Internet Computer Protocol just rapidly pumped up to over $3, and excitement in the community reached much higher levels than when DFINITY made a huge announcement. And yet, look what happens. Immediately, the pump goes right back down.
I'm grateful I can create more honest ICP content now, because I sold 3,400 of my ICP yesterday, and I have 3,456 more that I may be selling or doing something with, at least part of it, although I'm going to continue holding this ICP indefinitely. So I very much believe in ICP. I'm going to continue creating ICP content, but I will not be marketing ICP for free anymore and just talking about what's good about ICP. We need to face the reality in ICP: yes, we have the best technology in the world. Yes, we have the largest research and development team in the world with brilliant people behind it. And yes, this is the truth and the way. But there are huge people, companies, and blockchains, so many people, that have every incentive in the world to crush ICP, and they have every tool at their disposal to do so.
Why every ICP pump gets stepped on
At this point, to me, it's unrealistic to expect that when ICP pumps, the pressure to crush it is not going to immediately step in. As soon as someone sees the price moving, there's probably automation set up so that when the ICP price goes up a certain amount, there's a certain amount of time where it's like, okay, let's make sure that it's peaked temporarily. All right, step on it and crush it again.
Because imagine this. Imagine you woke up and ICP got its rightful place up at number one, number two, or number three, because the technology ICP has makes all the rest of this look like junk. Imagine somebody researches ICP and realizes that when you have ICP, you can just go into the Network Nervous System and earn an 8, 6, or 7 percent APR, whatever it is, and that holding Bitcoin looks kind of useless next to ICP. Holding Ethereum with its outdated technology, and all these layer twos extracting all its value on Ethereum while capitalizing on the branding, is useless next to ICP. XRP is utterly useless next to even things like Ethereum and Solana. Why would you have Solana once you understand ICP? Hyperliquid? DFINITY just built a better version with AI. I mean, it looks to me to be better because it's actually run fully on chain and able to be owned by the Network Nervous System. That's better than something that says it's a decentralized exchange like Hyperliquid but actually is truly centralized in all the places that matter.
Imagine people suddenly learning all these things. Like when Charles Hoskinson is out here talking about all this stuff Cardano Midnight can do, and they realize he's just blustering and it can't do any of that stuff with AI. He's pointing out real problems and then acting like Cardano solves them, and it doesn't. Imagine when people realize what this whole space is. I mean, ordinary people do realize this, but people in crypto for some reason don't. This entire space, like Bittensor TAO out here saying, oh, we're doing amazing things with AI. No, you're just having AI outputs from other sources like ChatGPT rated and then subsidized with Bittensor TAO. Utterly useless, completely useless. No reason to do that. No reason not to use centralized tech versus Bittensor TAO. I mean, absolutely ridiculous. The Trump family launches World Liberty Financial to rug people.
And then imagine if Internet Computer surges above these and everybody starts to realize what crap the rest of this space is. Do you see how many people lose how much money by having that happen? I've been a bit naive thinking that the truth will set people free. Well, there are too many people that need to know the truth. And there are too many people with huge amounts of money that can just sit there and use financial leverage, doing things like taking out a ridiculous amount of longs and then intentionally putting in a huge ICP sell order all at once to crush the price. That can be done practically infinitely, because the average person only cares about price.
The average person only looks at the chart
The average person looks at a chart like this and won't even look into ICP. Then the average person sees on the chart that, yes, we have had some steady upside over the last three months, which has been nice. But what you'll notice is that anytime there's a nice ICP pump, when maybe somebody did get into this and get it, it just gets crushed. And every single time there's an ICP pump, there's every single incentive for people to spend tens of millions of dollars if they need to, to crush the price.
Do you understand how easy it is to use a relatively small amount of money to artificially inflate the price and crash it? Right here on the chart, this might have been some genuine buying power and some shorts getting liquidated or something. But all you have to do right here is sell a few million dollars of ICP consistently and repeatedly, take out a bunch of longs against it, and then liquidate all those to cascade-crash the price down and down and down. When we're in ICP, what we're up against is people that have billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, that are dependent on people not knowing about ICP, on people being easy and extractable and not knowing what's happening and being confused, and investing in things like Hunter Biden's laptop, which just got to an insane valuation off of a relatively tiny amount of volume, hundreds of millions of dollars, and then crashed and rugged everybody right away, down 97 percent already after this guy goes and does a tour in these different places. Things like Ponzi schemes just being celebrated and pumping on Robinhood.
