ICP Staking and Voting Rewards: How I Earn Passive Income on ICP

Here is my direct answer: I think staking ICP in the Network Nervous System and collecting voting rewards is the simplest passive income setup I have found in crypto, and I keep most of my ICP locked this way. Not financial advice, and I have an obvious bias. But the mechanics are real. When you lock ICP in a neuron, the rewards are paid for taking part in governance, which means they come from voting, not just from holding.

What does the reward look like? When I wrote the passive income post, the dashboard showed 13.4% APR for an eight-year lock, and my own neuron was paying about 14.6% because I had locked it a little over a year and a half earlier. Treat those as starting points, not promises. Rates move with the network, the principal can fall, and the rewards only arrive if your neuron keeps voting. Below are three of my posts on this subject, read in the order I wrote them, so you can see how my view changed.

The first is the tutorial, ICP NNS Staking Tutorial: How to Earn the Best APR, from June 2026. It is the mechanics post. You create a neuron, choose a dissolve delay, decide whether to auto-lock your maturity or let it unlock so you can spawn it, and check the maturity-modulation chart before you disperse. I think two weeks and two years are the two clean choices, because three months and one year only add about a percent. The part I stressed most is voting. A neuron that does not vote earns nothing, so I follow a known neuron and check that my participation rate reads 100%. I also warned that the lock can only be increased, never decreased, and that it is final the moment you create it.

Two days later I published Why ICP Is My Easiest Passive Income Setup for 2025, and the tone shifted from how to why. I argued that the technology is the best I have seen and that the rewards are the easy part. I described compounding: my neuron had grown to 546 ICP by automatically staking its maturity, and I was receiving about 1.56 ICP a day. I also worked through a hypothetical. If the price rose tenfold while my payout stayed the same in ICP, I would be earning around 146% a year on the dollars I put in. I kept the caveats, though. Voting is not 100% passive, and the principal could go to zero. My practical advice was to follow only one neuron rather than a long list, and to vote once yourself or confirm your follow every six months.

The newest post is You'll Regret Not Buying 1,234 ICP, from July 2026, and it is where my conviction is loudest. The argument there is about ownership more than yield. With a supply of about 555 million ICP, 1,234 ICP works out to roughly one 450,000th of the whole network. At around $2.20 that was about $2,714 by my numbers, and at a 6% voting reward it comes to about $162 a year. My claim was that if ICP ever reached a Bitcoin-sized valuation, that same stake would be worth far more, and I said I would prefer to borrow against a position like that rather than sell it. I said plainly that the upside is possible, not guaranteed at all, and I also admitted that I have lost tens of thousands of dollars on ICP. One example I gave: I swapped Bitcoin for ICP when one Bitcoin bought about 10,000 ICP, and it now takes about 30,000 ICP to buy one Bitcoin.

Put the three together and the arc is clear. The tutorial is about getting the settings right. The passive income post is about why the rewards are worth the lock. The 1,234 ICP post is about why the upside might justify going all in. The mechanics stayed the same across all three, and they are the most useful part for anyone who is actually going to stake. The conviction grew, and it is the part I would check hardest.

Below this opening you will find the contents list and then the full text of each post, newest first. Read the tutorial for how to do it, the passive income post for the reasoning, and the regret post for the bet. If you want the network itself explained before any of this, my plain-English explainer on what the Internet Computer is is the place to start. Then read my bear case for ICP, which covers the scenarios where this does not work out.

You'll Regret Not Buying 1,234 ICP

From my video published July 22, 2026.

Why I Believe You'll Regret Not Buying 1,234 ICP

You'll regret not buying 1,234 ICP, because in my opinion this is the best opportunity I've ever seen in crypto. While a lot of us are afraid of losing, to me the biggest regrets in my life are where I've not gone all in, where I've given up too early, where I haven't just fully opened my heart. I thank Michael Duffy for the video he made called "You'll Regret Not Buying $2 ICP." And I say, forget $2. To me, an amazing amount of ICP to have is basically over 1,200.

Here's why. If you look at the ICP supply, it's 555 million, the voting reward is only 3.5%, and the node provider rewards are pretty low. So if you do the math on the calculator, you'll see that if you buy 1,234 ICP, you will have one 449,000th of the whole supply. That's a huge, huge deal, because if ICP goes on to become a global internet platform, it could be something that's worth as much as Bitcoin, which would be a 1,000x from where ICP is at today. That would be life-changing money, where the voting rewards alone could be something you live off of.

