Internet Computer Protocol's biggest customers — like corporations and governments — may never actually buy the ICP token. They may not even see it. Understanding this will help you understand the price action today and understand the massive potential opportunity going forward. Now, this is not financial advice, and I'm an ICP maxi because in my experience it is the best technology in crypto, as I show off on my cryptotechcap.com website I created that's hosted directly on the ICP blockchain. ICP has remarkable capabilities, which is why what I'm telling you here is not possible on any other blockchain.
Governments and Enterprises Are Already Paying — in US Dollars
Here's what's happening, and this is what's possible and what we have evidence for — like Pakistan and Switzerland, and from what Dominic Williams has posted. It looks like there are a number of governments, enterprises, businesses, NGOs, and the United Nations that are interested in ICP's technology and the things it can actually do. When I went through and asked 100 different questions, ICP answered 97 of them with things it can do. So you've got governments, enterprises, and consulting firms very interested in what this technology can do.
But here's what's really surprising to the average ICP holder — I hadn't even thought this through myself. Bobby O's video about DFINITY's funding got me going down this rabbit hole, and I researched it. What's so surprising is that right now, a lot of money could be being invested in building technology out on ICP, but you're not going to see that until everything's actually getting burned and fully operational.
Here's what looks like it's happening in the background, based on the tech. You've got governments, enterprises, and consulting firms that right now are serving clients that want the technology ICP has to offer. They want to use it, but these governments, enterprises, and consulting firms are in a position to pay somebody to actually set all this up for them — whether it's DFINITY, whether it's ICP Alliance, or whether it's another company. They're in a position to just pay somebody to get all that set up for them and help them get into using the technology, and then they just pay the company that does all that for them. And it looks like right now there are millions and millions of dollars — if not more than just single millions, maybe tens of millions, maybe more — that these entities are already paying to get all this in position.
But right now, they're paying US dollars, and the cycles aren't getting burned yet. The ICP is not getting burned yet, because it takes quite a bit of time to set all the infrastructure up. It looks like right now there are a lot of prototypes and tests being run, which are being paid for, but they're not burning a lot of cycles. They are, however, setting everything up to burn a huge amount of cycles in the future.
The Two Ways Cycles Get Burned
When you have ICP, there are two basic ways that cycles get burned. First, you pay the company that's actually delivering — which means a company in the middle could be delivering for a bunch of other companies or governments that are actually paying them. That middle company would then be paying for the cloud services and managing all of that, and then 20% of whatever they're having to pay to actually run those services is getting burned out of the supply.
The second way is setting everything up directly yourself. That's what I'm doing on all of my websites right now — Crypto Tech Cap is one of those websites. I've got a massive landing page, and I've got the best offer I've ever had. If you want to talk to me, you can now join the Jerry Banfield Family and have a one-on-one call with me every single week — because I know a lot of you are lonely, a lot of you want to talk ICP, and I am available. I am a great listener. You can feel comfortable, from watching my videos, adding me as a person you can really count on to talk to — a person who will really listen to you and be one of the people you can really talk to in your life.
I've got that whole offer hosted on my website — this huge sales page that goes into just a ton of stuff, all built with AI. Then I go through and manually review it and make changes. And I pay cycles whenever it's used. My community itself is hosted on Skool because it's just easier at this point than trying to build it all on ICP, though at some point I may move it from Skool to ICP as AI continues to come along. So in my case, I see the token because I'm working on it myself.
What Happens When Web Developers Discover ICP
Now let's put the same scenario in a web developer's hands. Most web developers don't realize how powerful this technology is and how it could save them huge amounts of money and drastically increase their security in their existing web development firm. Right now, you've got people still shilling things like Hostinger, Kinsta, WordPress, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. The problem with those is you usually have to pay for much more actual server than you need because of how those are set up. Then it's inherently insecure, you can easily be censored, and if you get a lot of traffic at once, you often will not have enough capacity. I've personally been through most of those scenarios myself, and the complexity of those scenarios is horrible.
Meanwhile, you can use AI to build out an entire website like I've built out. And if you want me to work through that with you, that's something you could do — join the Family and say, "Hey, how do I get my setup like you've got it? How do I get my website on ICP with AI and all that?"
What you're seeing now is people like me just doing it on our own websites. But what happens when a web development agency finds ICP's infrastructure and moves all their customers over to it? All their customers will never see the ICP token. And do you understand how important this is for adoption? This means true mass adoption potential, because this is the first way I see where you've got huge entities — governments, enterprises, big consulting firms, web developers — that all can be paying in US dollars, and then a much smaller number of people and companies actually paying to burn the ICP directly themselves.
