I've said I'm done marketing ICP for free, and I've proposed a very clear solution by laying out exactly how Internet Computer Protocol could build a marketing army for just 0.2% inflation each year. I did a 30-minute video documenting this yesterday, and I'm going to continue, because this is a long, deep presentation, and this is, to me, the absolute most important conversation we can have in ICP. Going forward, all I care about with my ICP content is that we need to get this marketing fixed. It's time to stop complaining, and it's time to take action — and there's very clear and obvious action that could easily be taken. If you haven't seen my breakdown of how ICP could build a marketing army for just 0.2%, I would love to hear from you — start there, because then you'll understand exactly what I'm talking about. I posted it on X as well, and I have content on Facebook too, which lays out everything that came before this.
The Network Nervous System Should Pay for Marketing, Not DFINITY
Now we need to continue that discussion, and right now, the criticism is coming from people who've done zero critical thinking, because this idea is so clearly and obviously the best solution that exists for marketing. Think it through. What's the problem? ICP's marketing, visibility, and price. What's the solution? Marketing, to help with visibility and price. And who should be responsible for that? Not DFINITY. The Network Nervous System — the same system that pays node providers and pays stakers — should also pay for marketing. It's super obvious, and I've seen it work successfully in other ecosystems like Dash and Steem, wherever you have a public, open budget proposal system.
Here's where this really gets interesting. In the previous video, I laid out all the amazing properties of the Network Nervous System, which is the governance protocol that runs the entire ICP blockchain. If you haven't seen it, go to dashboard.internetcomputer.org and look at the governance section. The Network Nervous System controls voting rewards, voting power, and proposals — it's amazing what it can do. Right now it pays out voting rewards at 3.5% inflation every year. To put my proposal in perspective, that voting rewards function is fifteen times higher than what I'm proposing, and node providers get five times more than what I'm proposing. This marketing fund would be the smallest expense the Network Nervous System pays out. I'm saying that in addition to the voting rewards function and in addition to node provider rewards, we add a marketing fund.
The Fund Existing Becomes Marketing
And here's one of the coolest things about the marketing fund: the fund existing becomes marketing itself. Let me give you an example of how this already worked in ICP. Right now there are a bunch of SNS DAOs that collectively raised $80 million. That was a lot of ICP buying. Most of these, unfortunately, have trended toward zero and gone down the drain. OpenChat is one of the best examples of a team that has continued to build and grow — although these days you can just build your own version with AI, like I did with my own chat. But OpenChat, one of the realest, most active DAOs in crypto, has gotten no price appreciation. They even paid me for marketing, and I got a bunch of people into OpenChat. It's an $8 million project, they still have $200,000 in the treasury, and they've done an amazing job — but the marketing is difficult.
Then there's Origyn, and honestly most of these projects have been almost total losers that I actively started covering. It's funny — these projects loved me covering them for free. They asked for it. Some of them were nice enough to pay me, especially when Adam voted, like with Trax. The Trax team didn't want to pay me or do an interview with me, but Adam voted with a supermajority and made them do an interview with me and pay me. And now that project has just collapsed — which is funny, because today you could almost easily build with AI what they were trying so hard to build back then. Sonic collapsed too, and one of the signs was how inactive the team was. BOOM DAO was a huge rug pull that destroyed investor trust, along with Yuku AI, which I called out. It's funny that back when I was hyping all these projects, some of them were ripping off the investors they raised money from — and this was all happening on the most advanced governance in crypto. What was obvious was how effective marketing was at getting people interested in these projects.
But here's the thing. All these projects existing — even though some ripped off a lot of investors, even though most didn't sustain — brought $80 million into ICP. That was some of the biggest buying power we've ever seen in ICP. And some of these projects are still very active. OpenChat is still active. Origyn is still developing. Gold DAO — one of the people from Gold DAO is in the Skool community, and I hear they're still building. ICPSwap still works and still functions today. Adam, I hope you're going to release Dragginz someday, because it feels like it's been a long time. WaterNeuron is still functioning.
