The internet could be rebuilt on ICP, and most people would never even know it. That's how powerful Internet Computer is, because it's providing infrastructure to put the internet directly on blockchain, which nothing else can do. You'd just know that it's fast, and I know that it's secure and that it's practically free. It's so cheap and so scalable compared to any other web hosting that that's why I build on it.
You have governments like Pakistan and Switzerland that look like they're making serious efforts to explore and test out moving their infrastructure onto ICP, and there are enterprises and other organizations that, according to the Zero to Heroes channel, are working on getting onto the Swiss subnet. And the average person would have no idea how the back end of any of this works, because the average person doesn't know that Amazon hosts a huge portion of the internet. The average person is not familiar with the term Google Cloud, or that Google has this massive internet hosting infrastructure. When Google started up their search engine and started to scale it, they were frustrated with trying to use everybody else's infrastructure. So they built their own data centers and their own internet connections and fiber optic so that they could deliver everything faster, because the existing infrastructure wasn't fast enough and cost too much for them. They built their own infrastructure, and Amazon with hosting did the same thing, building their own data centers, and Microsoft has their own infrastructure too.
And all of those infrastructures are very vulnerable to cybercrime. They don't allow you to control your data. In fact, even Google and Amazon have every incentive to move parts of their infrastructure onto ICP to keep it running. Now, they may not be the first movers. A lot of the first movers are likely to be people like me — solopreneurs who want the absolute best technology to host a website. And they're likely to be governments that want to leap ahead in the age of AI, that want a sovereign hosting solution where they don't have to build the infrastructure and secure it in their own country, where they can stop having to depend on the US and China.
The Only Way You'd Notice Is on the Dashboard
The beauty is these things could be rebuilt and quietly moved onto ICP, and the only way you might know about it at first is on the ICP dashboard. It may just show in little changes, like the finalization rate going up to 189 blocks a second. You can already see the thousands of transactions a second ICP does — and that's serving real activity, like when you go to my website, that generated a transaction on the ICP blockchain. You see the cycle burn rate go up, and the canister smart contracts go up, and the millions of instructions executed per second. It looks like they made some change recently that made things a lot more efficient — I'm not sure what happened with that, or it could have been Bob. I'm not sure what that big change was. But as you watch the numbers on ICP in terms of what the infrastructure itself is doing, you've seen the canister state consistently go up as terabytes more of data have been added onto the blockchain — like that's three terabytes that have been added onto the blockchain. And still, adoption is relatively small right now.
And the Network Nervous System, being able to participate in governance like this, is really cool. With our existing internet infrastructure, you can't participate very well in governance. You can own Amazon stock, you can own Google stock, but owning the stock gives you very little say in the details of how they run operations — in what decisions they actually make. The beauty of ICP is that with this infrastructure, you can actually have a vote and a say in the decisions, in the proposals, in the updates to the network — changes like the proposal to resize the Swiss subnet. You can have a say in what happens on the infrastructure, and that's beautiful. That's so much more transparent than what we're seeing today.
A Gift to the World, in the Form of Infrastructure
ICP has offered a gift to the world in an infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I mean what actually gets used behind the scenes. When there are fiber optic cables running around the world, that's infrastructure that is facilitating you using the internet, just like our roads and highways are facilitating you driving places, and our planes and airports are facilitating you flying places. ICP is the only thing in crypto that's building infrastructure that can really make a huge difference to the world by pulling the entire internet stack onto blockchain.
Now, it doesn't need to pull every single thing onto blockchain, and every single use case doesn't make sense for putting on ICP — that's for sure. If you can just run something on your own computer, or you don't have sensitive data, then there's no reason you can't use existing solutions. But what ICP is for right now is areas where you have sensitive data, where you have a need to keep things secure, where you want to make your business more efficient. That's why I am hosting my website on ICP: not only do I want to save money, but I want to increase security, and I want to be scalable for a hundred thousand people coming through my website every day. All I need to do right now to be totally ready for that is to add $20 or so more in cycles, and my website can handle a huge amount of traffic coming through it — and the average person would have no idea what's happening in the back end.
This is why ICP may continue to be relatively silent in crypto for a while: it's not a coin that needs to be noisy. It's building out a new layer of the internet, and that may take time. Think about old phone systems still running decades after they were built. Infrastructure takes time to be built out, and it takes time to get all the people who want to use it aware that it's even a possibility. That's why the marketing approach from DFINITY makes sense to me. Imagine back in the days of the railroads — people were probably pretty excited about being able to take a train across the country instead of having to do the Oregon Trail. But you couldn't just put an infinite number of trains on the tracks all at once. It took time to build the trains, and then you had to organize running all of them. You can't just put the whole internet on ICP immediately. You need to rebuild it slowly and steadily.