So what I think we're going to see is a migration of a lot of the internet's infrastructure — using AI to rebuild that infrastructure directly on the ICP blockchain — to save money, to increase security, and to be prepared for the functionality of an internet that can interface much more easily and trustworthily with AI and with the new payment system. But the majority of people never need to even see the ICP token or ever buy ICP in this process.
Why No Other Coin Can Do This
That's what makes Internet Computer Protocol, in my view, the most brilliant technical innovation in all of crypto — because I challenge you to explain to me how something similar happens with any of these other coins in crypto. Please explain to me how the masses are going to suddenly be using Bitcoin without ever buying any Bitcoin. This is possible because of what the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain can actually do, which none of these other blockchains even comes close to. And that means a whole bunch of money can come into Internet Computer Protocol without the token being bought or even marketed.
Once you understand this, DFINITY's marketing plan makes a lot more sense. They're going for the governments, the enterprises, the consulting firms, the web developers. They're going after the people who will have huge amounts of money to pay to use the actual technology. And that's where ICP is so much in position to be bought and burned that you don't have to worry about the short-term token price. In fact, there's lots of money to be made just building all this stuff out right now.
For example, Caffeine AI — which I do not use anymore because I have a vastly superior setup, although I could plug Claude into it; I tried Caffeine AI and it was effective — is a perfect example. Caffeine AI is its own independent company at this point. When Caffeine AI is charging, the customers are paying in US dollars. They never see ICP. So you can have people vibe coding all over the internet using Caffeine, and Caffeine can independently fundraise for its own marketing. It can then provide competition for platforms like Replit and Lovable, and it can be bringing all this money in, in US dollars or whatever other currencies wherever else it operates. But then it's generating ICP that's being burned to host everything on the back end — the front end, the canisters, and all of that.
This, to me, is the most important information in all of crypto. This is a function, a metric, a serious utility adoption that nothing else in crypto has built in. This is where everything else in crypto fails. There's no amount of adoption that's realistic for any of these other coins that can even touch 1% of what's possible for ICP when you bring in all these bigger entities that don't even need to understand ICP at all.
The Sleeper Token Waiting for the Burn
You see, in Bobby O's recent videos, he talks about how you have the prime minister or president of France talking about the things they want. They want sovereign computation. They want things that are secure and verifiable. They're talking about all these things they want, and ICP is the only solution we can see right now that actually provides that. And we know it takes governments and enterprises a significant amount of time to even get into using something. We're talking years between when they know about it and when you've even got pilot programs — and then potentially years more before you actually have significant usage.
This unfortunately means we don't know exactly how long ICP will sit there as a sleeper token until the day comes when there's such a serious burn kicking off from a government or an enterprise that has actually moved a big part of their infrastructure online. Then all of a sudden they may be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to have that infrastructure hosted — and that's not a lot for some governments and enterprises; they pay a lot more than that. Some of these things may kick on fairly suddenly. Right now we can see Pakistan has serious prototype trial plans with their memorandum of understanding through the Pakistan Digital Authority. This is a serious thing they're working on testing. But you're not going to see ICP's price shoot up until you start to see these things actually running and serving real computation. And if my websites are any example, hosting like this is practically free.
948 Blog Posts on the Blockchain for $10 in Cycles
I'm shocked how many times I upload a website with 948 blog posts — and this is great, because then this sits on the blockchain. I have real control of this infrastructure compared to hosting it anywhere else. And it's easy with AI. I just drop videos in a folder on Claude — like the video I dropped about "Is anyone having fun dating?" that I'm posting on my dating channel later today, and the one I did earlier about how I review every top-100 crypto in 26 minutes — and it puts them up on my website. I put one command in the command line interface and it goes live on ICP. I've put $10 worth of cycles in it and I've never had to top it up. And I've made 948 blog posts, and I've revised the homepage and uploaded a ton of times.
The downside is that this infrastructure works so well that you're not going to see an instantaneous, massive burn come in all at once — perhaps not even in the foreseeable future — precisely because it works so effectively. It's not wasteful like a lot of these other infrastructures are, and it takes time to build. But when it happens, ICP may be going straight to the top when the burn kicks in — huge amounts of ICP, potentially millions of dollars a day, getting bought and burned just from hosting on ICP. In the future, you could have tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a day in ICP being bought and burned just to run the network. And that's totally reasonable, because right now hosting the internet is a trillion-dollar market cap. ICP with cloud engines is prepared to just sit on top of things like Amazon Web Services and Google so they can keep running, and ICP adds this layer that gives you all this security, privacy, and verifiability, plus the ability to easily interact with everything else that's on it. So this is how I see a thousand-X upside being possible for ICP — that's my personal belief, not financial advice. When that will happen, though — it could be very dramatic when it does, and unfortunately we might see kind of boring price action before then.
