We can fix the biggest problem in Internet Computer right now just by creating 0.2% of the circulating supply and using it for a dedicated marketing fund. My first version of this video was a little too toxic, so I refilmed it and took it down a notch. I encourage you to step into your thinking brain and step out of your reactive, junk-posting, screaming-and-ranting brain. Get out of that brain and get into your thoughtful thinking brain, because I'm speaking to the people who can think and who want ICP to succeed. If you want ICP to succeed, we need marketing. We need serious marketing, and we need it to be done by the Network Nervous System.
The Proposal: A Marketing Fund Controlled by the Network Nervous System
Here's the proposal I'm making: we create an ICP marketing fund controlled by the Network Nervous System. I intend to work to get this fund created, and then this fund will pay me for my videos. From now on, that is my sole obsession in ICP. I don't care about anything else. This is all I care about until it gets done. This is the number one thing we need to do to get out of the rut we are in as a community, and it's something that would allow us — the blockchain itself — to promote itself.
Here are the recommended starting settings I have for this: every single day, the Network Nervous System mints a fixed amount of ICP directly into the fund. I think a nice percentage to start at would be 0.2% of the circulating supply. Right now there are 556 million ICP in circulation.
Putting 0.2% in Perspective Against Voting and Node Provider Rewards
The voting rewards are much, much bigger than this — I think around 5% — so let's compare this to the voting rewards and put things in perspective. And again, if your reptile brain is coming in and crying immediately, you need to step out of that and think clearly. Thinking clearly will solve most of the problems in your life. Right now, the annualized rewards for voting are 6.59%. If I do a little math off the top of my head, the voting rewards right now are 30 times as high as what I'm suggesting here — more than that, actually. Looking at the voting rewards function, that's the APR for locking, so depending on how you slice it, the voting rewards overall are somewhere between 10 and 30-plus times as high as what I'm suggesting for marketing.
Then look down at the node provider rewards. The current node provider rewards were 541,000 ICP in August. Over the course of a year at the current rate, that adds up to six-plus million ICP. By comparison, I'm suggesting about a million ICP a year. That means the voting rewards are roughly 30 times that much, and the node provider rewards are about five or six times that much. The marketing fund would be the smallest of these expenses. But out of the voting rewards, the node provider rewards, and marketing, which one has the most potential to move the price? The voting rewards and the node provider rewards are not moving the price. They provide a foundation for the business, and that's important — but we are missing the thing that moves the price.
Breaking my proposal down to monthly and daily amounts, it comes to about 3,000 ICP a day. At current prices, that's over $6,000 a day — call it $7,000 a day — that would be available and would pile up in the marketing fund inside the Network Nervous System every day. At the current price, the total would be about $2.67 million a year. And here's the key part: the ICP would just sit there in the marketing fund until proposals executed against it after being passed by ICP holders. Realistically, DFINITY could shoot down any obviously bad proposal any time they felt like it.
Destroying the Sell Pressure Argument
Everybody who's complaining about inflation over 0.2% needs to see the possible realistic gain from this and the relative situation we're in right now without it. This is a minuscule cost. All the whiners who aren't thinking are imagining sell pressure, and I'm going to destroy that argument right now. The amount of marketing I'm proposing is very tiny. Let's look at the numbers, because the complaints are all about inflation and token printing, but the complainers are not looking at the real numbers — and they're really not comparing that to what people who hate ICP are doing against us, which is what you should be thinking about.
If ICP remained worth exactly the same amount and the only change were two tenths of a percent of additional supply, here's the simplified proportional price impact. Assume all of the ICP got sold. Assume every marketing person like me did nothing, literally took the money, and generated no new demand, no users, no developers — basically like the ICP hubs. They did a little something, but most of that money, millions and millions of dollars with the ICP hubs, was wasted. We've already seen that. Now compare the Network Nervous System printing directly. Here's the effective cost: if everything else stayed the same and all of the marketing budget were wasted — immediately taken by people like me, immediately dumped on the market, and literally all of us did nothing — the price would go down by approximately half a cent. That's the reality of running all the numbers and looking at the amount of ICP in the bigger picture. Even if all of it was wasted: a half-cent price impact. That is the maximum potential downside — half a cent per ICP. That's what you need to think about. The maximum downside is a half cent. So what's the maximum upside?
