August could be a big month for Internet Computer Protocol. For those of you wondering when things are happening with ICP — "I don't see any announcements, what's going on with the price?" — let me show you the things I watch. Are there significant, real developments happening? Because those are the signs that will be out there before the price moves.
July Delivered: Pierre's Watch List
I love this post from Pierre talking about all the July watch list items that were delivered. When I have calls with people on jerrybanfield.com and they're panicking about the price, ready to lose hope in ICP, I tell them these are the things to be watching, because these are laying the foundation for future price action and they indicate big, important things are happening.
Here's an overview of what happened in July with ICP: new branding, a business subscription plan, and a Claude connector on Caffeine. I'm going to do a future video about how big a deal Caffeine AI's building alone is on ICP. There's OISY, an incredible wallet app where you can now borrow and hold all your different coins — Bitcoin, Ethereum — straight on the ICP blockchain. There's MultiDex. The amount of things happening on ICP is just crazy right now, and you could have several of them hit all at once.
Hyperliquid is a tens-of-billions-of-dollars market cap, and it's a huge deal that DFINITY just used AI to spin up their own open-source version straight on ICP — and they've got game mode live now. I tested it. That is just one single thing happening on ICP that could be huge.
No Single Point of Failure
Somebody in a call that was scheduled on my website recently said, "Well, if cloud engines fail, it's over for ICP." First off, it looks like DFINITY has been working on getting the game on ICP through a basic cloud engine setup called Utopia before, now rebranded and adjusted into cloud engines. But more to the point: there's not any one thing on ICP that's going to fail and bring all this down, because there's so much happening. The infrastructure has so many use cases. Cloud engines are one thing — and general availability is coming soon for cloud engines, which is a huge deal for massive scalability and utility on ICP.
Then there's the ICP MCP beta: one agent, every app. AI agents can now act across ICP apps with no app hosting needed. Claude is already playing on-chain games with it. There is so much happening on ICP, and what's magical is that there's not just one narrative. While other blockchains are trying to specialize and find a way they can survive in the future, ICP is a blockchain everything singularity. I'm seeing all this firsthand from using it, not from having to listen to others — I'll show you that in a minute.
Real Usage, Real Burn
According to cloud engines, ICP is a blockchain that can survive into the future. To the facts: it's the number two most active chain today, and by far number one in terms of delivering real-world value to everybody. Solana is just sending a bunch of vote transactions to basically inflate the transaction count across the network, plus meme coin trading bots. ICP is serving websites and hosting tens of terabytes of data on chain. Combine that with the inflation reduction — and the new Network Nervous System is awesome.
Then there are little lines like this: a sovereign chat app pilot in Pakistan. I'm going to do a whole video on this later. When partnerships are announced on these other coins, they don't matter that much, because it's very difficult for the value from the partnership to actually accumulate toward the blockchain's token. You can have huge amounts of value transferred — stablecoin payments, real-world assets on chain — on most of these other coins, but because there's no substantial payment for things like computation, the token itself barely benefits. XRP only burns a few hundred dollars a day in total, and it's a sixty-some-billion-dollar not-fully-diluted market cap. Even if you 100x the usage on XRP, you still would only get the token burn and actual XRP utility up to tens of thousands of dollars a day.
Now take something like that sovereign chat app pilot in Pakistan. If something like that goes live, you could be looking at tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in ICP that needs to be bought and burned to pay for the hosting of the app. That's because everything else in crypto is dumping all the hosting off chain, which means the token itself is not actually getting bought and burned to pay for the real work behind whatever it's doing. When you have chat apps like this in Pakistan, the amount of value that can accumulate to ICP is massive from even one project, because the computation — the hosting — is the most expensive part of the equation, and nothing else in crypto has that.
And it's not going to be just one thing. Something like this could 10x or even 100x the burn rate on ICP. Cloud engines are another way to do that. Then you have something like MultiDex — because the hosting is on chain, MultiDex could crank the cycle burn rate up 5 or 10 times, or just consistently scale it up. More cycles burned means more ICP needs to be bought, and the lower the price of ICP goes, the more the cycle burn matters. That means ICP has a bit of a price floor that nothing else has.