Why the Powerful People Aren't Buying the Coin Yet
Some of the questions you all have are: well, if this tech is so great, people are going to have to buy it — so why isn't the prime minister of France talking about this tech? It's because they don't need to actually know about the coin. They don't need to care about the coin. A lot of people are not trying to get involved in stuff they don't need to be involved with when they already have a bunch of things to do, when their calendar is already busy or full. It's like people who say they're looking for a man like me, and then it's still hard to even fit me in the calendar — so we digressed into dating for a minute. But you can see, when you've got people in governments and corporations that have a lot of responsibilities and tons of things to do, they're not looking to buy some crypto coin and get rich. They're asking: what can this infrastructure do? How does it work? The coin itself is not even relevant until they get their prototypes going and tested.
So at this point, there's a lot of research happening on ICP, it looks like — governments, enterprises, consulting firms. There's a lot of research, there are prototypes, people are testing it at scale. And there are NDAs protecting almost everything that's happening in the background. What I imagine we'll see is that when some of these corporations, enterprises, governments, and NGOs successfully test ICP, and they all nod their heads in agreement that they are going to do a serious build-out on it and that this is going to be the future — at that time, they may make some serious token buys.
You see, at this point, some of the most powerful people in the world may know about ICP. But if they took a look at the price chart, they might not be eager to buy it. Until they get their infrastructure tested and ready to go, their prototypes running successfully, until they run their analysis to show how much money they can save by moving over and how many security risks can be mitigated, and then start to see that their colleagues may be moving in this direction — they're not likely to buy the coin until they figure all that stuff out.
The Domino Effect I Expect
But once that stuff gets figured out, there may be a domino effect, where the first big government or enterprise finishes its test with ICP and says, okay, this is going to be the future of our infrastructure. They themselves may not even be dealing at all with the ICP token — they may be working with a consulting firm or another company that actually does the interface between what they want to do and the infrastructure itself. But then when the word gets out — and it'll probably be quite secret; crypto retail is probably not going to get wind of it beforehand — all of a sudden you may see the ICP price shoot up from, say, $2 or whatever it's at today, suddenly to like $20 or $50, very rapidly, as a couple of big buyers go in. Then that gets a whole bunch of attention for the coin, and crypto retail catches on: hey, what's going on here? Because ICP is so suppressed in the world of crypto, and it's so under the radar right now, that you have hardly anybody who knows about this, at least on the ground. But you have people in bigger positions researching this.
They're not going to pull the trigger, though, especially on large amounts of money where they'd be hurt if they're wrong. Picture right now somebody who is a billionaire that might want to put $100 million into ICP. They're going to do a hell of a lot of research and due diligence, and probably try to reverse-engineer ICP themselves, before they pull the trigger on putting a big amount of money into it. But from everything I can see today, everything is in position for the trigger to be pulled. Whether it's going to be tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, or two or three years from now — that's what's uncertain.
And until something else comes out — which something could come out — it's going to suffer from ICP having first-mover advantage. It's like how Bitcoin is still the top-market-cap crypto even though, in my opinion, it's some of the worst technology in crypto today compared to a lot of these other ones. Ethereum answers 22, Solana answers 16, XRP actually answers less. But you see, the token itself is not a big deal right now, because many of the people and organizations that are going to benefit from ICP don't even need the token themselves. And even if they do plan on doing everything themselves, they haven't finished their research to justify a serious investment. From what I'm seeing, though, it's coming.
AI Changed the Game for ICP Development
From what I'm seeing personally on my own website and my own business — I've used a lot of web hosting platforms, and this blows me away. And the time has just come recently where it blows me away. Before AI could code, like when James Allen was so frustrated with the developer experience on ICP, it made sense to ask: well, who's going to use this tech? But now that Claude can just crank this out on the ICP blockchain, the game has changed. You're going to have web development companies, and you're going to have businesses that start converting their customers over to this infrastructure and stealing customers from other businesses to use this infrastructure, because it's more efficient. This is where I see the future going, and this is why I see it going there. If you want more of my thinking on all of this, you can watch my ICP Crypto playlist.
I would love to hear your thoughts, and the best place to give me your thoughts is in the Jerry Banfield Family. If you're stuck on ICP, if you're struggling with being comfortable with it, the price, and all that, why not have a call with me every week? That's the most generous offer I could possibly imagine. I want to fill my calendar up having conversations with as many of you as possible. If you watch my videos, I want to get to know you and have a two-way relationship here, where I'm not just talking at you — I want to get to know you better, be there to listen to you, and know what's going on in your life. And it doesn't just have to be ICP: we can talk about anything else in your life — dating, YouTube coaching, anything else in crypto and ICP and beyond. I'm available if you want a two-way communication with me; I would enjoy that.
I hope to see you on the next post, or in the Family soon.