So what we need to do is add a marketing fund, because just the fund existing changes things. A big part of ICP's price pumping off its all-time lows around $3 in 2023 came down to two basic things. One was me coming in and suddenly starting to promote ICP. The other was all these Service Nervous System DAOs launching and getting people to invest like crazy. Just the Service Nervous System existing brought in $80 million of ICP buying power. Yes, did tens of millions of that get dumped by teams like BOOM DAO? Yes. But to this day you still have millions of dollars of ICP sitting in these treasuries, and some of these projects are around three years old. I'm surprised the Trax treasury hasn't been drained, honestly. You can see the effect the Service Nervous System has had.
A Couple Thousand ICP a Day Is Meaningless Sell Pressure
Now imagine an ICP marketing fund where every day there's $7,000 of ICP minted at current prices. That's a couple thousand ICP a day, which, as I described in my previous video, is absolutely meaningless in terms of inflation and numerically pointless in terms of sell pressure. I did the math. I broke down the math. It is a meaningless amount of tokens even if every one of them got dumped.
The main resistance comes from jealous people who come around saying, "Well, I post about ICP too." Nobody sees what you post about ICP. Can we just stop acting like that? What I post about ICP is seen millions of times — more than almost all the rest of the community combined. If you set aside Bobby O, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero, and a couple of others, everybody else that's left doesn't even equal my reach. All the rest combined don't equal me. That's why I'm in a position to get paid and the majority of the community is not. And my posts bring in new people — most people in ICP post things that only reach other people already in ICP, and maybe a couple of their friends.
But here's the thing: with the marketing fund, anyone could apply. You could post and reach 100 people and ask for $20. The system would probably need spam protection, so it might cost $20 to $100 to submit a proposal. But you could ask for $500 to post about ICP all year. Some micro creator could get $500 to post about ICP all year — I think that would be useful.
And just this marketing fund existing will generate a ton of conversation. Right now there are so many mercenary crypto creators, and if they see money that's easily available and see that they can apply, they'll come. That's exactly how I got into Dash in 2016 — I saw they had a budget proposal system and thought, all right, I can get some money from that. I was just a mercenary content creator looking for money. So if you have hundreds of thousands of ICP a year available for marketing, people are going to come out from all over the place with their hands out, and they're going to make proposals against the marketing fund. That conversation alone might do more marketing for ICP than what I'm doing. Imagine all these little crypto YouTubers who get a few views seeing, "Hey, I could ask for a thousand dollars from ICP and I'll do videos for three months." Imagine a bunch of them starting to make videos about ICP just to build their case. By the time they go to ask for money, some of them will do what I did in 2023 — by the time I asked DFINITY, and they ended up giving me twenty-five thousand dollars, I had already made 60 or 70 videos about ICP. Now imagine a bunch of small creators whose mouths aren't duct-taped by non-disclosure agreements and deals with all these other coins, making 10, 20, 30, 40 videos about ICP just to prove what they can do so they can then ask for money.
Then imagine ICP holders getting to vote on all these different proposals. If any sizable proposals were garbage, DFINITY could shut them down. If someone came along and asked for a hundred grand to tell their aunt about ICP, we could all just vote that down easily. So having ICP print tokens for marketing is likely going to generate a ton of free marketing before people even apply, and a ton of word-of-mouth marketing. There are certainly a bunch of compromised crypto creators out there who fought ICP because somebody was paying them to do it. But there are others — if you would support them, they would support you.
Scarcity Mindset Is Holding ICP Back
The scarcity mindset in this community is sad to see. So many people think it's not worth using 0.2% of the supply to potentially raise the market cap by hundreds of millions of dollars. That is utter scarcity mindset. Even if that 0.2% of the supply were all immediately sold every time and accomplished nothing, the price would only move by about half a cent. Meanwhile, if any of that marketing works, the price could easily move by several cents — and I believe, based on my experience, the price would move by at least a dollar, because of all the amazing things that would follow.
I am dedicating myself to this. It's all I care about in ICP: I want the Network Nervous System to print tokens for marketing. Nothing else that's happening to me in ICP matters right now. I don't care about anybody else's projects, and whatever DFINITY is doing, that's their business. My business is fixing this issue. People have complained endlessly that the marketing sucks, the visibility sucks, and the price sucks. Do something about it. This is an easy way to do something about it.
