If you want to see the future of crypto, this is it. I know that in July 2026 almost nobody sees this coming yet, but this is where I think we're headed. I see Internet Computer Protocol on the way to being the number one cryptocurrency, and I realize that would make it around 1000x from today. But unlike the majority of predictions out there, I'm not just pulling this out of my butt. I have made an entire website at CryptoTechCap.com, which breaks down cryptocurrencies ranked by technology, not by market cap. It goes in and scores every single crypto by what it can actually do, and it's fully transparent. There are 100 different questions answered. For example, ICP answers no to whether the founding foundation company is unable to unilaterally upgrade the protocol — they haven't been doing that, but it still looks very possible. And could the chain realistically continue operating if the foundation disappeared? Probably not. At least not yet. Maybe at some point.
What the Market Cap Should Look Like If Technology Mattered
According to CryptoTechCap.com, here's what I think the market cap should actually be today. If the market was any kind of logical, based on technology — if it was people like me looking at what the capabilities of each blockchain actually are — the technology-adjusted market cap would put Internet Computer Protocol at a market cap around where Bitcoin is today — which I realize is 1000x from here.
Some of you may think that's impossible, but I was in Bitcoin, and it got nearly 1000x from when I bought it back in 2014 — close to that. If you had told me in 2014 that Bitcoin, if I just held on to it for a decade, could get me nearly 1000x, that would have sounded insane at the time. I was stacking it for a few hundred dollars, and my first plan to start DCAing out began when it went over $2,000 — which seems tiny today, doesn't it?
And yet Bitcoin's present market cap is something like $1.28 trillion. To me, if you stripped away all the marketing and misunderstandings around the actual Bitcoin market cap, and you valued just the Bitcoin blockchain and the history and all that, I think the market cap would be about 0.15x — roughly 85% lower than it is today. To me, a huge Bitcoin sell-off is much more probable at this point than a bunch of accumulation. When people dig deeper and find out how little Bitcoin can do, how much of it is routed through centralized entities, how the original promise of the blockchain has been nearly completely compromised, how things like mining are not meaningfully decentralized in my opinion — and neither is the development on the core GitHub, where each of these has essentially a handful of people who control it — and how massively wasteful Bitcoin is from mining — Bitcoin would be really easy to FUD back down to those levels.
But what's difficult to FUD once the price moves is Internet Computer. Because the way I see it, the only things holding Internet Computer back at this point are the price and the length of time it takes to onboard governments and enterprises — who are already working, like Pakistan and Switzerland, who are already getting infrastructure set up. It just takes time to get all of that fully rolling.
So this is my prediction, written in July 2026: one day, ICP is going to sit at the top of crypto, and almost everything else is going to go down a lot. I think it's highly unlikely at this point, based on what I see, that any other scenario plays out here. Because any other scenario counts on people continuing to be completely ignorant about what really matters in crypto. And what really matters in crypto is the technology. There's only so long you can keep lying and narrative-pushing and fluffing and promising and showing stuff on roadmaps. A lot of the foundations today have given up on their roadmap. They know there's nowhere to go.
97 Yes Answers Versus 19
Some coins today, like SUI, are acting like they can do stuff the Internet Computer can do. But here's the truth: look at the 97 questions ICP says yes to. Look at the 19 SUI says yes to. That is not a little bit of a difference. You have coins out there like Near Protocol that are going around talking about how they're the future of AI. Well, why do they answer no on all 20 questions for things AI can do with the Near blockchain? Why can Near hardly do anything that ICP can do?
And here's the thing — you could adjust the questions a little bit. You could try to do your own research deeper than mine. But no matter how you do it — sure, some of the people who are just making things up and saying anything could try to invent some ridiculous framing — anyone with any level of integrity, which I guess narrows down crypto quite a bit, doesn't it, is going to come up with these results. The Internet Computer is the utterly dominant technology in crypto, solving gigantic real-world problems. And that means a huge amount of money can come into ICP from outside of crypto. When that happens, and the ICP price chart isn't scaring off crypto retail, and people see that there is something true, something real that has massive value in crypto, all these other ones are going to get destroyed. ICP, to me, is the first coin that's actually set up to take over from Bitcoin as the ongoing dominant number one coin. And it's because of what the tech can do. It's not because of what I'm saying or some narrative. It's because the tech is so genuinely useful to the world.
