Here's the latest argument we need to absolutely destroy in ICP. If this is how you are thinking, the opportunity for you is to start learning more about business — because if you're making the argument that we can't possibly mint any ICP to pay for marketing, then you do not understand business. Now, the guy who made this post doesn't understand business, obviously. He was saying, I don't understand — we fought inflation, now we want more inflation? No. We want a business in ICP that works. What you are not getting here is that inflation is how many of these coins, like Solana, are sustaining themselves and getting huge market caps — because they're printing billions of dollars a year and passing it out all over the place for marketing.
I am leading the charge that we need an ICP marketing fund on the Network Nervous System. At a bare minimum, it should print 0.2% — an absolutely tiny amount of tokens in terms of the big supply. Voting rewards would get about 15 to 20 times that much, and we already reduced inflation gigantically in the voting rewards. This argument, the underlying thinking behind it, is so simplistic that you're missing the big picture. If you're making this argument, you do not care about ICP succeeding. You do not care about price appreciation. You do not care or understand how ICP could even succeed.
Here's how ICP can succeed: when people like me bring in tens of millions of dollars of buying power into ICP, sell the rest of their altcoins, and hold ICP for years, even when the price is down. I did that, and I got very little for it in exchange. I've gotten nothing for it in the last couple of years, at least from DFINITY or the Network Nervous System — I've volunteered. Meanwhile, DFINITY has given away tens of millions of dollars to ICP hubs. They offer tens of thousands of dollars from some anonymous person to test their trading app. They pay $100,000 — hundreds of thousands of dollars — out to people to manage social media and do mostly ineffective marketing in terms of reaching the masses. Meanwhile, DFINITY is doing great at onboarding governments. And DFINITY should not be responsible for marketing.
The Network Nervous System Already Pays for Everything Else
The Network Nervous System pays for basic business functions, like operations in terms of node providers — they just had their rewards reduced. And the Network Nervous System pays for holders, in terms of stakeholders: you get all kinds of voting rewards minted every day, 15 times as much as I'm suggesting for marketing. Now, owning and holding ICP and staking is valuable. But this comment is essentially considering all inflation economically identical, and you are ignoring the reality of crypto. The reality of crypto is that marketing — greasing the wheel, bribing people, making profits — is what makes crypto coins have value. That's why you have coins like Solana that do fantastic marketing and have a 50 times higher market cap than ICP, maybe even close to 100 right now, depending on the price today. This is what you don't get. You think we're going to break out of where we're at anytime soon in ICP without minting or using a tiny fraction of tokens for marketing? You don't understand business if you're thinking this way.
The thing for you to do would be either to learn about basic business stuff yourself, or to simply follow someone who does — who understands all this stuff and who is living as an example. Who has one of the largest voices in ICP? Me. Who starts brand new YouTube channels and brings in millions and millions of impressions across YouTube from scratch, organically? Me. Who understands marketing? Me. Who put this thing together? Me. That's who. Who onboarded tens of millions of dollars of buying capital into the ICP ecosystem? Me. Who funded people who came into this ecosystem, and got some of them to sell after I brought them in? You. You did. And when you're out here posting this, you are making our community house dirty. You are out here sabotaging the opportunities that we have to succeed.
ICP will not succeed in the foreseeable future without us changing the Network Nervous System to pay for its own marketing — I offer you the last five years as evidence. Now, ICP may absolutely go off in the coming years as governments, corporations, and builders like me — building jerrybanfield.com on ICP — keep building. Are you willing to wait years for that to happen? If you don't want to wait years, then you better get on board with what I'm saying, and unfollow anyone who's posting like this. Ignore, mute anyone talking like this. And anyone talking like this: you need to change what you're saying, if you want the price to go up. If you don't have a meaningful amount of ICP and you don't care about the price going up, go ahead, post whatever you want.
I Got $25,000 for Some of the Best Marketing in the World
Marketing is what will change things. We've had five years of extremely ineffective marketing, which I think almost all of us would agree on. DFINITY has spent tens of millions of dollars, and ICP got dumped. I have done some of the most effective marketing in the world that anyone has done for ICP. I've gotten a total of $25,000 from DFINITY for doing that — and I got all of that at the beginning of 2024. I have gotten nothing else from DFINITY or the ICP blockchain for doing some of the very best marketing in the world. And I'm saying that if you want me to continue marketing for ICP, then you should pay me. This is where people's irrational brain kicks in: eh, but you're just posting. I should get paid. No, content creators shouldn't get paid. I get results. I do better marketing — I would argue my marketing has been better at bringing people in than anyone; show me anyone else who's brought more people into this ecosystem than me. Now, Bobby Oh has done a great job keeping people in here — and bringing me in. And so did Blockchain Pill. Blockchain Pill and Bobby Oh were creating content when I got to ICP, and their content brought me in. Content creators, and DFINITY with their research and development reports, also kept me here. Now they've stopped doing research and development reports. Now they hardly even can do basic marketing and posting. But DFINITY does a great job with governments, and they should stay there.