I even got into degen meme coins on Robinhood myself for a little bit. Some of these top gainers are ones that I was just providing liquidity in. So I'm trying to figure out in my MaxFi portfolio what I can do to make money myself while having any kind of integrity. And you've got to realize that in this crypto space, for most of the people who are in positions of power, the number one goal is making money.
I could afford morals when my wife had a six-figure job
I've got to acknowledge my position. Some people have been very critical, because I don't want to just sit here and hold ICP indefinitely while I watch all the other crypto creators around me make a whole bunch of money, while I watch all kinds of people like the Trump family and the Biden family just printing money themselves launching meme coins, and I'm sitting here trying to have ethics and values.
You see, that worked when I had a wife with a six-figure job that I helped do everything so she could get. I made time, helped her believe, helped her negotiate her salary, showed her what it looked like to make money online for years so that she could have confidence and get past her own things to apply to all these remote jobs. Then I helped encourage her and asked her to negotiate for tens of thousands of dollars more in her salary. I did everything to set my wife up at the time to get a six-figure job, so that I could then afford to have morals in crypto, play the long game, and just talk ICP.
But then the wife gets the six-figure job and decides, after me paying the bills for most of our time together, that me going on my ethics and values is not paying the bills that much anymore. She figures she could have some boyfriend she'd be more attracted to, doesn't really need me to parent the kids that much, and she gets rid of me. Now I'm on my own here. I've got $2,700 a month in rent, and now I've got debt payments.
Guys, I am not just going to sit in ICP and hope things go up anymore. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if this will ever change. Because this ICP, the tech, I believe in it. I love the tech. And yet my number one goal has got to be making money at this point.
DFINITY's attitude toward paying content creators
And then there's DFINITY's bad attitude about paying content creators. Pierre was following me on ICP and supporting me while I'm shilling ICP every single day. Then Pierre unfollows me when I say that I want to get paid and that we need to talk about the things that are happening with the ICP marketing. Pierre unfollows me and never reaches out to me when we have this whole conversation about content creators, even though I've brought a huge amount of people into the ICP community. Guys, that's a bad sign. That is a bad sign. I hope we can overcome the situation we're in, and I hope that DFINITY is able to prevail in this environment.
But at this point, it'd be hard for me to recommend anybody going all in on ICP. It's hard to even recommend anybody buy ICP. They can't stomach years of potentially watching all this other crap like Hunter Biden's laptop fly off and print all this money while everybody sits there and the ICP price just gets crushed again and again and again. I did not account for how all the negative forces, so to speak, in the world that don't want progress have huge amounts of money set up to stop it. ICP is not going to pop off until they're ready for it. And if I'm them, I'm going to take as much as I can from everybody until the technology is absolutely essential.
What if Google or Amazon builds their own ICP?
The other possibility is that perhaps there's some big company that's working on their own version of ICP, and all they need to do is crush ICP until they come out with their own version of it. Picture Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon coming out with their own secure blockchain-based hosting technology. ICP is not inevitable. It is useful, and I think it's going to consistently have a place in the future. Ironically, if a big company like Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon came out with their own blockchain-based hosting like ICP, that actually could be insanely bullish for ICP, because it could draw attention to the fact that this is similar to ICP's technology. Or if there's an AI company that partners with ICP or something, there are a lot of bullish things that can happen for ICP in the future.
However, there are so many ways that this is going to stay suppressed just the way it is indefinitely. We could get some price appreciation over time, but there's every incentive for so many people to just spend money. You might think, who's going to spend $50 million to keep the price of ICP down? Who's going to spend $100 million? The way I see it, you can just buy a low price for ICP. All you have to do whenever the price pumps is take a little action, and it doesn't take much. You'll see it in some of the other cryptos that have been insanely manipulated: if you can prepare to buy at the right time, you can artificially manipulate the price up. XRP is a perfect example of this.