One Proposal From DFINITY Could Start This
All we need, ideally, is one person from DFINITY. Basically, Dominic Williams and Pierre need to agree that an ICP marketing fund at 0.2% yearly inflation — a couple thousand ICP a day — is worth doing. Somebody from DFINITY needs to put a post out there, and ideally a motion proposal first. I may put one out there myself at some point. Right now I'm planting seeds and having the initial discussion, because you can see how closed people's minds are. That means I need to challenge every person in this ecosystem. Some people have encouraged me to quiet down — don't cause any trouble, this is too much. No. This is the most important thing we need to be doing right now.
I'm going to crush all of the opposition and make everyone in the opposition look foolish — like you haven't been thinking critically, and like you are against ICP. In my opinion, you are against ICP if you don't think it's a good idea for the Network Nervous System to create 0.2% of the tokens and do it on a daily basis. Not 0.2% every day — 0.2% annually, which comes out to a few thousand tokens a day, which is meaningless sell pressure even assuming they all got dumped. If you are not in favor of this, you are against ICP. You are against the success of ICP. You are against basic business principles like operations, ownership, and marketing. You are against basic capitalism. You are against what has worked to promote the top cryptos, which is marketing. The cryptos at the top are at the top because they've been marketed.
Bitcoin has a lot of word-of-mouth marketing, but how do you think that happened? People bought a bunch of Bitcoin and then started marketing it. They said, yeah, let me scoop up a ton of Bitcoin, then I'll tell all my friends about it. Larry Fink says, guys, buy all that Bitcoin and then tell everybody about it. JPMorgan says, buy Bitcoin, flood into it, then tell everyone about it and sell it back to them. That's marketing. ICP needs marketing. All we need is somebody from DFINITY at some point to make a proposal that builds this technical functionality into the Network Nervous System — it votes, it executes, and we are in business. Nothing else matters to me until this gets done. I will crush every opponent. I will rip apart every single argument. I will wear down anybody who's resisting. This will come into being, because this is what we are missing. I have identified what we are missing, and I won't stop until this is in place, because the arguments against it are ridiculous and childish — nothing more than "I'm jealous. I'm jealous Jerry's going to get money for doing his job, which he's doing effectively. I'm jealous because I post about ICP and I don't get paid for it."
Well, I don't get paid to shoot baskets either. And I have the honesty to realize I don't get paid to shoot basketball because I don't generate any money doing it and nobody comes to watch me shoot. Maybe one day I'll make an event and sell $50 tickets for people to sit in the bleachers while I shoot three-pointers, and then I can call myself a professional basketball player, because I'd get paid to shoot baskets. If you can get people to care about your ICP content, then maybe you could submit a proposal yourself — and maybe I'll vote on it.
So this is the direction Jerry Banfield ICP content is going. This is all my content from now on: the ICP Marketing Fund, the Network Nervous System Marketing Fund. I encourage you — get on board, support me, and get these discussions going. Crush the opposition. Destroy their fake arguments. Use AI if you have to, to take apart the ridiculous things they're saying. I will not stop. I will not give up. I don't care about anything else — and it's not that I want to stop promoting ICP. I love ICP. I deserve to get paid, and I'm going to get paid promoting ICP. And I want to help other people get paid too. I literally want to help other people collectively make much more money than me — at least 20 times as much money as me, collectively. I'm campaigning for people to make 20-plus times what I get. The whole ICP community should be supported by the Network Nervous System: anybody creating meaningful content, onboarding people, building things, or doing anything that should be funded by marketing. The Network Nervous System takes care of node operators, it takes care of holders, and it needs to take care of marketers.
This Is Bigger Than Paying Content Creators
Here's the amazing thing. You might think, oh, we're just paying a bunch of content creators to shill ICP. Yes, paying a crypto YouTuber like me who gets this out to a lot of people is valuable. But imagine paying a web developer. Some web developer could make a proposal saying, hey, we love ICP, we found out about ICP, and we changed 10 client websites over to ICP — this is a big task for us, but we're going to do it, and we're asking for $5,000 to help pay our employees to do it. Or maybe they ask for $20,000, which would only be three days of the marketing fund. Imagine a web development agency that puts serious time into a proposal and says: we have 500 clients currently hosted on WordPress and Google Cloud, and we want to move them to ICP with AI. This is going to be a big project, it's going to take our team a lot of time, and we'd like $10,000 up front and $10,000 when it's finished — and we'll show you all the websites we built on ICP. Imagine an agency saying, we're going to move hundreds of client websites over to ICP and build all our new client websites on ICP.
