The Missing Piece in ICP Is Distribution
Most of us in the Internet Computer Protocol community would agree that something needs to be done about marketing. Most of us would agree that the worst part of ICP since its launch has been the marketing, and the single biggest complaint with ICP is always marketing and awareness. I have a very clear solution for exactly what we should do about that, and I will present it here.
My solution is this: the Network Nervous System itself should pay for marketing.
Now, I can already hear all the whining complainers and tokenomics people screaming and agonizing and preparing to write comments I won't read, because I only read the ones on jerrybanfield.com. But for those of you who are not immediately triggered and closed-minded to begin with, we need to talk about having a real business system that's based on the Network Nervous System and on ICP.
Right now, businesses have three basic areas. The first is product and operations. For ICP, the node providers get paid to provide the basic product and operations of the network, which makes sense. They just got their rewards cut back a bit, but node providers are prepared to scale as much as is needed. The second aspect is capital, governance, and ownership. We have voting rewards, and those just got cut back drastically. So we have product and operations, and we have capital and governance. But we're missing the third part of the trifecta, and that's distribution.
People have complained about it endlessly, and there's one obvious solution. The Network Nervous System, in addition to paying node operators and in addition to paying stakers in ICP, should pay for distribution. Because that's what will actually get so many more people on ICP.
Right now, it doesn't make sense that DFINITY is in the position where they need to be the ones paying for marketing for ICP. They have a more important job. Their job is helping huge enterprises and governments get to using the technology. DFINITY needs to advance the technology, make products, and demonstrate the products you can make on it. And DFINITY clearly needs help with the marketing, to put it as nicely as possible. The DFINITY accounts on X have not been posting very much lately. They haven't been keeping up with the research and development reports. These are big red flags to me.
One Percent Inflation for a Marketing Category
When you've got the blockchain itself already paying for the most important functions except marketing, it makes sense to me that we should start taking one percent in new inflation on ICP every year. We just cut voting rewards and node provider rewards to make room for it. What we should do is have a proposal in the Network Nervous System that creates a new voting category, which could be called marketing and advertising, or distribution, or whatever you want to call it. The Network Nervous System needs a new category. Every year this could be adjusted, but to start right now, I think it should be one percent.
ICP's market cap today is around $1.6 billion or so off the top of my head. Checking CoinGecko to make sure it's accurate, right now ICP's market cap is $1.3 billion. That means at one percent, you would have $13.8 million, assuming the price stayed exactly the same all year. That would be $13.8 million a year for marketing. DFINITY could vote on every single proposal, but DFINITY would not have the responsibility of doing anything for them. The community is in a perfect position to hold people accountable for their marketing proposals.
This would also incentivize you to keep participating in governance and to follow people who are making intelligent decisions on marketing proposals. Because obviously, yes, if you had $16 million sitting there, it could just be ripped off if people were not mindfully voting. But we're in a position right now to do this. This is what other blockchains have done so well: paying all these people to talk about them. Right now, this is the weakest link for ICP. Almost nothing. No one that I know of gets paid to talk about ICP.
What I've Already Driven for ICP, and What I Got Paid
Here's what's happened with what we've already been doing. From my knowledge, no one has gotten more impressions or more views on content about ICP than me. As far as I know, if you add up the lifetime totals of the impressions all my videos have gotten, you're looking at probably 10 to 20 million plus impressions that I've generated for ICP. If you compare notes with some of the other creators, even with me deleting everything last year and coming back now, I have the largest marketing share of ICP content. In total, I have received $25,000 in exchange for that, and that was in 2024. From January to July, I got $25,000 from DFINITY.
In the last month alone, I've driven millions of impressions for ICP. In the last 90 days, I have driven 3 million impressions on YouTube and 500,000 plus on X for ICP. At competitive rates for those impressions, if I was getting paid by some other coin, they would pay me tens of thousands of dollars for that work. And yet I'm doing this on a volunteer basis for ICP.
