The Internet Computer today in 2026 is like NVIDIA in 1999. I was aware of NVIDIA way back then because I was into computer gaming — although maybe I actually found out about NVIDIA four years later. But in 1999, almost nobody knew about NVIDIA. They had been around since 1993, they went public in January 1999, and that same year they released the GeForce 256, what they called the first graphics card. It has been quite a ride since, and decades later, things have gone even better for NVIDIA. What I want you to see is how much potential is still here with ICP.
Now, this is not financial advice. I am all in on ICP, and I do not have any NVIDIA — although I do have two NVIDIA graphics cards in my house that I am actually using right now, even though I do not own the stock. That is a very important comparison, because you can use NVIDIA graphics cards without investing in the stock. Just like when you go to jerrybanfield.com, you can use my website, which is hosted on ICP and contributing to ICP being burned, but you do not have to do anything with the token. Very good comparison.
The Biggest Use Case May Still Be Ahead
Same thing here with 1999 NVIDIA: very few people, if anybody, imagined that what they were making in 1999 would, two decades later, get a huge pump in the stock off of AI computing. They were just making some infrastructure that you could do computations on, which at the time were mostly gaming. I remember buying cards back then. I liked NVIDIA better than AMD, although I had Radeon in some of my computers, but I was buying NVIDIA graphics cards and making my own gaming PCs.
So the key similarity is here: the biggest use case may actually be ahead. Right now, people cannot see why ICP is so important in crypto. The biggest use cases are becoming more obvious to those of us in ICP, but in the rest of the world, the use case is not something people even realize. Just like almost nobody buying NVIDIA stock in 1999 would have thought that 20 years later they would have a massive pump off AI — even though you did have movies like Terminator as far back as 1984 talking about Skynet and an AI takeover, so there certainly were seeds planted.
Both Are Real Infrastructure
The key similarity between these two is that both of them are actual infrastructure. With the NVIDIA cards, I am using one in my computer right now. I am also running Claude in another window right now, and me using Claude is contributing to the NVIDIA GPUs that are sitting in gigantic data centers being used as well. With ICP, I am interacting with it right now too, having my website hosted on it and building on it, and that is contributing to all the ICP nodes sitting in data centers where my website is hosted. I do not think there is any other coin in crypto that truly represents real infrastructure. That, to me, is the biggest story in crypto: ICP, the coin, is a part of real infrastructure.
And the end user does not even need to know about either of these products. How many people using ChatGPT or Claude are thinking about the fact that NVIDIA is on the backend of it, that the data centers have a whole bunch of NVIDIA GPUs in them? Probably the majority of people using ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini Pro, or even Grok are not thinking, well, there are NVIDIA graphics cards powering the backend of all this.
The people on my website, unless they came from ICP, are the same way. I have Jerry Banfield Dating, Jerry Banfield Gaming, Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach, and my Jerry Banfield vlogs channel — and I appreciate that there have been a lot of you watching on there. That has been the strongest growth of any of my channels lately: on the new Jerry Banfield Show vlogs channel, my video about having four dates canceled in a row got 814 views within 10 hours. That is fantastic — thank you very much. From all of those channels, I am sending people to my website. Some of them do not have any idea about crypto. They have no idea they are using the blockchain. Now think about how big of a deal that is: they are using the blockchain and they do not know it. That, to me, is the kind of token I want to hold — one where the people benefiting from the ICP infrastructure do not need to have any idea it is there.
There are all kinds of people playing video games today, and a lot of gamers with gaming PCs are very aware there is NVIDIA in there and which RTX or GTX card it is. Like me — I think I have an RTX or GTX 50-something, and I know there is an NVIDIA card in my computer. But my kids, when they are playing, do not know the hardware that is in there. It still matters what hardware is in there, though — especially if you bought the stock, it matters where all of this hardware is.
The Narratives Are Pointing Toward ICP
Right now, we have seen how NVIDIA got hit with the new technology wave in terms of AI — and there were seeds. At least as far as I can remember, Terminator made it pretty clear in 1984, the year I was born, and there were seeds long before with things like The Matrix. There were plenty of things indicating the importance of AI coming in the future. ICP with AI has all of those same seeds in it, and right now the narratives are becoming more obvious. To me, one of the most bullish things happening with ICP is that the narratives in the rest of the world — the problems being discussed — are starting to point toward ICP as a solution, even though people have not discussed the solution itself yet. Just the problems: cybercrime, AI needing to build in a way that is verifiable and under control, and governments wanting sovereignty over their infrastructure. All of those problems are pointing toward this solution, and I am not aware of other solutions that are viable, especially ones that solve all three.
So with this new emphasis on sovereign technology and AI building, ICP has already been working on the infrastructure for it for 10 years — just like NVIDIA had been making graphics cards for decades before a ton of them were bought up and put into all these AI computation centers.