AI Just Made Building on ICP Easy
And right now, AI has just unlocked the ability to make it super easy to build directly on Internet Computer Protocol. That's what I do every day with my blog. For example, I just did an amazing vlog — a very teary vlog. I'm going through a new romance, and it's really just cracked my heart open. You can probably tell I'm speaking with a different tone today. It's very vulnerable, but it's open and it's heartfelt. It's called "I Cried Out for My Queen and Then I Met Her," and I invite you to watch it on the Jerry Banfield channel. I did that video as a vlog, and then I used Claude to put the vlog up on my website immediately. It's so fast and it's so easy. AI has made it easier than ever to move onto ICP, and the reason to move is security, is scalability, is cost. The infrastructure — the technology itself — is that powerful.
You don't need to just hold the token and hope it's going to work. You don't need to just hold the token and hope the price goes up. In fact, there's no need for the average person to ever interact with the token. And I've come to believe the only way you're going to get billions of people using any kind of crypto, initially at least, is when there's a reason to interact with the blockchain without buying the token — in fact, without even seeing the token. ICP is the only thing in crypto where you can interact with the blockchain like that.
There are two kinds of transactions you can do on ICP. One transaction is a query — that's just asking the blockchain, "Hey, what's going on? Tell me what your state is." It's one-way: you're just downloading from the blockchain. So when you go to my website, you're creating a query transaction, where you've asked the blockchain, "What does this say?" and the blockchain sends you back a message that says, "Here's what it says." And then when I publish a new blog post, I'm creating an update transaction on the blockchain — a two-way interaction where I'm telling the blockchain, "Update this canister with the new state."
Some people on other blockchains have refused to even count these — they'll say ICP transactions like that aren't the same as sending a coin, aren't the same as swapping one coin for another, so they don't even count. And I say these transactions are an indication of exactly how mass adoption happens: when you can query the blockchain directly in a web browser, interact with it, and have no idea that you just interacted with a blockchain. You'd never know. You could literally be using websites today that are hosted on ICP and you wouldn't even know it.
And with cloud engines, the customizability and the ease of spinning up your application gets so much easier. Then you can see the application of this technology in how DFINITY is using it themselves. When you have DFINITY building their own version of Hyperliquid, they can just use AI to spin it up. Because of the properties of ICP, any product somebody creates elsewhere in crypto, they can basically create the same thing on ICP. And because the infrastructure is all in one platform, it makes it so much easier to build on. When developers in crypto discover that building on ICP is so much easier than building on anything else — because you can just use AI and it's all in one single platform — that changes things. When you're trying to use AI to build your own version of Hyperliquid across all these other platforms, it's hard for the AI to bring all that stuff together. There are more points of failure. It's less secure.
Why ICP Has a Price Floor Most of Crypto Doesn't
So what I see, based on the data I have in front of me, is that it looks like we're in a position where the internet is going to slowly rebuild on ICP. And at some point, in my experience watching this, the price is likely to reflect that happening. Here's the dynamic as I understand it: the lower the price goes, the more ICP has to be bought just for people to pay to use the network. That's why I think it's so important — it makes ICP, unlike most other things in crypto, have a basic price floor to it, where everybody paying to use the infrastructure has to generate that buying.
And in many cases, the people using it don't even have to buy the coin themselves. If they've paid a web development company or a consulting firm to handle it, they never touch the token — the consulting firm will buy the ICP for all their clients and pay all their bills, and the clients can just pay them in dollars. That's how cloud engines are set up: they're priced in dollars, and behind the scenes the ICP still gets bought, with a portion of it burned — think buying 100 ICP and burning 20 of it — and the rest paid out to the node providers.
Right now ICP is set up so you can rebuild the internet a little bit at a time. You can't just throw the whole internet on it at once. But it is set up where it could scale to being a big part of the future of internet infrastructure — where a huge amount of the internet is hosted on ICP or through ICP.
Amazon and Google Don't Have to Lose for ICP to Win
And here's what's so cool: you can still have Amazon and Google with their infrastructure underneath it all. With cloud engines, Amazon and Google will still be in a position to get paid for their actual machines. The blockchain is a layer that sits on top and secures all of it. The user gets a better experience, Amazon and Google keep their present positions, and ICP makes it all better for everybody. The average user has no idea what's even happening — they just know that things seem easier and there are more opportunities for innovation because of it. Right now, innovation is limited by how difficult everything is. But when you combine AI with ICP, you can just crank things out. And that's a big deal.
If you'd like to talk with me about ICP — and by talk with me, I mostly mean you talk and I'll listen, instead of me just talking like I do in these videos — you can schedule a one-on-one call with me. You mostly talk, and I mostly listen, and if you have questions for me, bring them. In fact, this whole post was inspired by a call I had: the more I listen to you, the better ideas I get, and this exact conversation came out of a call, so I thought it would make a great video.
And if you want a really emotional experience today, watch my vlog "I Cried Out for My Queen and Then I Met Her." I was literally crying during that vlog — it's the biggest thing happening in my life right now, and it's opening me up everywhere else. For more of my thoughts on Internet Computer, you can also go through my ICP Crypto playlist.