I detailed all of this in much more depth in a previous video called "I Gave ICP 1.5 Million Impressions, Was It Worth It?" I'm not going to restate everything I said there, but I am going to share one very clear thought experiment.
Do you remember when I deleted all of my accounts online in 2025, a little over a year ago? What was one of the big motivations for me doing that? One of the big motivations was that I was not making hardly any money for all the value I was driving to ICP. I deleted everything because I was tired of working a full-time job and getting a part-time paycheck.
James Allen, Chris Yost, and the Creators Who Left
And I'm not the only one. James Allen left the ecosystem, and James Allen drove millions of impressions on his ICP videos. He was upset because he got rejected, or more accurately ignored, for a community grant, as did I and the other creators. DFINITY shut down their community grants program in the second half of 2025. James Allen drove millions of impressions for ICP, bought 10,000 ICP himself, and people were paying him to talk about ICP and do interviews on his channel. James Allen was doing an awesome job for ICP, and he deserved to get paid for that. Because no one was paying him, he started fudding ICP, which resulted in people selling it and giving up on it. He went over to Kaspa, and I don't know if he's been paid or not to cover Kaspa. That's up to you to guess, because they do have programs where they will pay you to show Kaspa. That's how blockchains like Kaspa, which in my opinion suck, get better marketing than ICP: they have programs where they pay you to show Kaspa.
So I ask you this. What would the ICP price be today if James Allen and I had continued to do this? If James Allen and I had continued to get paid in 2025? I would say to you that the ICP community missed out on tens of millions of impressions that James Allen and I would have given if we had been adequately compensated for our work.
Now imagine if you didn't pay the node providers to do their job. You would have nothing. Imagine if you didn't pay the stakers for voting. Voting would go down. Voting would go to crap. What you're not doing now is paying the people marketing ICP, and then the community is complaining that nobody's marketing it. So there's an obvious solution: pay people to market it. And there's no need to be afraid of $16 million. Even if all of us who got paid just dumped all of it immediately, in my view that would not make a material difference on the price. What makes a material difference on the price is missing out on the tens of millions of impressions that James Allen and I would have generated but didn't. I deleted my accounts. James went over to Kaspa. And you have other creators like Chris Yost. He was doing a great job with his ICP videos. Why did he stop doing them? Because he wasn't making any money, and he needed money, and he didn't even need a lot of money.
You could have given someone like Chris Yost, or me, a few thousand dollars a month, which is tiny out of $16 million. Give me a few thousand dollars a month and I would have continued making my videos and driven tens of millions more impressions. James Allen, I'm sure, would have been very happy with two, three, or four thousand dollars a month. I can't guarantee anything, but I suspect, and I would bet, that James Allen's videos alone would probably have contributed a few cents, maybe 10, 20, or 30 cents, to the ICP price by himself. You could have gotten that out of the inflation for a few thousand dollars a month. I say to you that there's nothing we could do right now better than getting some serious marketing on ICP.
Let me explain how this will snowball as well. I'm not saying you should give me $8 million for the marketing I'm doing right now. What I'm saying is that should be the maximum amount that's possible, and people could make proposals against that. So in the beginning, you would only be using a fraction of what's available.
How This Worked With Dash and Steem
I will give you a concrete example of how this worked ten years ago. Ten years ago, I found a cryptocurrency named Dash. It was basically just a copy of Litecoin that they'd added masternodes to. They added masternodes and budget proposals. This was not a big innovation. They literally just copied a blockchain, added a couple of little features, and called it their own. I found Dash and realized they had budget proposals, and that I could make a budget proposal and get paid to promote the chain. Well, I drove fantastic value. They gave me several thousand Dash, which was worth thousands of dollars. In exchange, I brought millions of people into awareness. I used YouTube ads and advertised Dash to millions of people on YouTube.
The price when I got into Dash, started using it, and submitted my first budget proposal was around $11. The price a year later hit over $1,000 for Dash. It 100X'd. My marketing was a critical piece of that, because I got Dash out to millions of new people, and all kinds of people got into Dash for the first time. Who put this together? Me. My marketing was essential to the success of Dash.