Now, this obviously isn't financial advice, and I hold ICP, so I'm heavily incentivized to say this. I hold ICP because of the technology, and the technology is so impressive. When you look at the voting rewards, right now I'm actually getting more than the base rate — I'm getting as much as 8% because I have a four-year neuron. But you can get something like 6.5% just for locking up.

Doing the Math on the Voting Rewards

Let's use the current price. I literally had to look this up on X because I don't know exactly what it is — I don't look at the price all the time, and I'd see it a lot less if I didn't do ICP videos. At around $2.20, it would cost you approximately 1,234 times $2.20, which is $2,714, to get about one 450,000th of the entire supply.

Here's how much ICP I have. Right now I have 5,679 ICP locked in neurons and 1,908 liquid, and I'm looking to accumulate more. I've also got a little bit in altcoins that I will swap over as soon as they're unlocked. My main neuron also has 716 in maturity, which is essentially 700 more ICP that I haven't minted and have locked up indefinitely, and I'm getting 8% on that.

So let's say today you get to 1,234 ICP, and let's just say that ICP 1,000x's one day — because that would be equal to the Bitcoin market cap, and that would also be comparable to a big infrastructure business like Amazon Web Services and what their hosting is worth. Let's say that happens, and let's say you're earning 6% in voting rewards. Do the math: $2,714 times 0.06 is about $162 a year you'd earn right now in voting rewards. But at 1,000x — which I believe is possible, not guaranteed at all, but possible — you could spend $2,700 today and be getting $162,000 a year in voting rewards. And you wouldn't even have to sell your ICP. You literally could hold your ICP and potentially become a millionaire by spending a couple thousand dollars on ICP today.

I don't see any other crypto that I'm aware of — and I've reviewed a number of them — where that's at all realistic. I don't even see where 100x is realistic in any of the top 100-plus cryptos. And even if you only got a 100x on ICP, even 100x would get you $16,000 a year in mostly passive income for voting, if you follow somebody and confirm. Where else do you have the possibility that you could invest $2,700 today and be earning $16,000 a year in ongoing rewards?

Why I'd Take a Loan Instead of Selling

What's even more interesting is that if the price pumps a lot, you could also take a loan against your principal without even having to sell it, and keep getting your ongoing rewards. If it dumps after that, you just lose your ICP, but you don't have to repay the loan. That would be my preferred method: instead of cashing out when it pumped, I would prefer to grab a loan. That way, if it continued to go up, I could repay that loan and get my ICP back. And if it crashed, I would simply not have to repay the loan.

I'm saying all this based on the technology. There's nothing else in crypto I would say this for. If you look at the tech rankings on CryptoTechCap.com, you'll see there's nothing else in crypto I would say this about, and you can see my exact ranking methodology and all the questions there. That's why I say it's realistic, in my opinion, for ICP to have a thousand-x upside someday. It might take five years or ten years, but I believe it's realistic someday because of where Bitcoin is today and because ICP is, to me, truly the dominant crypto in terms of technology.

The Regrets We Actually Carry

Now, let's talk about the regrets, though. Where else could you put a couple thousand dollars and potentially turn it into life-changing money without taking a hell of a lot of risk? What's honest to say about ICP is that yes, there is risk, and so far the price overall has mostly gone down. I recognize that. I've personally lost a good bit of money — tens of thousands of dollars — by investing in ICP. In fact, I had Bitcoin three years ago that I swapped when it was about 10,000 ICP to a Bitcoin, and now it's about 30,000 ICP to a Bitcoin. So I've lost essentially two-thirds of what I would have had in Bitcoin by investing in ICP over the last few years. But I don't regret that, because I went for it. I went based on my research.

