I just met a guy in person yesterday, and it was cool. He recognized me as soon as he saw me. We had actually met before, but he had also watched my videos like a decade ago. This is a guy who does full-time work in crypto. He has been a part of selling tens of thousands of dollars of crypto in the last year for his products on Ethereum, and he has been in crypto for a decade. So I asked him about Internet Computer Protocol, and he said he had never heard of it.
Now think about that. The most powerful technology in crypto. The one coin in crypto that has the largest innovation, the biggest deal, the simple truth that ICP in crypto is all that matters in terms of the world and the technology. And he has never heard of it, even though he literally works in crypto every single day.
He is not the only one. I have talked to crypto developers in person who had never heard of it. They had never heard of Internet Computer Protocol, and they build with blockchain every single day. And then there was the one guy who did not even believe in the project he was working on. He just dumped the token as soon as he got paid it every month. It was just a paycheck to him. And he had never heard of ICP either.
Why nobody knowing about ICP is not the problem you think it is
Now you might say, well, that is a negative, right? Because people are not hearing about ICP. How do people not know about it? But the amazing thing with ICP is that it can still succeed even if most people do not know about it. And that is the huge difference between ICP and the rest of crypto. You can be using it without even knowing you are using it. When you go to my website and join the Jerry Banfield Family, you are using the ICP blockchain, because my website is hosted on it. But you do not even know it.
It is the only thing in crypto where you can be using the blockchain and have no idea that you are interacting with it. And some of the biggest companies in the world had an impact that took a long time to be recognized by the masses. Even today, the masses often have no idea they are doing things like using Amazon Web Services when they go to a website, or that Google Cloud is hosting the website they are visiting.
That is why ICP is such a fantastic crypto, in my opinion, to invest in, which is why I hold all ICP. This is not financial advice. This is what I am doing. I hold it because ICP can succeed quietly, and because it solves huge, huge real problems. The biggest companies in the world have generally solved huge real problems and built infrastructure that people do not even realize they are using.
Take Google, for example. I am embarrassed to say I did not realize Google was the best search engine until something like 2012. Now think about how long Google had been around by then, how long Google had been the dominant player in search. I was just carefree, using Bing, Dogpile, Google, all the different search engines. I was pretty clueless. Today that looks silly, like wow. But now you have got ChatGPT out, which is taking market share from Google. Then Anthropic comes along with Claude. You have got this new technology that is making Google search less relevant, and in the foreseeable future people might not even go to Google hardly anymore.
Demand for the token does not depend on the public knowing
With ICP you have the same things in play, where you can have your website hosted on ICP and nobody needs to know about it. But the token is getting purchased to pay for the website. And that is what matters. There is something real that can drive demand for the token, regardless of whether the public knows about it.
When you have got governments and companies that have so much to gain from building on the ICP blockchain, you could have governments and companies running their infrastructure on ICP and people might not have any idea. They go to sign in with id.ai at their workplace and they are using it. People interacting with government infrastructure might have no idea that it is hosted on ICP. And that could generate a huge amount of buying demand for the token just to pay the hosting bill. That means there could be a floor for the ICP price, because there is so much consistent demand to buy the token. There is always going to be real utility there, whereas most of these other cryptos have no real utility at all.
Some of you were asking me yesterday, oh, the ICP price suddenly pumped a few cents, what happened? I do not know. I genuinely do not know what happens with the price on a day-to-day basis. That is not the position I am looking at this from. The question I am asking is: where is serious building going to happen? Where is a foundation being laid?
Foundations get laid long before anyone notices
Think about the railroad tracks a hundred and something years ago. Where is a serious foundation being laid that is going to be there for a long time? Like that interstate system we have around the USA. The foundations for that were laid fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, and we are still using the same interstate system. Or the internet. The foundations for that, like fiber optic internet, were laid twenty years ago, and while they have upgraded some of them, companies are still using the same basic infrastructure.
ICP is laying a foundation for a new internet. And we are in a position where that new internet does not have to get everyone in the masses talking about it. In fact, you only need the people it solves the biggest problems for, like governments, enterprises, and solopreneurs like me. You only need us paying attention to it.
I see this happen directly. When I have people from other YouTube channels who do not know anything about ICP go to my website, and then they end up joining the Family on the Jerry Banfield Skool that is linked on jerrybanfield.com, I have people who do not do crypto going to my website and using the blockchain. That is producing transactions, query calls on the blockchain. These people have no idea about crypto, but they are using the blockchain.
Word of mouth marketing is going to carry this where it needs to go, because it is so genuinely useful. And that is what everything else in crypto is lacking. It is not genuinely useful without the attachment of narratives and hype and speculation. ICP is genuinely useful without narratives, without hype, without speculation, without everything that props up all the rest of crypto. ICP is genuinely useful.
Can it last the test of time?
To me, the most important factor for a crypto is whether it can last the test of time. That is one reason Bitcoin is where it is at today. It is still around. People are still using it. But more and more crypto projects are shutting down because they are unsustainable. If all the rest of these coins cannot constantly pump and constantly trick people into getting into hype and narratives and speculation, they cannot survive. All the rest of these coins, and even Bitcoin and Ethereum, are dependent on new people buying them all the time, fundamentally based on hype and speculation. And yes, on trying to get around inflation.