I did the same thing with Steem after that. They gave me thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and I advertised Steem to millions of people. The price hit all-time highs since the launch. It hit multiple highs, and my marketing was an essential part of that. And when I saw that the team was rugging and constantly selling, and that they were a bunch of liars, I came out with a video destroying Steem, and the price absolutely plummeted after that. Marketing is essential.
What Really Happened in the 2023 ICP Pump
If you look back at the ICP price chart, I can tell you exactly what happened when we had that huge pump. It's not some big mystery. There were two key things. When I got into ICP, I got in during 2023. I found ICP around February, and Kenny Boy credits himself with telling me about it in the YouTube comments. Bobby O and Blockchain Pill's videos, along with Kyle Sixfigs, but especially Bobby O and Blockchain Pill, were essential to me understanding why ICP was different.
Now, 2023 mostly sucked for ICP. I started buying near the top of that range. So what exactly happened at the bottom, when the price was at all-time lows? At that time I had a crypto channel with tens of thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of viewers that I had community-farmed from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Avalanche, Polygon, and more. Hyperliquid wasn't around yet. I community-farmed all kinds of communities, at least 50 of them, where I'd hype their coin, they'd follow my channel, I'd hype another coin, and they'd follow my channel too.
Then in October 2023, I went all in on ICP. I dumped all my other coins, and I dumped my entire community that I'd spent almost a year building through very effective community farming into ICP. Halso Crypto's channel was about the same size as my channel back then. I dumped a channel of that size on YouTube all into ICP. What happened over the next month or so was that a number of my viewers were dumping their entire crypto portfolios for ICP. I made videos relentlessly over the next month. Nothing else at all was happening in ICP at the time.
Then the SNS sales began. So you combine my marketing with the SNS sales and the marketing they did, and all of a sudden, over the next few months, the price shoots up to a little less than a 10X, something like a 6X over the next three to six months from when I got into ICP and started heavy-hitting the marketing, followed by the SNS projects heavy-hitting the marketing. There was almost nothing else happening. Almost nobody else was doing anything except me and the SNS projects. Bobby O and Blockchain Pill were continuing to do their videos, and they were an essential reason I got in, so we were all continuing our videos, and Taggr took off right around this time. But one of the big turning points was me dumping a bunch of people into ICP who hadn't heard of it while the price was at the bottom. That was enough action to start liquidating a bunch of shorts, which starts a positive feedback loop, which temporarily breaks the price suppression. And then the SNS launches followed. That's what happened.
A Marketing Fund Pulls Influencers Out of the Woodwork
If we have a marketing fund, we can help make this happen consistently, because you've got to take care of the creators you've already got in the ecosystem. Here's what will happen with a marketing fund. Right now, there are a bunch of broke crypto influencers, a bunch of crypto influencers who are just shilling whatever coin gives them the most views and the most money. Yes, there are certainly some who are controlled by the crypto matrix and told what to do. But the masses of smaller crypto YouTubers, and even medium ones, are just chasing views all the time. They do a video about XRP, a video about ICP, a video about Hyperliquid, a video about Bitcoin, a video about Ethereum. They'll crank out videos on whatever coins give them the most views. So if some cryptos have bigger communities through bots and narrative manipulation, and others have smaller organic communities like ICP, the crypto influencers are motivated to constantly chase the dollars.
What happens when we've got a million dollars a month for marketing? What you'll start seeing is some of these other crypto influencers coming out of the woodwork. They've already heard of ICP, but they see no incentive to do ICP videos all the time because they're making more money on their other videos. Some of them will come out of the woodwork and start doing free ICP videos to prove what they can do. Then they'll start bringing their audiences over. Then they'll ask whether they can get a few thousand dollars to support their channel and do an ICP video every day, or have ICP sponsor all of their videos. What you'll see then is influencers from all over the place getting drawn to ICP to talk about it, because if they can get a paycheck from ICP, that gives them so much more money than what they're doing elsewhere. You'll essentially get all the mercenary crypto influencers who aren't getting paid by other coins, and they'll all flock to ICP.
