Internet Computer Protocol is the first crypto that is in a position to truly decouple from Bitcoin. Almost everything else in crypto is really just shackled to Bitcoin. When Bitcoin goes up, the altcoins tend to go up with it. When Bitcoin goes down, the altcoins tend to go down with it. But ICP has several unique dynamics that will allow it to be the first to truly break free and operate independently of the Bitcoin price, based on real demand for actually using the network.
The Only Crypto You Buy to Pay Your Hosting Bill
The number one thing ICP has that nothing else in crypto has is the ability to buy the ICP token and then use it to pay, effectively, your web hosting bill — to run all kinds of computation, to host all kinds of data, to pay to use the blockchain like a world computer. Everything else in crypto is mostly driven by hype and speculation, with very little real utility or computation happening on the blockchain. Thus, the prices are all extremely speculative too. This is why, when things go down, there is no floor for many of these projects — they are not actually doing hardly anything useful that continues to get paid for over time outside of crypto speculation, hype, and occasional fee burning from things like meme coin trading, DeFi narratives, or whatever the next narrative is, like quantum computing. ICP is different. I buy ICP to host my website, and I love that.
I also love getting to know you all. I see some very familiar names from the comments and from the open chat over the years, and I am really happy to see them. We have 25 people in the Family now, and I would love to see you in there too — we talk about ICP. In fact, the conversation we had in there yesterday is exactly what motivated me to drop another $2,100 to buy another thousand or so ICP yesterday, which I shared at the time. And I will admit I was not happy about the sound while I was working on this, because something just fell on the house and it looked like it was trying to rain — and I was trying to have a tennis date. I had a date in two hours and I was out here saying, stop that. All right, stop it.
So ICP has this unique property where the network is so useful that people, enterprises, and governments are set up to want to buy the token just to pay to use it. And this introduces a dynamic that nothing else in crypto has, where there could be huge customers paying to essentially buy and burn ICP — and they may not even buy or see the ICP themselves. Think of enterprises that are working with a consulting company or an implementation company, or even paying someone like DFINITY themselves for cloud engines. They may be paying in US dollars, and behind the scenes that money is buying and burning the ICP coin in the process to pay the node providers and use the network. Thus, ICP is in the best position of anything in crypto to have a floor for the price, because as the price gets cheaper, you need to buy more ICP and burn it just to pay for the same computation. Nothing else in crypto has that dynamic going for it.
Buy It Cheap, Burn It When It Pumps
Then there are a couple of other angles. If you understand this dynamic, you see what is coming, and you plan on using ICP, then a smart enterprise, government, organization, or even a solopreneur with a lot of compute ahead of them may buy a bunch of ICP when it is cheaper. Then, when the price pumps, they can burn all that ICP and stockpile cycles. Imagine if, instead of paying Amazon for your web hosting bill as a fixed amount every month, there were an Amazon token that you would buy. If the price of the Amazon token went up, you could burn it while the price was up and use that burned amount to pay your entire web hosting bill for a year or two in advance, instead of sitting there paying the same thing every month. That dynamic exists with ICP.
It would only take one institution with one serious implementation, and one person sitting around the boardroom table who says: we know we are going to use this, and we know how the computation and the pricing works — why don't we buy, say, $10 million, which is small money in a lot of enterprises, or $10 to $20 million of the coin right now? Then, when the price goes up, we will burn it to pay for the cycles to actually run our implementation. Someone in a boardroom may run the calculations and say: look, I think if we buy $10 or $20 million of ICP right now while the price is low, we are going to be able to burn $50 or $100 million worth of it for computation. It will only take a few people who are in the know and planning to use this technology for what it can do — and there are incredible things it can do.