The potential sell pressure is tiny, and this destroys the argument of everyone who says "the selling pressure — we can't mint more tokens." You are not thinking when you say that. If you're making that comment, you haven't done the numbers and thought about this like I have, so I encourage you to try thinking — it will make your life much better. Here's the reality: the maximum sell pressure from this would be about $7,000 a day. In theory, if somehow the fund paid out one big lump instead of being given out consistently, you could have more in a single day, but that's the average. Meanwhile, the ICP spot trading volume is $40 million a day. Even if every day's issuance were immediately distributed and immediately dumped with nothing coming in return, that's roughly two hundredths of a percent of the current spot volume. Even if everything was useless and wasted — which it wouldn't be — the sell pressure is negligible and it disappears. That's the reality behind everyone saying "you can't mint tokens" or "Jerry's greedy": a meaningless amount of ICP in terms of the bigger market picture.
What ICP's Enemies Are Doing Against Us
Now let's look at what our competitors are doing against us, because this marketing fund is here to support our community. Some of the comments have been absolutely insane, saying things like, "Giving people inside the community money — how is that going to market anything? You're just going to take care of your own people." That would be like saying I shouldn't feed my children, that they should feed themselves. That's insane. The ICP blockchain should take care of itself. It takes care of its holders. It takes care of its node providers. The ICP blockchain should take care of its marketers too. It should take care of people like me. Who put this proposal together? Me. That's who. The blockchain should take care of me — I am important to the blockchain. I bring a lot of people to ICP and I keep people here.
Compare $7,000 of ICP being sold a day to normal crypto market violence — to what the people who hate ICP are doing against it. We recently had a huge liquidation cascade that crushed the price of ICP down about 40 cents in a few minutes. Whether that's intentional, or whether everybody just happens to take out a long at exactly the wrong time and get liquidated, the people who want ICP crushed are destroying the market and hitting the price hundreds of times harder than the worst-case scenario for the marketing fund. What they're doing to crush the ICP price in a single day would equal nine months of the entire marketing fund. That is what we're up against. And you're telling me we can't spend a few thousand dollars a day on marketing to try to make up for people willing to dump millions of dollars to short and crush the ICP price? You need to wake up to the reality that there are enemies that will attack ICP with AI, that will take millions of dollars and lose it in order to dump the ICP price, that will pay for FUD against ICP — and you're telling me we can't take care of our own? That's scarcity mindset.
Now, yes, the derivatives are not identical to two million dollars of spot ICP being dumped. But what we're seeing is leveraged liquidations creating cascading price effects that are crushing the ICP price. The number one way we can counter that is spot buying, and the number one way we're going to get spot buying is consistent, serious marketing. Not by complaining. Not by expecting DFINITY to do something. You can see that DFINITY accomplishing amazing things — like getting governments prepared to onboard — does not move the price. Marketing moves the price. That's why the best technology in crypto is not the number one market cap: marketing moves prices much more than technology by itself when there's no full marketing behind it.
The Other Side of the Equation
Now let's look at the other side of the equation — this is what all the people not thinking critically are missing. With ICP's current supply, if marketing could lead to just a one-cent price increase, the value of everybody's ICP collectively would go up over $5 million. I personally estimate — and I'll admit this is a rough number I'm pulling out of thin air — that I have personally contributed to the ICP price being 10 or 20 cents higher. If I dumped and sold all my ICP right now, said forget this, and walked away, I imagine that over time — maybe not overnight — the price would reflect it.