The Powder Keg
Finally, Pierre's last item: a special announcement, signed and sealed, under PR embargo until mid-August. It's worth the wait. Now, some of you have complained to me in calls, saying, "Well Jerry, none of these announcements have mattered" — none of them have mattered in terms of immediate price action. But what you need is a powder keg: a whole bunch of pressure that builds until at some point you see a price explosion.
Unlike many other coins over the last year, ICP had a brief breakout where the price blew up 3x in just a week. Most other cryptos did not have the price shoot up within a week like that. And keep in mind, nothing actually happened there — I'm not saying there was some big announcement. Nothing big went down. ICP is so suppressed and so small, with so many big things happening, that it can move any time. There was no warning before that breakout either. The price had dropped from around ten, it was just all down, and then all of a sudden it shot up. No warning, no reason, no announcement — it just suddenly shot up.
So ICP is building one of the biggest powder kegs I've ever seen, with so many incredible things happening. This is the stuff I look at: what is PR posting, what is Dominic Williams posting? These are the things to watch, because the price will come after this stuff, and there are little warnings. This announcement could come and the price could go up 2x, 3x, 5x — or it could not move. It doesn't matter, because there are so many things in motion.
I used to have a gambling addiction, and I quit going to the casino because I felt like every time I sat down, the game was rigged against me — which is a fact. Being in ICP today feels like the game is rigged in my favor. All I have to do is be patient. There are so many exciting things happening on ICP. Just the OISY wallet alone would be enough narrative to get some of these other coins in the crypto matrix pushed up to a bigger market cap than ICP — just a wallet, with all that functionality built in. And Caffeine — I'm going to do a separate video on what a big deal all the Caffeine building is.
I'm going to keep watching this — this is what to watch, not the price. The reason to look at the price is: can I buy more? And I'm looking, thinking I might need to grab some more, because once the price goes up, I'm not going to be able to accumulate anymore. I'm not buying at three, four, five, six, seven — which is funny, because everybody else would be buying at those prices, but not me. I want to get loaded at the bottom and then have enough where I just hold on indefinitely.
I Built My Website on ICP — and You Can Use It Today
I appreciate you watching this, and to take it to the next level: the big difference between ICP and all these others is that with the others, you always have to take somebody's word for it. I had a guy earlier today schedule a call with me on my website — and my website is built directly on ICP. I have functionality where I can just click a button and you can talk to me nearly instantly. This guy paid, and three minutes later I messaged him on WhatsApp, and he was ready three minutes after that. So six or seven minutes after he paid, he was talking to me face to face on WhatsApp. I'm not sure how I would build this functionality with anything else — I used Claude Fable and AI to build it.
He paid directly with a card, but you can also pay with ICP, and there's an option for 30 minutes. There's the Skool community, and there's the chat community where you can go in and chat with me. I'm firsthand building this and using this. I don't need OpenChat anymore — I've got my own chat directly on my website that you can buy with a credit card or buy with ICP. This technology is a huge deal. This is not some little thing, some minor improvement, some speculative "I hope it becomes something someday." This technology is a huge deal, and I'm just early — I'm always early.
The guy talking to me today said, "I want to build something with Claude on ICP." I said good — just ask Claude how to do it, and it will tell you how to do it. You don't need a tutorial from me, no screenshots. Tell Claude what you want to do and it will tell you exactly how to do it. This is incredible. All the friction is taken out, and all the haters are proven wrong — this tech is game changing.
I just decided one day that I wanted to build in a tip leaderboard, where you can tip 5, 10, or 25, and when the bigger tips come in I'll add more. There's a tip wall where you can send a message. I built this in Claude — it took like 10 or 20 minutes — and it's live, with a leaderboard. Then there's a story section where I can put anything I want. This tech is so good, and there are so many people and governments already looking at it and already using it. It's just going to keep growing from here, getting bigger and bigger.
These are seeds that could grow into a huge oak tree someday. When the price is huge someday, you'll be able to look back and say these were the signs of what was coming. You just have to be patient, be ready, and use the technology yourself until then. If you want to follow along as each of these stories develops, I cover them all in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Thanks for watching — I would love to talk with you and chat with you at jerrybanfield.com. When you're on my website, you are using ICP blockchain technology yourself. You don't have to speculate: you use my website, it all works, and you realize this guy built it with AI on ICP. It would have cost me ten or twenty thousand dollars to pay a developer to do the same thing. This AI plus ICP combination is a game changer.