To me, regrets are often surprising. A lot of us are too risk-averse in our lives. For most people, the idea of putting a couple thousand into a cryptocurrency sounds crazy — "I'd hate to lose that money." But what you actually regret more than trying and going for something is giving up or not trying, not going for the life you wanted. There's a book I read that was really helpful on this, called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The number one regret listed is: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me" — coming from unfulfilled dreams and the realization that many choices were made to please others rather than honoring your own path. Number two: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

I believe ICP can address both of these very directly, where you might have the chance to not have to work so hard to achieve your goals or to make money if ICP does well. It's one of the few investments I see that could truly bring life-changing wealth, and one that I feel I can hold on to with confidence. And the courage to live a life true to yourself, not what others expect from you — that often stems from things like people staying married just because they didn't want to get divorced.

My Biggest Crypto Regrets: Ethereum and Dash

My biggest regrets are usually about not sticking with things. My biggest regret in crypto is that I didn't stick with it. I found Ethereum in 2016, but I didn't stick with it. I was buying Ethereum under $10, and I sold at $14 thinking I could rebuy under $10 again. That didn't work out so well. I wish I'd stuck with Dash longer, too. I had bought $11,000 of Dash and turned it into $87,000 in just a few months, and then I sold everything. I didn't have the courage to hold on a little longer and believe in my own marketing. I would have been a millionaire just off of Dash if I had simply waited eight more months — although I did sell the Dash at just the right time against the Bitcoin price. But if I'd held the 60 Bitcoin that I sold my Dash for, do some math on how much I'd have today. I remember selling 60 Bitcoin at $1,700, which seemed like a great deal at the time. Not so good today, is it? 60 Bitcoin times maybe $65,000 today — not such a good deal now.

Going All In

So to me, a lot of us will regret the things we miss far more. A lot of us are too afraid of losing to ever go for it. As I've been sharing on my Jerry Banfield channel, I've just gotten into dating this woman, and I've gone all in on her, and it has been quite a wild ride. If you're interested in learning more about that, it's on The Jerry Banfield Show — those vlogs have just been my heart and soul pouring out, and it's been so intense. But I know I would rather go for her with all of my heart than play it safe and have something not work out because I played it safe. I'd rather go all in. To me, the wife I want to have is going to appreciate that I offer her all of my love and devotion immediately, that she doesn't have to earn it. That's unconditional love. You don't have to earn unconditional love — it's just given. And that, to me, is the most beautiful thing I could offer.

With ICP, I look at it the same way. So many of you have all these other coins you're holding on to because you don't want to commit to ICP. But how are you going to feel if ICP 100x's in the next big market while the rest of your coins barely do anything or only go up a little bit? The crazy thing is, even if you sell the rest of your portfolio at a profit, if you miss ICP when you knew about ICP, all those other profits from those other coins will mean nothing. You'll regret not being all in on ICP when you saw it, when you were on top of it.

I think of another story where I went all in and it seemed like a total loss and a bad idea at the time. There was this dispatcher at the police department, and she was as beautiful as you could possibly be. I knew it was a bad idea, but I went all in on her, and I ended up quitting my job over it. That was one of the roughest periods of my whole life. But I look back now and I'm so glad I made what at the time looked like a dumb decision — choosing the dispatcher over my career.

Knowing the Risk and Going For It Anyway

I knew I couldn't have both the career and the dispatcher, because two other guys had already either quit or gotten fired over her before me. I had a good understanding that I might be the third — I might be the hat trick if I went for it. And I went for it anyway. So I understand with ICP that this could go to zero. In my opinion it's probably not going to, but there are scenarios where this doesn't work out. And I would rather take that risk, because if ICP doesn't work out, it's going to hurt, but I'm going to learn and I'm going to grow. Opening my heart to this woman has been full of joy, but it has also brought up all kinds of pain and fear and doubt and unworthiness, and that has been scary to deal with. But I've become a stronger person because of it.

Research It Deeply and Use the Technology Yourself

When you see an opportunity jumping out, you've got to really research the opportunity for yourself. I would never buy ICP without looking deep, deep into it. I host my website on ICP. CryptoTechCap is on ICP. My games site, jerrybanfield.net, is hosted on ICP with games that you can play. I just made this new one, Math Strike One, which is brutal — jump into the 12th-grade math on this game and you'll get a quick dose of humility. Something like: if f(x) equals 4x plus 9, find f(-157). Bro, what? I used to know how to do this at some point — I think we're talking a derivative there, so we need to find x, and honestly I'm not exactly sure, because it's been a while. But that game is hosted on the blockchain.