And when that happens, it's done transparently through the Network Nervous System instead of through backhand mechanisms like secret payments. Some of these popular coins have fantastic secret, underhanded marketing where they're paying all kinds of channels to push their coin all the time, and none of it is transparent. Imagine having all of that transparent on ICP. And that only costs you one percent inflation.
The Return on One Percent
But how much price action will that lead to? I would estimate that consistently investing in marketing would create at least five percent at a minimum, if not ten percent or more, of consistent price appreciation on average. So you print one percent in new tokens, and on average, at a minimum, I believe you should get at least ten percent, if not twenty percent, in price appreciation in return. That is a 10X to 20X return on the investment, in my view. Then whenever the price does pump, the marketing funds get even bigger. Imagine the next time the price is back up toward $20. Instead of $16 million, there's $160 million to go around in marketing. Now you've got some serious funds available, and that can be invested in serious projects that could drive huge adoption. Then everybody all over the place is marketing ICP. And at that point, you could turn it down. We don't need that much, so we adjust it in the Network Nervous System and crank it down to half, $80 million, a half percent of the total supply.
This totally solves the problem where DFINITY should not be screwing around trying to market ICP. The blockchain itself is capable of doing that, unlike most other blockchains, and the blockchain itself is capable of handling all of it fully on chain.
How to Set It Up: Motion Proposal, Then a Fund
The way to start this off would be to make a motion proposal on the Network Nervous System and let the community vote on it. A lot of the closed-minded people in the community will probably just immediately vote no out of short-term selfish thinking: "We don't want any more supply to dilute my own." But most of the people who are serious about being in ICP for the long term, who understand how important marketing is, who've been complaining about it for years, will be in favor. Based on what I saw with my proposals in SNS communities, I think most of the people who have a lot of ICP are going to vote in favor of marketing. DFINITY could sit out the motion proposal and see what the community thinks. Then DFINITY could vote on the actual Network Nervous System proposal, or they could make the proposal themselves to say, okay, now we're going to start it.
You could accumulate it on average per day. Every day, the Network Nervous System would allocate one percent divided by 365, so over the year it would allocate the full amount to something kind of like the Neurons' Fund, but as a marketing fund. The marketing fund would just sit there and accumulate ICP, and then proposals could be made against it. DFINITY could, if they wanted to, shoot down a bunch of the crappy ones, because you would certainly have some spam and garbage proposals.
Maybe what you could do to filter it is give marketing proposals a higher cost to submit. You might have to spend something like 100 ICP to submit a marketing proposal, so that you'd stop all the freeloaders, spammers, and scammers from promising all this crap with marketing and submitting spam proposals all the time. You could set up a nice ICP burn that way. Someone like me, I'll drop 100 ICP to submit my proposal asking for 1,000 or 2,000 ICP for one month of my ICP videos. I'd absolutely do that. And then the marketing fund would build up every month, but it could work like the undistributed voting rewards, where until a proposal was successfully executed, the funds would just sit there. They'd be available.
I'd Be Auditing Every Marketing Proposal
I would be a very active voice in auditing all the marketing proposals. I am extremely skeptical of most people's marketing proposals, and I'm grateful I've got about half a percent of the entire ICP voting power on my neuron right now. I'd sit down and shoot most of the marketing proposals down as other people submitted them. Unless you're going to demonstrate some serious value you've already contributed, unless you're me, Bobby O, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero, Chris Yost, or James Allen, I'd vote no. I would love to give James Allen $10,000 to come back to ICP and start doing ICP videos. That would be some of the best money the Network Nervous System could spend. James, here's 5,000 ICP. Obviously he'd need to start making some videos showing that he left Kaspa and is coming back. James Allen, let's keep making more ICP videos.