What My Videos Have Already Been Worth to ICP
I imagine that with all the videos I've made about ICP, if you take some theoretical scenario where I never make those videos and never bring all these people into it, almost certainly the price is 10 or 20 cents lower without my efforts alone. I estimate I have personally raised the market cap of ICP 50 to 100 million dollars over all the videos I've done, over all the years — over all the people who have come to jerrybanfield.com, shown me their portfolios, and said, "Jerry, I'm holding 100,000-plus ICP because of your videos." Think about how much buying power that is. And you're telling me it's greedy that someone like me would want a few thousand dollars a month, when my videos are not financial advice and they are contributing to people buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of ICP? You see the mismatch going on here.
Now imagine 10 times or more the marketing I'm doing. If the price of ICP went up a dollar — and with a marketing fund, I calculate there's a very high probability that a successful proposal to create an ICP marketing fund would, over the next year, contribute to raising the price by a dollar all by itself, not counting anything else happening — remember, it would only cost pennies, fractions of a cent, even if all of it was dumped. I estimate the marketing fund will contribute to raising the price by a dollar by itself at a minimum. That would bring $500 million to ICP holders. And to all the people criticizing my last video: I'm not going to keep working to market ICP for free. You are going to pay me. I do valuable work, and I'm going to get paid, and the Network Nervous System is the one who should pay me. I'm going to endlessly campaign for it until it does. Because it is worth spending maybe $3 million a year to raise the value of ICP by hundreds of millions of dollars. That is what's possible — a marketing fund could even help raise the value of ICP over a billion dollars. For everyone who hasn't immediately jumped on this and supported it: you're telling me it's not worth $2.67 million a year for a very reasonable shot at raising the value of the ICP token by $500 million, a dollar in price? That's insanity.
The Return-on-Investment Math
Here's the math. Even if all the marketing fund does is raise the price one cent, that's double — a 2x ROI. A five-cent difference in the price, which to me is absolutely easy for a marketing fund that could afford $7,300 a day, feels all but guaranteed — that's a 10x return on investment. Realistically, I think 20 cents is the absolute minimum. In my view, in 99% of scenarios where the Network Nervous System launches a marketing fund, the price goes up 20 cents just from that by itself. That's a 40x return on what the marketing fund could spend versus what all ICP holders get back. I can't guarantee anything — what I'm showing you is the asymmetry. We have almost nothing to lose when you use logic and reason. But most of the people communicating, especially on platforms like X, are not using logic and reason. They're using their reptile brains, thinking in a way that doesn't consider data and facts. I am thinking with data, with facts, with logic, and I'm looking at what we can do now to get the results we want as a community.
So to all the people in opposition to making the Network Nervous System print money for marketing: you're saying you are not willing to try for a $100 million market capitalization increase against spending a couple million dollars in marketing capacity. That is scarcity. This is me thinking abundantly, seeing gigantic opportunities. Everyone sitting here crying against spending some money on marketing — this is what your scarcity mindset is missing out on. If you want the price of ICP to go up, we need to take marketing seriously.
$200,000 a Month: A Global ICP Marketing Army
At what I'm proposing, the marketing budget would be about $200,000 a month for ICP. That is enough for a global ICP marketing army, and that will produce serious results. Think 10-plus. Imagine essentially creating 10 more versions of me, or Blockchain Pill, or Bobby O. Imagine creating 10-plus more versions of us — overnight you would double or triple our reach, and imagine pulling some of these people from other ecosystems.
Let's break this down. Imagine 20 major creator packages — on the level of what I'm delivering — at $10,000 a month. You could get 20 major creator packages, and $10,000 a month is enough to pay some serious creators to do only ICP videos every day. There are creators with my size of audience or bigger who would sell out and just totally do ICP videos every day, and they will bring over a lot of people. Imagine doing that with 20 people like me. The numbers would break down to millions — at least 30 million impressions a month across all kinds of different platforms. There are people on TikTok with a crypto following who will do a video for a couple hundred bucks and probably get out to 100,000 people, and you'd probably get tens of thousands of dollars of ICP buying demand for a few hundred dollars. Guys, the world is so abundant. There are so many opportunities. Opposition to this is purely scarcity mindset — that's all I see when anybody is against this, and I will be the person who helps you see how much abundance there is. This is what the marketing fund could be producing: 30 million impressions a month. For all of you who say ICP has a visibility problem, this is a concrete, immediate fix. Obviously this is an illustrative scenario, but I'm talking about scale.