I would never buy something where I wasn't actually using the technology itself and hadn't deeply researched it. Now, crypto is different than a relationship — you should do deep research on the actual technology. But once that crypto earns your trust, once it shows you that it's special, that it has something different, that this blockchain can do things like host a game — you can't put a game like that on another blockchain. And not only did I put it on there, it was easy. It didn't take much effort to fire that up. I've been able to build using Claude and just throwing it in with the ICP command line. I have a friend's website on there too. I'm actually hosting websites on ICP and it's doing something useful — it's better than any other web host I could find. I have all my crypto in the ICP wallet. And DFINITY is the largest research and development team in crypto. Bobby O makes incredible videos talking about the big picture. Blockchain Pills' videos keep me going — I talked to him for an hour and a half recently, and it was an amazing conversation and connection from the ICP community. And Michael Duffy inspired this video.

The Risks You Didn't Take

A lot of us think way too much in terms of risk aversion. But I challenge you: when the time comes that your life is wrapping up, the biggest regrets are going to be the risks you didn't take that were worth taking — like not committing to ICP. It's the same in dating. The main advice people give men is to have options, don't commit, make them earn it — all this stuff. No. I would hate to lose an amazing woman because I was playing all these games and keeping options. I perhaps experienced that once already this year. There was a woman — she seemed like she was rich, a woman from overseas, and she wanted kids. She seemed like she really liked me, but I withheld my love from her. I didn't text her for two days, and she figured that meant there was nothing there, that she was getting ignored, that I didn't care about her. She was hurt, so she didn't want to see me again. And I'm like, what? So now I'm jumping all in on the things that are worth going all in on. And in my opinion, ICP is a crypto worth going all in on — the only one.

If you'd like to talk with me about anything related to ICP or anything else — dating, or you just want to share your life with me — I'd love that. You can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and we'll talk about whatever matters most to you.

Thank you for reading this all the way through. If you want to keep going deeper on the Internet Computer with me, you'll find all of my videos on it in my ICP Crypto playlist. I appreciate you being here.

Why ICP Is My Easiest Passive Income Setup for 2025

From my video published June 17, 2026.

If you're looking for passive income in 2025, the easiest, most perfect setup I see is with Internet Computer Protocol. Let me be clear up front: this is not financial advice, and I'm not a financial advisor. I have over 10,000 ICP, and I have at least $16,000 of it locked up indefinitely, earning higher than 13% APR right now. So I clearly have a strong bias in favor of saying all of this. That said, I've been in crypto for 11 years. I've looked everywhere, and I've invested all my money in ICP because I don't see any better technology and I don't see any better passive income anywhere. That's why I keep doing video after video about it on Jerry Banfield Live and on my original channel. In my assessment, this is the best opportunity I see in the world right now.

The Actual Passive Income You Can Earn

Let me show you the actual passive income you can earn. If you go to dashboard.internetcomputer.org and click on governance, you can right now get 13.4% APR if you lock your ICP up for eight years. I'll also share a way you can get the same thing without having to lock it up for that long.

This is the first thing I did after I took six months to research Internet Computer Protocol in 2023. I bought maybe $50, then a few hundred dollars, and got up to about $1,000. But at that thousand-dollar point I realized that if I was going to put any more into this, it needed serious investment, serious consideration, and deep, deep research. So that's exactly what I did. I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into researching Internet Computer Protocol and its alternatives.

Why I Believe ICP Is the Best Technology I've Seen

What I see today is that Internet Computer Protocol is the absolute best technology on the planet. For blockchain, for crypto, for a new financial system, for AI, for Web3, there's literally no competition in terms of the tech. Now, if you talk about hype and narratives and speculation, that's everything else. But in terms of the actual technology, there's nothing close. ICP is so far ahead of what anyone else is doing. If there were a site ranking crypto technology, ICP would be number one, and it would be farther ahead of second place than Bitcoin is ahead of Ethereum. The technology, from what I see, is at least 10 if not 100 times better than any other blockchain. Not even Google or any of the other large companies in the world seem to have this level of technology.

