Internet Computer Protocol right now has the best technology in the world that I can see available publicly for building the future of the internet on. There's just one problem. All the companies that are building and working on AI, the ones that already have the existing web infrastructure, have every incentive to build their own better infrastructure. Don't you think it's obvious to the people at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and ChatGPT (which I realize is the same thing), Anthropic behind Claude, NVIDIA, and all these other companies doing AI and hosting the infrastructure of the internet right now? Don't you think they realize where the current limitations are? You've got Google and Amazon seeing that cybercrime is going parabolic, and you've got OpenAI and Anthropic trying to sell their AI and running into all kinds of limitations with the infrastructure itself.
Right now in ICP, DFINITY has made this incredibly unique technology that is way ahead of everything else. But how long until the centralized companies come out with their own version? The longer we don't see anything, the more I suspect there is something being built secretly that will be released when it's ready. The longer ICP goes without grabbing market share, the more at risk we are that Google comes out with the same basic thing that Internet Computer Protocol, via DFINITY, has innovated.
What ICP innovated, and what happens when Google copies it
What Internet Computer Protocol has innovated is a blockchain that is actually able to host entire full-stack applications. I've got my website at jerrybanfield.com hosted right now on ICP. But what happens if Google comes out with the same basic thing, and then I can use Google's AI to do the same thing? I can use the AI to build directly on Google's own blockchain and just pay one fee for all of it. ICP is in big trouble. This is why I've repeatedly harped on the point that marketing is urgent for ICP.
I know Bobby O has laid out in his videos the thesis for going forward, and you know that these big companies need these solutions. I think they are already working on them. They also have AI at their disposal to help work on them. They have whatever the frontier models are that are not released to the public to help them work on the best infrastructure for this. And they already have all the infrastructure in place. All they need to do is upgrade it the same way that DFINITY has.
Now, the longer we go where ICP does not gain significant market share of people actually building on this technology, the easier it's going to be for them. Customer relationships are the reason for this. ICP right now has almost no customer relationships. It has almost no attention in crypto. It's got a handful of governments working with it. We could assume there are maybe a handful more governments and companies that are secretly exploring partnerships and looking at this stuff. But even right now, just in the limited crypto space, ICP is getting shut out of things it could do better, like the recent UAE partnership that went to Avalanche. ICP could do everything in that deal better. So why did they go with Avalanche? Who knows? But you can assume it comes down somewhere to marketing, and to somebody getting paid, more than likely, rather than the infrastructure itself.
So the longer the infrastructure itself does not get real adoption, the more everyone who already has customers is in position, as soon as they launch their better infrastructure, to just wipe out any hope ICP has for the future.
The Microsoft and OpenAI scenario
Now, ICP could still survive into the future even if Google comes out with its own blockchain-based hosting, or Amazon partners with OpenAI to do AI-prepared, AI-ready blockchain hosting. Or Microsoft, who already has deep partnerships with OpenAI, comes out with a Microsoft-OpenAI blockchain-based hosting solution that's perfect for AI, integrated with everything in the AI data centers, and fully included already in your subscription. That is absolutely devastating for the ICP thesis. And to me, it's very likely to happen. To me, this is the most real problem we have with the ICP tech: you don't get forever. This is the window now for ICP adoption. We need marketing now.
I can tell you personally, from the people reaching out to me and paying to talk with me: as I've said, I've sold some of my ICP and moved it over to MaxFi. I have one person today who has more crypto than I do, and they're selling ICP and moving it to MaxFi also. If you think marketing is not important, watch what people are doing. People followed me and bought a bunch of ICP. Now the people who follow me are starting to sell their ICP. Marketing is extremely important, and if you don't do marketing, you are going to get locked out.
When one of them launches, the rest follow
Because if one of these companies comes out with it, you can bet two or three of them are right on their heels with their own version. It's just like when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT: Anthropic came out soon after, Google came out with Gemini, and X put out a garbage version of Grok that is embarrassing. But they all have their own AI. Or if they don't, they integrate: Copilot was pretty bad, so Microsoft finally just integrated ChatGPT in with it. Amazon already has their own AI for shopping, and then they just plug into whatever else they need and cooperate. And search is being changed by all of it.