An Even Better Model: 200 Smaller Creators
Now, what I think would actually work better: you don't need a whole bunch of people like me. The beauty of the Network Nervous System is that DFINITY is not in a position to give 200 small creators $1,000 each. DFINITY could, in theory, do 20 major creator packages if they wanted to, but even that proved to be too much for them with the community grants and the hubs — that's more where they were operating, and basically most of that money got wasted. The $25,000 DFINITY gave me two and a half years ago was some of the best money that was spent, and it was also timed with the highest price. That is not a coincidence. I did exceptional marketing for ICP in exchange for $5,000 a month for five months, and the ICP price broke out of an all-time low and hit the highest we've seen since launch. That was just me — plus some projects launching, and Dom doing the face recognition demo, so I was a fraction of it. But this would be much bigger than that.
Here's the even better version: instead of only big packages, what would probably work a lot better is giving 200 smaller creators $1,000 each. Take one of these crypto guys on TikTok who sits there and shills XRP and Bitcoin and say: look, here's $1,000 — do a video about ICP and how ICP is the best technology in crypto. One creator like that might bring in thousands of new people to ICP. And here's the thing: you give them $1,000 once, and they might go all in on ICP themselves. If you pay 200 creators $1,000, probably a handful of them go all in on ICP and start shilling it organically, then making more proposals, then bringing tons and tons more people in. Because a lot of people just don't know about ICP, or all they know is that "it's a rug pull" — they don't know about the technology. You literally hand out $1,000 to this one and $1,000 to that one, and some of these guys are going to go all in like me. I got $25,000 from DFINITY after I did videos for three months that got millions of impressions, and then I did videos on and off for a couple of years. I brought a ton of people in, and now I'm in ICP — and I only got $25,000 for all of that.
If you fund 200 smaller creators at around $1,000 each, you can cover all the platforms. What DFINITY did with its marketing didn't get this kind of coverage. Two hundred smaller creators means you can fund people on YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, podcasts, newsletters, web development, and AI. Imagine giving an AI channel $1,000 to sponsor a video about ICP and building with Claude on ICP — you might get 50 or 100, maybe even 1,000 people building on ICP instead of putting their projects on Amazon or Google Cloud Platform when they're using Claude. And you might get that for a one-time payment of $1,000 to support their YouTube channel with a sponsored video. The beauty of this is that creators would start approaching the Network Nervous System through word of mouth — it doesn't have to chase them down. They would come to us. You could get this out in different countries, different languages, all over the place. Ideally you'd mix everything up: creators like me, small creators, new people, web developers, AI channels, podcasts, PR, tutorials.
How Big Could This Get?
Imagine, once the marketing fund stacked up some cash, Joe Rogan coming along and saying, "I'll take $500,000 and I'm going to have Dominic Williams on my podcast." I don't know exactly how that would work, but start getting that idea in your head. How much buying power would come from Dominic Williams being on Joe Rogan's podcast? That's just an example — a theoretical scenario; I don't know if Joe Rogan would even do it. But some of you would tell me it wouldn't be worth $500,000 to have Dominic Williams on that podcast. How many tens of millions of dollars of ICP would get bought if Dominic Williams went on Joe Rogan? Ideally, Joe Rogan would just put Dominic Williams on there for free — maybe that's not how it works, but this is the idea. You could get ICP out to incredible audiences. But you've got to pay for it.
Now, the narrative a lot of people spin is, "You're just giving influencers money to pump ICP." No — we're creating a real market for ICP growth. And for the people calling me greedy and all that: I could propose $3,000 a month for my ICP channel and just keep doing one video a day about ICP like I have been.