That actually makes the tech a little bit dangerous, which is one reason you probably haven't heard about it. Because it's so good, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money from this tech getting adopted and their tech heading down. It's important for me to say that, so I don't paint this as something it isn't. When you see a claim like this, your mind is likely to think it's too good to be true. I've just given you what I see as the big-picture reality: this is, in my view, the best tech in the world, and to me it looks drastically undervalued right now. Not financial advice, and what do I really know about these things, but if you go to icptokens.net, the entire market cap for Internet Computer right now is $2.5 billion. This is the number one technology I see in the world to run AI in a secure, tamper-proof, verifiable, micropayments environment on blockchain. In my opinion, there's nothing better. There are some people in AI who are desperate for others not to find out about ICP because of what it can do with AI. For a new financial system, I believe it's the best tech in the world, and nothing's even close. I covered that in a recent video.

The Dream of Passive Income

So here's the dream for passive income. I had a friend come to me the other day and say, "Jerry, I'm thinking about buying a business." I asked why, and he said, "I just want some passive income." I told him to look at my shirt. If you want passive income, this is as easy as it gets: 13 and a half percent.

But here's what's even better. The dream with passive income is that the principal also appreciates. Now keep in mind, the principal could go to zero. I think there's a small chance of that, but there is real risk involved. To me, though, it's asymmetric risk. So the absolute dream come true is to be getting these kinds of rewards while your principal potentially appreciates a lot. Right now I have 10,000 ICP worth of ICP and ICP altcoins. If this whole thing goes where I think it's going, in a theoretical scenario where it goes up 10x, what I'm earning in APR stays the same. Whereas if you have 13% APR in the bank, you're not going up. Your dollars are becoming more worthless every day, and your APR is barely offsetting inflation.

But, not financial advice and anything could happen, if ICP were to go up say 10x, I would effectively be getting 160%. Right now I'm receiving about 1.56 ICP in maturity per day. I'm actually getting 14.6% myself, because I locked this a little over a year and a half ago. In a theoretical world where the price goes up 10 times, I'd still keep getting the exact same amount of ICP. So that would effectively turn into, assuming I bought it all at this price, around 146% APR on the US dollars I put in. That is the absolute dream for passive income: your principal itself can greatly appreciate while you keep getting the same rewards on it. To me, there's no setup in the world better than Internet Computer Protocol right now.

How I Compound My Rewards

I'm actually compounding my rewards. In my neuron, I'm automatically staking the maturity, which is why I've grown to 546 ICP in it. By compounding, the amount of passive income I get daily keeps going up and up.

One caveat: this is not 100% passive. The rewards you get on Internet Computer Protocol are based on voting. The reason you get paid is that you're being compensated for voting on proposals. You can make this as passive as possible when you go into your neuron. If you want to see how I stake neurons, I have a tutorial. Search "Jerry Banfield ICP Crypto NNS Staking and Voting Rewards Tutorial" and that'll show you how I do it.

To make it passive, you go to follow neurons, and on the first three categories you add a followee. Then every time that followee votes, you vote too. All you have to do every six months is either vote one time yourself, or confirm that you still want to follow them and are active. Here's an example: right now I'm going to click adopt on a proposal for a signed node provider from DFINITY. I don't see why I wouldn't vote yes, so I'll vote yes. Notice it starts at around 36 to 38 million voting power, and when I click that button, a half percent or so of the voting power, millions of it, just moves. That's because everybody who follows me just voted at the same time I did. You should only follow one person, by the way; don't follow a bunch of people. Then every day ICP tallies the people who voted and gives you maturity. For passive income, all you have to do is keep loading up maturity, click spawn neuron, and it'll crank out ICP. Or, if you want to compound it, you can just automatically stake the new maturity.

How I'd Appraise It, and What I'd Do Next

This is the best setup in the world I see for passive income right now, because your principal can appreciate and because the technology appears, in my assessment, to be undervalued by at least 100 and potentially 1,000 times. If I were appraising this and looking at what other things are worth in the world, I personally would appraise it at about a trillion dollars. Not financial advice; that's just what I would value it at based on what the tech can do and the problems it solves. I'd appraise it about 500 times higher than it is right now, and I'd appraise almost every other crypto at least 10 times lower, if not 100 or 1,000 times lower, than where they sit in my analysis. For my friend who's looking for passive income, this is as easy as it gets.

However, I would not buy any of this until you've done further research. If you want to go deeper before making any decision, you can keep learning through my ICP Crypto playlist, where I record clip after clip walking through exactly how I approach all of this.