I'd sit there and shoot down a lot of the garbage marketing proposals all day, because you'll have some guy coming in saying they're going to sponsor some stupid event, and they want 10,000 ICP to sponsor their dumb event when they've done nothing for ICP in the past. I'm going to vote no on that. So this would be very easy. The proposal mechanism itself would generate a lot of conversation, a lot of interest, a lot of free marketing. You'd have all kinds of people coming out of the woodwork all over the place trying to get some of that marketing money. It would be great organic conversation. The entire community would be stimulated.
Once you get those marketing proposals in place, there are many things that could be done. It wouldn't just have to be people like me putting videos out. It could also be someone who's built something and wants to market it. Developers could get paid through the marketing proposals as well. Those would have to be a lot more strict, though, because as we've seen with the ICP hubs, and as we've seen with a bunch of the SNS projects and a bunch of the other projects that got developer grants from DFINITY, those were mostly all wasted. But now with AI, you could give smaller amounts to people too. Imagine some hustler who built their own local social media platform. Why not give them a few hundred ICP to support them and thank them for building the platform? It would incentivize people to build things and show that they're being successful, and it would give people a place to show them off.
Paying Builders Back Through Marketing Proposals
For example, let's say somebody built a local social media platform on ICP, they got thousands of users, and they had ICP directly in it. Then they make a marketing proposal to essentially compensate them for the work they did on the app they built and to show it off. Why not? Maybe the marketing proposal costs 100 ICP to submit and they ask for 500 ICP in return. You give them 500 ICP as a thank you. Look, here's a real platform they made, with real people using it, hosted on ICP. You essentially just pay their bill for hosting it as a thank you. It could be a fantastic way to feature, generate, and showcase what's being built on ICP and who's talking about ICP.
I think this is the missing piece that we add in now. Obviously, government adoption, the things DFINITY's doing, and their announcements can certainly help also. But in my view you're going to be stuck with easy price manipulation, and marketing is going to continue being a sticking point for the foreseeable future, until you get such huge adoption from something like governments and corporations, or just entrepreneurs who build successful businesses. The marketing could basically speed up the timeline, where otherwise we could be stuck for years as governments slowly build things and corporations slowly transfer over. And if the marketing was no longer needed at some point, you could always remove it. I think almost everybody would agree we need marketing right now. But if ICP gets so big in the future, you could always turn it down or turn it off. So this, to me, would be something the community would be fantastically excited about. I see very little to lose by going forward with it and a lot to gain.
I'd Love Your Feedback
If you want to give me feedback on this, the best place to do it is to go to jerrybanfield.com and join my chat, where you can get lifetime access. You can pay with a card or with ICP, and you can join us in the chat and share anything you want there.
I also have a Skool community where you can post and direct message me, and I have one-on-one Zoom calls.
If you want to sponsor a crypto video and share your project with me on my channels, I've got that option up. If you want to talk to me whenever I'm available as soon as possible, I've got that option as well.
A huge thank you to everybody on the leaderboard in the first couple of weeks since I built jerrybanfield.com fully on ICP. I show this off because it is generating cycle burn every single day, which you have to burn ICP to get. Thank you to the number one supporter, who just came through yesterday, bought the lifetime chat, then bought 10 minutes to talk, then bought another hour after that to talk. I'm very grateful for all the supporters on the leaderboard helping me continue doing this on close to a volunteer basis, since besides this I make a few hundred dollars a month in ad revenue.
So I am prepared to receive some money from the Network Nervous System, and I would prefer to get it from the Network Nervous System because I'm serving the Network Nervous System. I'm doing a lot for it, and it should do something for me. It should support me because it's in its best interest. I'd love to get a check from the Network Nervous System every month along with those of you on my website, because, real talk, I need to make thousands and thousands of dollars a month in order to be able to do this. Otherwise, I need to go get a job, move in with my mom, and make no more ICP videos, just like last year. So it's up to you. What are you going to do?
If anyone makes a proposal or would like to talk with me about me submitting the proposal, join my chat, schedule a call, and talk to me about that.
I've also got tips that you can drop as a one-time thing.
Thank you for reading. You can follow the whole story of this proposal and everything else I'm doing on the Internet Computer in my ICP Crypto playlist, and I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com.