What I Would Ask For — and Why Competition Makes It Work
That $3,000 a month would allow me to continue doing these videos and not have to go do something else to pay my bills. It would be well worth it for the massive value I've delivered, it would be roughly 1.5 percent of the total marketing fund, and it would fully pay my rent every month. That would be a huge deal for me. I do work that is very valuable for everyone holding ICP, and that work is worth at least $3,000 a month. Honestly, what I've been doing has been worth at least $10,000 a month. And suppose I offered to continue my current level of promotion and nobody else was ready to step up — I'd be asking for maybe 4 to 5 percent of the fund to continue promoting ICP on two channels reaching millions of impressions every month, putting out shorts to TikTok and Facebook, putting out long-form videos to Facebook and to X, generating more and more impressions, and bringing people over from all over crypto into ICP.
Let's say at the beginning maybe nobody else is ready to step up, and the community is ready to say thank you for the incredible amount of work I've done to bring people in, mostly on a volunteer or hardly-paid basis. But then let's say other people start stepping up and more proposals come in — then we could compete. Maybe eventually I'd have to drop down to $3,000 a month because there are so many other fantastic proposals that it's like, well, we don't need to pay Jerry ten grand a month when there are 500 other proposals from all kinds of people who will take $500 or $1,000, or there's a huge crypto channel that wants $10,000 and will introduce ICP to hundreds of thousands of new people. That's the thing: this is a competitive system, and the competition will make things interesting. All of it would be under Network Nervous System control, and if my proposal sucks, you can vote no on it.
A New Reason to Hold the ICP Token
This will give people more reason to hold the ICP token, because when you buy and hold the token, you can then vote on every single marketing proposal along with the others. While average people may not understand or be in a good position to vote on ordinary subnet upgrade proposals or most of the other proposals on ICP, regular people could easily look at marketing proposals and place meaningful votes on them. I can imagine PR firms submitting proposals, a conference, a company of 500,000 web developers, more creators like me — Blockchain Pill, Bobby O, Chris Yost, Zero to Hero — all having the chance to submit proposals. That sets up an environment shaped by the lowest bidders: if one ICP content creator doing a good job decides to sell their services for a thousand a month, then I'd probably have to bring my price down. If all the creators ask exactly what we're worth, then we'll see. This functionality just needs to be in the Network Nervous System, and then the holders can decide who should get paid and who shouldn't. If my proposal sucks, if you don't think I'm doing valuable work, vote no on it.
But here's the thing: this needs to be a possibility. We need to be able to have this option. It is absolutely insane scarcity thinking to not even try this. There's almost nothing to lose and everything to gain from trying it. It sets up a system where the people doing the best job promoting ICP get funded. That's capitalism. That's competition. That's governance. That is something that will give us a huge edge over the competition that's trying to destroy us.
The Third Pillar — and a Part Two
And what makes this even better? Holy crap — we're going to have to do a part two. I'm stopping right here because this has already run 30 minutes, but there's more: the fund itself, with people applying to it and doing word-of-mouth marketing — "Hey, there's money available on ICP, all you have to do is submit a proposal and ask" — means the marketing fund itself will be a viral marketing mechanism. I'll talk about that in my next video.
This is the number one thing. This is my cause. This is all I care about in the ICP community now: the Network Nervous System needs to pay for its own marketing. I will not stop. All my ICP videos are obsessively going to be about getting the Network Nervous System to pay for its own marketing — you can follow every one of them on my ICP Crypto playlist. I don't care about anything else happening in ICP until the Network Nervous System can properly fund operations via node providers, capital and governance via voting rewards, and then the third key pillar — the third part of the triangle — marketing and advertising. Every single video is going to be about this until it gets done.
If you want to talk to me, join the Jerry Banfield Family and/or join my chat on my website, where you can message me directly.
Let's get this done so I can get back to promoting ICP to people instead of talking about ICP marketing. I'm tired of ICP having a visibility problem. I'm tired of all the people complaining about the price and the marketing when we can do something about it. So get behind me and do something about this. Demand that we get this done. Thank you.