How XRP-style manipulation works against ICP
If you can prepare to buy a lot and combine it with a narrative, like XRP going up from 50 cents to $2, there's no actual substance that the blockchain did. It's literally just paying to market it, and then you can keep the price there for quite a while before it comes back to where it ought to be. Then all you have to do is another one of these manufactured buying things where you get the price to go up 50 percent in just a few days, and the price will just kind of stay there for a while.
The same thing can be done against ICP. Anytime the price pumps, you can intentionally sell a whole bunch and try to crash the price on purpose. As long as you have enough money that you can afford to take, say, a hundred thousand ICP and dump all of them at the same time, which only costs a few hundred thousand dollars to do, then you can always rebuy it when the price is lower, load up again, and dump all of it at the same time to crash it again.
So unfortunately, to me, it's unrealistic. Anybody that's still very hyped about ICP needs to explain how exactly we are going to get out of this. How are we going to get out of where, for example, on June 3 the price is $3.10, and then a couple of days later it's $2.30? This is the manipulation I'm talking about. All you need to do is be willing to take a few million dollars and dump all that ICP at once, and you can make the price do this over and over and over again. Especially when you combine taking some liquid ICP with taking some longs and liquidating those, you just get a price crash. So I don't see how the ICP price gets past this, when every single time it pumps there's every incentive to just use a few million dollars against it.
Exchanges could crush ICP nearly for free
And you know what's crazy? If exchanges were in on this, the exchanges could actually do this nearly for free. They could just sell ICP they don't have when the price goes up. They could sell extra ICP when the price goes up. So let's picture this. If even one exchange is in on this, and clearly somebody at some exchange somewhere is in on rigging the price, then that's not a good sign. If even one exchange is willing to do this, let's say the ICP price pumps and people are getting excited and buying. Then the exchange could just fake-sell a bunch of ICP they don't even have. That would suppress the upward movement on the ICP price. Then they literally take the money they made from selling ICP they don't have, and they can sell several hundred thousand ICP all at once to crush the price downwards. Then all the people who just bought ICP higher are literally going to sell it back cheaper. The exchange can crush the price of ICP and not even hardly spend any money to do it.
And exchanges have every reason to crush ICP. Exchanges have a ton of money to lose if people stop trading and just get into ICP and sit there and stake on the Network Nervous System. Exchanges are one of the biggest losers in that equation. So it's naive to think that somebody from some exchange, at least some exchange with a lot of ICP on it, is not going to do this. And if one exchange has that happening, then the prices of ICP on all the exchanges will come crashing down with it from arbitrage. Even if only one exchange is able to manipulate the price like that and crash it down, the arbitrage means all kinds of selling pressure will immediately hit all the other exchanges who potentially aren't even participating in that.
So ICP has some big, big enemies. Dominic's making it clear that people are attacking ICP with bots. Yeah, ICP has big enemies, and they're going to go after ICP from every single angle, whether it's launching SNS projects and ripping people off on them, whether it's crushing the price through manipulation, whether it's censoring coverage on ICP, or whether it's attacking the network with bots and looking for exploits. And if they do find an exploit anywhere, then the price could get even worse than it is today.
My first priority in crypto is making money now too
That said, I'm still going to hold a little less than half of my ICP, but I'm going to be looking to take $15,000 somewhere else and see how much money I can make with it, because I need to pay my bills. This is what I do professionally, and I'm not just going to sit here and talk ethics and be broke and be living with my mom and then try to date as a broke guy. All right, it's time. Almost everybody in crypto, almost everybody on the inside, has making money as their first priority. So I'm just going to be honest: my first priority in crypto is to make money now too. I'm going to try to find the best way to do that and be transparent about it, but ICP is clearly not the best opportunity to make money in crypto. And many of the people in the ICP ecosystem have just been extracting and using ICP to make money on all their projects as well. Almost nobody has any virtue in this whole equation at all, but somehow maybe we'll all make it work out.
If you want the best experience, I'm now live streaming on YouTube on my Jerry Banfield channel. We had an amazing live stream yesterday that was really lit. I also have my Jerry Banfield Games channel that I live stream on, where I do some gaming videos. Every ICP video I've made, from the years of shilling it to this honest turn, is in my ICP Crypto playlist. It's time to face the truth of the ICP.