting in there and really using it (and how many people in crypto do that?), he says this is where the future is going. This is where the hottest opportunities are coming, because the technology is vastly superior and way easier to use, and this is where people are going to be hiring in the future. So you need to listen to what actual developers are saying. For better or worse, I'm mostly a marketing and content creation guy. I'm a full-time creator. It's taken me a long time in crypto to finally cut through the crap and stop wasting my time with all these other cryptos that are, to me, games. They're gambling, they're speculative hype, they're houses of cards. Most people have lost money in crypto because, in my opinion, many of the projects are nothing more than copies, lies, and marketing hype.
So if you want to hear from a real developer who's actually building stuff, who's in the programming language for the Internet Computer and who's also into crypto, watch Cityscape on YouTube. He's done videos on other cryptos as well, and things on topics like ICP tokenomics. And if you want to compare how I think about who's worth listening to, I went through every top 100 crypto YouTuber with one question.
Who do you actually listen to?
So when you're doing your own research, be very careful about who you listen to. One thing to consider is: does this person honestly care about my results, or do they care more about buying themselves big houses, fancy cars, and trying to take over the world? Unfortunately, crypto is a space that tends to attract people who are mostly selfish and self-centered. How do you think I got into this? Let's be real. I am sober almost 10 years now, but I was in the middle of my alcoholism when I found crypto. Selfish, self-centered, only thinking about how to bring myself up no matter what happened to other people on my way up. That's how I got into crypto.
I very recently have had a change of heart. What I care about now is building a world full of wealthy people. Because if I consider each of you as a neighbor, I don't want you to get ripped off by somebody's crypto scam. If you lived next door to me and lost your life savings in somebody's crypto scam, I don't want a broke, desperate neighbor living next door who might steal my stuff or be jealous of my stuff. And I don't have much: I just have a regular thousand-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house, no garage or anything. It'd be like $100,000 if I wanted to build a garage, so I'm not building a garage. I'm not even going to spend like $20,000 to get a new studio. I could get one built, but I'll just move into a closet in the house or a little shed.
Because what I care about is providing a meaningful education. I care about a world full of wealthy people, people who have enough, who are comfortable. I'm not talking about the ultra-wealthy, who are often mentally sick and care too much about wealth, power, and domination. I'm talking about people who are comfortable, who have enough money, who often have time for fun, for family, for friends, for volunteering, for charity. We tend to be some of the happiest people in the world. The biggest difference in the world is having enough versus not having enough.
So when you're doing your own research, be very careful about who you listen to, because most people in crypto care about themselves, their own earnings, and their own pocketbooks, and you are a secondary consideration. There are various degrees. There are people who are just a little selfish but do care, and there are people who are absolutely paid liars who perhaps can't stand you, and all they care about is ripping you off, or buying a new house, a new car, a private island. They'll lie straight to your face like Sam Bankman-Fried. Crypto is full of people like that. So pay attention to the energy of the people you listen to. The more you cultivate your own energy, the more you become an honest, transparent, loving, and caring person, the more you'll be drawn to people who are the same, and you'll just stop watching the others.
Cut out the noise
I don't even read stuff on X anymore unless it's shared in my open chat group, because there's so much noise. So if you want to do your own research, you need to learn to cut the noise out. The main place most of you are going wrong in crypto is that you're listening to too much noise. You're clicking on these hype videos and these 100X videos, and I don't watch those, because 99% of the time they have no substance, and the 1% of substance is either copied from somebody else who was paid to say it in the first place, or it's not long-term meaningful substance.
I hope this has helped you do your own research better, because learning how to really do your own research in crypto is, to me, the difference between wealth and poverty. So I invite you to join me in wealth. Stop getting ripped off, stop holding your crypto on exchanges, and make sure you learn about ICP, because once you really understand it, you're in a better position to understand everything else. If you want to go even deeper, this is the same one altcoin I keep coming back to after researching thousands of them.
These conversations have really helped me to care about you. I've talked to so many of you who lost so much in crypto and were desperate for help. I realized not everybody can afford or wants to pay to talk to me one-on-one, so I want to give the same information I share on those calls to everybody for free, and lead by example. If you'd like to talk about your whole crypto portfolio and learn this directly, you can join me and the rest of the Jerry Banfield Family here. Most people who make content like this do not do face-to-face video calls with their followers, because if they did, they'd have to stop doing what they do.