Demand Without Anyone Buying the Token
This allows massive demand to be created for the ICP token without people even having to buy it. When people go to jerrybanfield.com, they are creating demand for the ICP token, because they are pulling transactions from the blockchain. The more my website does and the more people visit it, the more everyone is creating demand for the ICP token, even though nobody is buying the token. And I am able to accept payments in ICP directly on there. Do you see what a beautiful setup that is? Once you already have the infrastructure on ICP, then using ICP for payments makes more sense. I also may choose to accept Bitcoin or Ethereum as payments on there — I could take Bitcoin or Ethereum just as easily as ICP — but I would just put those in as other options.
A Use Case That Keeps Expanding
So the wave of where technology is going is pointing in the direction of ICP. Just like in 1999, there were signs that this technology would matter more in the future than just for people playing video games and rendering videos. Especially when YouTube was invented in the early 2000s, and when I got on it in 2011, the importance of graphics cards went up. Before that, it was mostly just people playing video games and a few people rendering videos. But then YouTube came along, and now people were editing videos. Then cell phones came along, and now people were using these graphics cards to render and edit videos everywhere. You see how in 1999 it looked like a pretty narrow use case — somebody wanting to play video games on their computer, or back then, I think you even needed a graphics card just to watch a video because computers were so basic. That, to me, is a good place to be: where your use case is continuing to go up.
What I am seeing with ICP is that the use case for it is continuing to expand, while most other cryptos do not have a strong use case outside of speculation, hype, paid metrics, and marketing. With ICP, it looks like the demand is going to continue to go up indefinitely on average — there will certainly be spikes — because ICP is the only coin I see where real usage can create real economic demand without speculation being the primary source.
For most of these other cryptos, speculation has been the primary source of their prices pumping, and perhaps financial engineering as well. Some of these projects have said exchanges wanted to charge them tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to list their coin, and then do things like enhance the volume — produce artificial volume. They pay the exchange a hundred million dollars in the coin, the exchange uses that for liquidity, and in some cases the exchange artificially inflates the volume too. That, to me, is what has driven the majority of the price action, the volume, and the conversation in crypto. Maybe Ethereum has had the best use case, where real usage of the token — people buying, transacting, and paying gas — created some real economic demand. But with layer twos, that has dramatically shrunk for Ethereum over the last five years. The real economic demand for the token has plummeted, and it has gone back to being mostly speculation.
The Best Time to Accumulate
So right now, the biggest opportunity for ICP may be invisible while people judge it by its current market. In 1999, looking at just the PC gaming graphics market, you would have really underestimated what this infrastructure was going to do and how much it was going to matter over the next 20 years. In 1999, NVIDIA had the basics of the technology, but it did not have a world that really appreciated why that mattered. Today, it has a world and a stock price that appreciate it. ICP, to me, seems like a very clear comparison. Now, this is not evidence that ICP's returns are going to be the same as NVIDIA's. But to me, ICP is in the absolute best time to accumulate right now. Prices are at all-time lows, and meanwhile the infrastructure and the use case are at all-time highs. Maybe not the actual adoption in terms of ICP transactions, but the use case, the infrastructure, and the need for it are all at all-time highs.
It is like you have been given a great price along with all kinds of external validation — and from what I see, there is going to be much more external validation of ICP in the future. A big company announces they have finished their year-long integration with ICP and they are finally running on it. Or, as I hear it, everybody is talking about ICP in Switzerland right now. I am not in Switzerland, but according to Zero2Hero and some of the commenters, ICP is everywhere in Switzerland right now, and it will be a matter of time before that spreads further and further. There is also a lot of worldwide wealth tied up in Switzerland. At the time I am making this, ICP is priced around $2.22 or so, and I will be interested to see exactly where we go from here.
What 1,000 Shares of NVIDIA in 1999 Would Be Worth Today
I wondered what the NVIDIA stock price was in 1999 versus today. It was $0.03 per share, or $12 split-unadjusted, and today it trades at $223 per share — with six stock splits along the way. So I asked Gemini to calculate the ROI on 1,000 shares of NVIDIA bought in 1999, because I think we could have similar results with ICP, where 20 years from now you would be filthy rich.
Wow. If you had bought 1,000 shares of NVIDIA in 1999, you would have around $100 million today. Every share purchased at the 1999 IPO is 480 shares today due to six forward stock splits, so you would have $107 million today — and you could have purchased those shares for $12,000 in 1999. That is a return of 8,000x, almost 9,000x. I am seeing the same opportunity with ICP. If ICP did a 9,000x, you could be looking at something like $18,000 per ICP, maybe by 2046. I would be a very rich man to have that much ICP at the amount I hold today. So, not financial advice — anything could happen — it is just a good illustration of 1999. NVIDIA in 1999 did not look like much, but 9,000x over 27 years? That is pretty good, isn't it? To me, those are the only kinds of investments worth making. You literally could have just sat on your NVIDIA stock and done nothing for 27 years and been a centimillionaire — you could have paid $12,000 and had $100 million today. That is the only kind of crypto investment I am looking for.
I invite you to check out jerrybanfield.com and see all the stuff I have got on there. If you want to join the community, join the Jerry Banfield Family — you can also schedule a call with me, and I am going to keep putting all kinds of other things on my website to see what you are interested in.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. If you want more of my perspective on the Internet Computer, you will find it in my ICP Crypto playlist.