My Website Is Hosted Directly on the Blockchain
For example, the website I created, CryptoTechCap.com, is hosted directly on the ICP blockchain. You can't do that. You can't do that with any other coin. And that is extremely useful, because just that alone saves me a lot of money personally. What happens if this site goes viral one day because some influencer who's not compromised shares it — which, again, starts to seem less likely. See, this sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But what if there's some influencer who actually has a sense of integrity and cares — another person like me and Bobby Owen, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero, Michael Duffy 2.0, Chris Shouse — who is concerned about this stuff? Sharing it is a simple thing to do.
So let's say this website goes viral one day and gets 100,000 visitors. The way it's set up, hosted on the ICP blockchain, all I need is maybe $50 in cycles — if that — sitting in my account, which is super easy to do. I probably have $20 in there now, and I probably could easily have 50,000 visits come through right now before I ran out of cycles. That is extremely useful, because web hosting alone is a huge problem. Normally you have to pay to reserve a spot on a server, and then you have to just hold that empty capacity all the time in case somebody comes through. But because ICP has a coin and can do microtransactions, it can just bill you incremental, tiny fractions of a cent when people come through your website.
I could host this somewhere else and get billed by actual usage with huge upside, which I think is possible on AWS. But AWS is not that beginner friendly, at least from what I've seen — you can't just go put your website on it without using some third-party platform in the middle, which then constrains you and makes you get a specific server. And even if that wasn't the case, when a website goes viral, the first thing that's going to happen is somebody trying to hack it — trying to take it over and stick their own stuff on there. Thus, this technology that ICP has, these capabilities, are not things that don't matter — which is a double negative, which means they do matter.
Crypto Retail Is Going to Keep Getting Smarter
So many people in crypto say the tech doesn't matter. Well, sure — to people in crypto who are insane. Or maybe insane is too harsh a term. Maybe to people in crypto who are financially inefficient, who are not doing their own research, who are throwing money around, who are operating on beliefs that don't make logical sense. Why would you invest in things you don't understand, based on the idea that nothing in crypto is valuable and it's all speculation and hype, and that for some reason that's going to continue indefinitely? Those are the ideas most crypto retail is operating under. And I'm going to assume — which, yes, makes an ass out of you and me — that crypto retail is going to continue to get smarter by being punished over and over for their insane (there it goes again) investing behavior. The more crypto retail gets punished, the more they're going to learn to do their own research. And the more people like me create websites like CryptoTechCap.com, the more obvious it becomes what's real in crypto.
If you sort the rankings by capability score, Polkadot and Kusama do show some more capabilities, but they're nothing next to ICP. They're incrementally better than some of these other ones, and that could be a result of over-exaggerating. I need to dig into the top five a bit further, because some of them could be over-exaggerating in their documentation about what they can do. But nobody even gets close in their own documentation — Polkadot and Kusama are barely doing a third of what I see ICP doing. That's what ICP is in terms of the technology.
And if you look at the ICP dashboard, it's doing 200 blocks a second right now. 200 blocks every second. You've got 50 subnets up. You have countries like Switzerland that have made their own subnet on this. It takes time for a government to move, but when you have governments that have already set something like this up, it's just a matter of time before the move happens. You'd better be in before the move happens, because this could happen fairly rapidly. Now, it's not going to happen overnight, but we've seen the ICP price, and to me, the ICP price has been massively suppressed using every technique you could imagine in crypto. Why? Because this is the future coming in ICP. Some of the people at the very top — in corporations, governments, power, the richest people — seem to have remote viewers or psychics who can look into probable futures and see things like this. This is what they're seeing. And how do I know? Well, this is what I'm seeing, and I've got a little skill at this stuff myself.
The future I'm seeing: ICP is number one, Bitcoin's two, Ethereum's number three. And even those valuations might be optimistic for the last two — Ethereum especially may take a much worse beating than going down to $83 billion.
And the coins below those three are likely to just get utterly trashed. Bitcoin and Ethereum at least have some history to them, and there are a lot of coins — especially on Bitcoin — that aren't transactable, so those may hold value a lot better than many of the others. But many of the other coins that were supposed to be better than Ethereum? When something comes out that really destroys Ethereum, they're going to zero.