I am living proof of this on a small scale. I have seen how well the network hosts my own website, which I have shown plenty of times before, so I know how good this tech is — and I have got ICP stockpiled. Basically, I never have to pay to host my website again. Whenever the ICP price pumps, I can just burn a couple of ICP and get a lot of traffic — I am not going to say unlimited, but a lot of traffic — to my website and the other websites I am hosting. I also get ICP locked up producing maturity, and whenever the price pumps, I can just burn that. I never have to pay again to host my website. That is a dynamic I figured out as a solopreneur. Other people are going to figure this out too. It is sitting there in plain sight.
Governance Bitcoin Simply Doesn't Have
On top of that, there is another dynamic that Bitcoin does not have: holding the token for governance. Holding Bitcoin does not give you any say over the governance of Bitcoin. Maybe if you are a centralized exchange holding a huge amount of it, or you are Michael Saylor, you could try to pressure the Bitcoin core team to take certain actions and threaten to dump the token if they don't. But holding the token directly does not give you any real governance. On ICP, the more the network grows, the more people will want to hold the token and use it to vote on the Network Nervous System on each different proposal.
For example, let's say you are a Fortune 100 company and you have decided you are going to move over to ICP because it can save you huge amounts of money. It can allow you to use AI to build everything on chain, which can secure all your infrastructure and bring all of it under one single platform — instead of having 50 or 100 different platforms that you all pay for separately and that all have access to your data. It would only take one Fortune 100 company to look at this and say: we are moving to it. Let's buy some ICP to hold for when the price goes up, which we can then burn for more cycles to save huge amounts of money on our hosting. And let's buy some more ICP to lock up. In fact, some might even decide: why don't we just put something like $50 million into ICP right now while it is cheap, lock all of that up for governance, and use the APR on it to help offset our web hosting costs? Whenever the price pumps, we can burn the ICP we are earning from voting. We will have a strong say in the future of the network, and we will have the ability to take the edge off all of our hosting costs indefinitely.
What Happens When a Government Puts the Pieces Together?
Now take that governance angle and apply it to governments that are looking at ICP. Remember how El Salvador put millions and millions of dollars into Bitcoin, and how hyped that was? What happens when a country like Pakistan or Switzerland comes along, the word finally gets around to the right people, and they put all the pieces together? Because right now, lots of the right people have some of the pieces, but they have not put all of them together in their heads. Maybe one or two of them are reading and watching my content. Bobby O of Blockchain Pills — do you hear? What a hero. Michael Duffy. Maybe they are following some of this and thinking about all of it. What happens when they put it together and say: here is what we need to do — we need to get maybe $50 million of this into the government treasury? Then this is going to pay for our infrastructure, and we will be able to guarantee that we have a significant vote in this ecosystem going forward, which will make it much harder for anyone to take any kind of negative action against us, and it will make us prominent in the entire community of ICP — a network that has the ability to grow worldwide.
Why I'm All In
To me, this gives ICP fantastic potential to completely separate from Bitcoin. Now, yes, there is always going to be some level of statistical correlation as long as a lot of cryptos are traded on exchanges. But the setup we have now is that huge amounts of ICP could be bought and burned without ever touching a crypto exchange. You could have companies, even countries, paying DFINITY — for all we know, tens of millions of dollars — to get set up on ICP. DFINITY could literally just be burning their own ICP to pay the costs instead of having to sell it. And then DFINITY could be in the position where they are buying a whole bunch more ICP off exchanges because they have to burn it for their clients. This is a fantastic setup. This is why, personally, I am all in on ICP, and this is why I bought a thousand more ICP yesterday, August 5th, 2026. That is my own conviction and my own experience — not advice for anyone else.
I try to film my videos ahead of time so I can take some days off while constantly putting out content — you can see the whole ongoing series in my ICP Crypto playlist. Thank you for reading.
If you have just spent this long with me, I would like to get to know at least your name.
Even if you simply join the Jerry Banfield Family, I will see your name and have you top of mind. And when you join the Family, I will send you the link whenever you ask for it, or you can get it with the next-level membership in there.
I am really grateful for the three new members who joined yesterday — we have had ten or so members join in the last week. I hope to see you in the Jerry Banfield Family soon.