But you — you think we're going to break out of this hole that we are in, when our competitors, when our haters, when there are trillions of dollars in crypto that want to see ICP fail — you think we're going to break out of that when you're posting dumbass shit like this? You think there's any way out of that if you don't have people like me bringing in a bunch of new people from the rest of crypto? You think there's any way we're going to get out of the hole we're in if we don't do something ourselves? It's time to stop expecting DFINITY to just deliver miracles in terms of marketing — because they've delivered miracles in terms of technology now for five years. But DFINITY has done very little for marketing that has been successful, at least in moving the price, in five years. The price on average has done nothing but go down. For five years. And DFINITY has spent tens of millions of dollars marketing, and clearly that shit did not help the price go up. It is time for us to take control of what we can control. If we demand that the Network Nervous System pays for marketing — a tiny percent of inflation — then we will start to see some incredible things happen with ICP.
Inflation Is Not the Problem
See, this argument — the idea that we fought inflation — is based on the extremely limited idea that it's inflation that somehow is crashing the price, which is stupid. That is a dumb idea. Look at Hyperliquid: Hyperliquid has gigantic amounts of token unlocks. Look at Solana: Solana mints billions of dollars a year in Solana. Bitcoin unlocks tens of millions of dollars every single day via mining. Many of the other coins around ICP have much worse inflation than ICP. Inflation is not the problem. And who fought inflation — did you? You went out and shitposted about inflation? Then you should be fighting for marketing. If you fought against node providers getting more money than they needed, good. If you fought against the voting rewards being higher than they needed, good. Now you need to fight in favor of marketing. Because if you just have this generic idea that all inflation is bad, you are not looking at what else is happening in crypto. Inflation is being used to pay a whole bunch of people to do marketing, and then those people doing marketing are causing more people to buy the token. Why do you think XRP is one of the top tokens? The Ripple Foundation still has billions and billions of dollars — they get money every month that they can just dump on the market. And you know what they do? They invest in marketing. They send money out all over the place. How many XRP shill channels do you see? How many of those XRP shill channels are paid shills? This is simple: marketing is worth inflation. Marketing is worth the smallest amount of inflation. Under my proposal, for 0.2%, node providers would still get five times as much as marketing would get, and then the holders would get five times more than that. Meanwhile, if you put some money into marketing, then the fucking price might go up. The price might actually go up with some marketing. But if you think crypto retail is not important for marketing and you're just willing to wait on DFINITY — good. Then I hope you can hold your ICP for several years while you watch all these other coins get financially engineered upward. But I suppose you'll be shitposting your whole way from now to there, won't you?
Rally Around One Cause
So, if you want ICP to succeed, we need marketing. As a community — everyone who has a brain, everyone who really wants the ICP price to go up — we need to rally around one cause right now: sustainable, transparent marketing paid for by the Network Nervous System. Nothing else the community can talk about or do is valuable. Every single thing that any of the rest of you are posting about is a waste of time and is sabotaging and distracting from the one thing we need to accomplish. DFINITY already has enough shit to do. DFINITY needs to focus on marketing to governments and large companies — that's a much different kind of marketing. But we need crypto retail marketing also, if you want short-term price appreciation. DFINITY looks like the long-term price appreciation — I think they're going to take care of that — but most of you can't stand to wait one, two, three, four, five more years for DFINITY's marketing to finally kick in, for governments to finally start burning enough ICP to make the price go up. And everyone who hates ICP, which is most of the rest of crypto, is going to destroy us as much as possible with every means at their disposal. We need to help ourselves.
Everyone posting like this needs to have enough people talk them out of posting like this so that they change their mind — and I invite you to be one of the people doing that. Everyone posting like this, you need to explain to them why marketing is important. And if you don't get it yourself, at least use AI to explain it for you. The AI can easily, in two seconds, tell you why a post like this is inaccurate, and why the poster needs to have everyone in their fucking comments blowing up at them and saying: look, Jerry is right. We need marketing. We need the Network Nervous System to pay for marketing along with stakeholders (AKA voting rewards) and operations (AKA node providers). We need a full business system — and full business systems have operations, ownership, and marketing. We do not have a full business system in ICP. If you're not doing something to help that, you are part of the problem. Join me and fill out this business system. Fight — confront, via messaging, via posting, the ideas that are sabotaging us as a community. Clean up the conversation in this community. Let's take control of the conversation. All that matters is paying for marketing.
And if you want to be part of my inner circle — show me what I need to talk about, show me how you're supporting me — if you make posts supporting me, I will feature your comments here instead of shit like this. I will feature you. If you want me to feature you, go to jerrybanfield.com, join the chat, and show me the stuff you're posting. You are either in favor of marketing and in favor of building ICP up using the means we have at our disposal, or you're just not thinking about this that clearly. Because this is very obvious. I've been making this whole case video by video in my ICP Crypto playlist if you want the full argument.
I imagine you're probably in favor of this if you've read this far, so I really appreciate it. Let's get this conversation the direction it needs to go.