Meme Coins, Influencers, and "The Future Is On Chain"
You've got Solana with meme coins launching — what happens when everybody figures out ICP is way better for launching meme coins than Solana? The infrastructure is there to make your meme coin more than just a website and narration. You can make a crypto game on chain, set up a meme coin, set up a community, build all of it out yourself with AI — then launch a meme coin on your own website. You're operating on a whole different level than something like Solana. When the average person realizes you can use AI to build your own pump.fun, stick it on ICP, host it almost for free, and have total control of the environment — everything changes. What happens when some crypto influencer realizes that instead of promoting all these other people's meme coins, they should promote their own meme coin platform — which you can only set up easily on ICP, because you need every single thing to be on the blockchain? What happens when some crypto influencer realizes they can print themselves millions and millions of dollars, pull in their community, and make way more money than their exchange deals — and all they have to do is use AI to build a meme coin launcher platform on ICP?
When Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, says the future is on chain — this is the only thing that does on chain. You can slice it up any way you want, but this is the truth as I see it: ICP's on-chain capabilities make everything else in crypto look useless by comparison. And ICP is hiding right now. But when it even pokes its head out of hiding, there's such a massive upside, because the truth of its capabilities is on its side — and for everything else in crypto, the truth is set up against it.
The Truth Is Set Up Against Bitcoin
The truth is set up against Bitcoin. Think about the people sitting there with Bitcoin in their Binance account who realize they may not even have actual Bitcoin — and this is not specific to Binance; it could be MEXC, KuCoin, Coinbase, whoever. You can't even prove you have that Bitcoin unless you withdraw it — and then you need a third-party wallet, you pay, and you wait 30-plus minutes for it even to get there. The exchange is just giving you an IOU for Bitcoin that's supposedly on the blockchain. It's worse than "not your keys, not your crypto": you could be sitting with a hardware wallet on the Bitcoin blockchain, the wallet could fail, and you could lose everything from that. When people realize Bitcoin only does seven transactions a second, and almost everything they think of as involving Bitcoin really involves Coinbase, Binance, ETFs, KuCoin, MEXC — third-party exchanges supposedly transacting Bitcoin for you — that makes you question the whole value of Bitcoin completely.
Thus, the way I see it, the future is very dark for everything except ICP — though some of these projects may have a future on ICP: Bitcoin may, and Ethereum may have its future using ICP as the definitive layer two. You've got people like Vitalik Buterin playing games of hiding ICP and not talking about it, because he's looking at losing his investments in Ethereum. Yet before ICP even released, when Vitalik was asked if there was a real competitor to Ethereum, he said DFINITY. So Vitalik gave you that information seven years ago.
And in those seven years, ICP's technical capabilities have continued to rapidly advance. These are not static. Almost all these other blockchains are static. Dogecoin — I just reviewed it on my crypto reviews channel — is not getting better. These other blockchains are lucky to make a point or two of improvement. ICP cranks out a point or two of improvement every month, because they have the largest research and development team in crypto. They're expanding their capabilities every month — I keep documenting it in my ICP Crypto playlist. To me, there's no coin in crypto that has as much upside and as low a risk as ICP.
Now, obviously none of this has been financial advice, and I'm obviously not a financial advisor. And I obviously have ICP — I bought 2,000 more ICP in the last month. I've literally taken cash advances on my credit cards, because your boy is living on leverage right now, leveraging my credit to see if we can make all this work financially.
You Don't Have to Figure ICP Out Alone
So if you're stuck with something on ICP, or you're already in ICP, you don't have to figure it out alone. If you want more, you can join those of us who are on the inside in ICP — who know how to use things like the Network Nervous System to stake our crypto. My own website, jerrybanfield.com, is hosted on ICP, with almost a thousand blog posts sitting directly on the ICP blockchain. It's close to free for me to host — it's crazy how cheap hosting is with this kind of infrastructure.
If you have a question about ICP, anytime, post it. You've got Scouse Will, Blockchain Pill, and a few others from the ICP community sitting in there, and any of us can help you. I read every message I get, and I will comment on every post people make. We're here to support you, give you feedback and clear next steps — whether you want to share a project you're building with me and the community, or you want help figuring something out, like how to get your ICP off of Coinbase. We have group calls too, so you can get support there.
My goal is for you to see where the future of crypto is going, so you can relax, use ICP with confidence, and see that you don't need any of this other stuff. The other stuff is not diversification. Investing in AOL in the early 2000s was not diversification if you also invested in Yahoo and several other companies that are all gone today. That's investing in things that don't make sense anymore. So I'm here to support you.