But the way I see it, it will not take very many people to realize that if you want to avoid inflation, instead of parking a hundred million dollars in cash in a bank, you could park some in ICP. It has genuine utility as infrastructure, it allows you to participate in governance, and from what I have seen it pays you an APR of around two percent if you lock it for just two weeks, and around six percent if you lock it for two years. At that scale, that is a vastly significant amount of money. In my opinion that is a vastly superior alternative to parking your money in Bitcoin or Ethereum, though of course I am telling you what I believe and what I am doing, not what you should do.
Michael Saylor looked pretty crazy six years ago when he went into Bitcoin, but ICP did not exist at that time. Today, there is going to be someone who becomes the Michael Saylor of ICP, someone who sees that ICP right now is like finding Bitcoin six years ago. Someone will park some serious money in ICP, stake it, and be earning off the APR. And there will be a government somewhere that sees they could be the El Salvador of ICP, the way El Salvador was for Bitcoin.
You can talk about what ICP does today, not what it might do
You do not need a whole bunch of people to know about ICP, because it has the fundamentals down and because it has the infrastructure down. And because of that, it has the word of mouth marketing, where I am sharing what I can do with ICP, not what it might be in the future. I certainly talk about the future too, but what I am really sharing is what I can do with it right now.
Take this guy I was talking to yesterday. He is in the crypto music business and he is into Ethereum. I said to him, when you are building on Ethereum, the music is not actually on the blockchain. You are sending people off the blockchain to listen to the music. On ICP, you could use AI to build the music actually on the blockchain. Then you could accept any kind of crypto you wanted to, and you could build all of that in a blockchain. You could build all of it with AI.
Everything that has been difficult for you to set up and build, where you had to connect all this stuff to the blockchain, and there are so many vulnerabilities with all of it, and it took so much time and effort, you could rebuild that whole system with AI directly on ICP. It would have a much stronger genuine value proposition, and you could do it overnight. You could just sit down one day, go back and forth with Claude, and build the entire setup, all of it on ICP. He was like, really? That is the thing.
ICP has the best word of mouth marketing in place because you can talk about what it can do, and what it can do now, not about what it might be in the future. With every other crypto, you are always talking about what the price might be in the future, what the price was in the past, what the price is going to do next week or next month. But ICP is the only coin where you can say, look what you can do with this.
You could build your own version of Bittensor TAO completely on the ICP blockchain with AI. If you think Bittensor TAO is impressive, go into Claude and build your own version of it. You could build your own little equivalent of a subnet, your own validators, your own miners. Then you could connect an external AI and crank the outputs over to the blockchain. Then you could grade them. Then you could incentivize them. You could literally build Bittensor TAO on ICP. And you could build your own version of anything else on ICP too. With AI, you could just do it overnight and build your own coin into it. That is what AI makes possible, and the AI is getting more and more powerful.
So this is why I am excited about ICP today. When I talk with people in real life about it, people have no idea about it. This guy had never even heard of the rug pull narrative or any of that. And when people find out about something first from what it can do, then the price chart looks like an opportunity. People in crypto retail are just looking at price charts and not seeing the opportunity. But people outside of crypto retail, which is almost, almost everybody, will be looking at what can this do. And wow, you mean you could build your own crypto exchange with AI directly on ICP?
Yes, and you could build your own social media app directly on ICP, your own music app, and they very easily can work on your phone with progressive web apps. This tech is a huge deal.
Infrastructure is not sexy until suddenly it is
Now, infrastructure is often not sexy, and it does not necessarily spike and move fast until all of a sudden it does, until it is in the right position and the right things all line up. So I do not know the timeline for ICP. I certainly hope that I can keep accumulating. I have got 9,200, or maybe I am close to 10,000 now, and I would love to get over 10,000 before the price shoots. Then I would love for the price to shoot at some point once I have got enough.
I do not know the timelines, and infrastructure can move slow sometimes. Look at NVIDIA. NVIDIA was around making graphics cards for probably at least twenty years, because I remember buying NVIDIA graphics cards twenty years ago to build my PCs. Then all of a sudden NVIDIA and AI all line up and the stock price goes insane. But they were making graphics cards for a long time before that, and then all of a sudden there is this unique use case for graphics cards that is huge.
ICP is in the same position. It is here, it is doing valuable stuff, and at some point there is going to be a rush for it. Like, oh my God, look at what ICP does, it is a huge deal. Most people in the world were sleeping on NVIDIA for twenty years, and then all of a sudden it was a huge deal. Most people are sleeping on ICP right now, but it is in position to all of a sudden be a huge deal.
If you enjoyed this, I would love to get to know you in the Jerry Banfield Family. You can message me there, you can post. And I have just set it up so that if you want to share my videos to platforms that I do not post on, like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, you can post my videos to other platforms and take all the views. I never file copyright strikes. You can take all the views, do whatever you want, share all my videos. Then you can affiliate link back to my Skool and earn 40% if you sell the Skool yourself using my videos. I just made that available today in there, so join and reply on that message if you would like to do that. Some of you could probably make some pretty good money sharing my videos on other platforms, keeping all the income and affiliate selling my Skool.
If you want to keep going deeper on all of this, everything I have been putting together about the Internet Computer is in my ICP Crypto playlist, where I keep sharing what I am actually doing with it instead of guessing at price charts.