Or imagine funding a web development educator who's not even into crypto at all. They say, hey, I want $7,500 — you can see my audience on my YouTube channel — and I'm going to build an entire application on ICP and show my audience of 300,000 developers how it works. Now, everyone who's against this: you're telling me you don't think it would be a good idea for the Network Nervous System to give $7,500 to somebody willing to use ICP and then share it with a whole bunch of developers who might do the same thing? Imagine some WordPress educator who compares Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in their videos — imagine giving an established, bigger creator like that a few thousand dollars and saying, hey, let's compare AWS versus ICP, let's compare traditional hosting to ICP. How about one of these hot AI creators? You could drop some of them a few thousand dollars and a single sponsored video on the correct channel could lead to onboarding tens of thousands of people to ICP. Imagine paying people around the world, in governments, to explain why sovereign infrastructure matters, to look at what the UN is already doing, and to get things moving forward. There are all kinds of possibilities. And all of that marketing would lead back to actual ICP burn — it would all flow back into things that could lead to buying the token.
And unlike depending on DFINITY to run this — where DFINITY needs KYC and somebody managing and reviewing everything — the Network Nervous System could build accountability directly into the system. You could even build a special type of proposal where the person submits proof that they actually completed what they proposed, and then people vote to confirm the marketing proposal was successfully completed. Then, when they submit future proposals, they could attach those confirmed proposals as proof of their track record.
Wait Five Years, or Build a Flywheel
To me, this is the most important thing we could possibly do in ICP right now, and we need to absolutely crush the uninformed, low-level, reptile-brain conversations happening about it. Look — if you're tired of the ICP price: DFINITY might do just fine onboarding governments, but are you fine waiting maybe five years for the ICP price to move while the rest of crypto rips everybody off as hard as they can for as long as they can? It might not take that long, but at the rate we're going, it might be years before governments burn enough ICP to counter the price suppression. If you have a marketing fund and get more people like me — and all kinds of other people — involved in creating content, building on ICP, and talking about ICP to all kinds of different audiences, then in my view there's no reason we couldn't see a 10 or 20x within the next year or two. And yes, that's not guaranteed. But when you invest in marketing, it's possible.
This could turn into a flywheel where the 0.2% stays static. If the ICP price doubles, now there's $15,000 a day for marketing. If the ICP price triples, now you're up to over $20,000 a day for marketing. Now you can pay for better and better marketing.
And one last comment. People say, "Well, if this is so good, you shouldn't have to pay for marketing." The biggest companies in the world — Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon — spend a fortune on marketing, and they're still spending even more every year. You would think Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple don't need to spend money on marketing — don't they have enough business already? No. Because their competitors are spending on marketing. And almost all of ICP's competitors — there are no true competitors, but almost all these other blockchains — are shilling and spending as much money on marketing as they can get away with without collapsing their price. Some of them may even have systems set up to artificially manufacture price increases that ICP doesn't have. We are getting destroyed from a marketing perspective. ICP is getting destroyed from a marketing perspective.
I have proposed a very simple, very high-probability fix that will cost us almost nothing and take almost no time from DFINITY to implement. So get on board, or get left behind complaining about the price and complaining about the marketing. Do you want things to be better? Then it's up to you to do something. Post and comment somewhere. Ask Dominic Williams. Ask Pierre. Say, hey, let's implement Jerry's proposal — we need the Network Nervous System paying for marketing, along with operations in terms of node providers and stakeholders in terms of voting rewards. Get out there and campaign for this along with me. And then, when I start getting paid, I can go back to proper ICP content.
Nothing Else Until This Is Done
Until this is done, I don't care about anything else. I don't care about anything else until this is done. Let's get this done. If you want to follow every step of this campaign from the original 0.2% proposal forward, everything I publish on it is collected in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Let's crush the opposition. The opposition is weak and shallow. The opposition has no patience. The opposition will crumble when they see themselves in the mirror, holding no argument that doesn't sound completely uninformed and self-sabotaging. Let's go. Let's do this.