Right now ICP has a window where the tech is so good it's worth building on, and AI allows you to build on it easily. But that window is going to close. Anthropic has every incentive to figure out a solution, either themselves or by partnering with Google or Amazon or Microsoft: "We're going to partner with them. They're going to provide the blockchain infrastructure. We're going to provide the AI." And boom. All their stock prices go soaring, and ICP continues to rug and go toward zero, because of the network effects where you already have people building on these platforms.
For example, if Claude had its own built-in blockchain hosting, I might pull everything off the ICP blockchain and put it straight into Claude, because it would just be easier than having that extra layer. So with these network effects, if ICP is not in position, all of these companies are in a better position to get governments on board and big companies on board, because they already have the customer relationships.
Remember Dogpile? How Google won search without inventing it
If you're thinking, "Well, that's not going to happen. This tech is so advanced. That can't happen," let's look back at search engines. I remember I used to use Dogpile and these other search engines back in the day before Google existed. And God, those search engines were bad. Then Google came along. They did not create a search engine from scratch the way DFINITY has created a lot of this technology from scratch. They simply looked at what other people were doing and made incremental improvements on it. Then they got serious marketing money behind it, they got venture capitalists, and they started providing a better business than the rest of their competitors. They bought into advertising. They built AdWords and AdSense and integrated advertising into their search engine. And the Google search engine worked better than everybody else's.
Even though they didn't make the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth search engine, they came along. A couple of guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, threw together the basics of a search engine in their dorm room. Then they got venture capitalists to give them a bunch of money so they could buy and upgrade the features and make it better than everybody else's search engine. And then they utterly dominated search engine market share and made huge amounts of money over the next several decades.
ICP has come out with the equivalent. A search engine was a big deal back in the day on the internet, and ICP has come out with the equivalent of a search engine: a game-changing piece of technology that is very much needed. But only if people hear about it and start using it.
They're watching, and they won't call it blockchain
You've got to believe the people at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are aware of what DFINITY is doing and what the technology can do. You know they've got their eye on it. While the public is not paying attention to this, you've got to imagine the people at these big companies are aware of their own problems and are looking to the future. You can almost be certain they're saying, "We need to get our infrastructure on the blockchain so it can't just be hacked into oblivion. So we can stop our own losses. So we can cut our own costs. How are they doing it? Reverse engineer that. Use the AI to look at it. Try and attack it. Figure out what's going on with it. And get ready to release our own version."
Now, these big companies move slower, because they have so much going on. But just watch for when one of them pilots something. They may not even use the word blockchain, and it certainly won't have some crypto token. They'll just take the fiat payment themselves and handle all the fees with it, which will make it much easier to adopt. Just watch if one of them comes out with a "secure stack," a "secure tech stack," or a "secure layer" of technology. When one of them comes out with some kind of a pilot, they'll be promoting that it's extra secure, resistant to hacks, all the same properties as ICP. They'll probably not use crypto or blockchain language, but they'll put out their own version of the technology.
The clock is ticking. I imagine that any time within the next year or two, somebody is likely to put out a pilot version of this themselves. And if ICP hasn't hooked significant market share by then, it is devastating, because the whole ICP thesis crumbles. Now, ICP could still survive as public infrastructure that anybody can build on and have some sovereignty with. It still could work out that way. But in the bigger crypto picture and for the price of the token, the price is extremely problematic at this point, because of how much the rest of crypto suppresses it. And you are seeing the technology being promoted without even mentioning the token. That's a very bad sign.
The NNS could fund its own marketing
So the Network Nervous System easily could start printing tokens for its own marketing. I commented on Dominic Williams's post yesterday saying that he's got this incredible technology out there, and if you're going to do something with it, you're going to need to have some marketing for it. This is the thing, guys. This tech is amazing, and Dominic talks about how he pioneered it. But if you don't have the NNS set up to actually get some marketing done for this urgently, before it's too late, the big companies are going to keep their market share. They're going to come in and grab all the opportunities that ICP currently could have if people knew about it. They're going to grab all those opportunities and keep all those customers, all that business, and all that control for themselves.
I mean, believe it. These guys are going to upgrade their infrastructure. They're not going to allow their infrastructure to stay insecure and get hacked into oblivion, and sit there and allow somebody else to have a better infrastructure than they do indefinitely. They move slow. We've got a year, maybe two at most, before they start testing pilots of an extra-secure, maybe-not-even-called-blockchain layer of their own.
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