My friends, you're about to experience an in-depth comparison of Internet Computer Protocol, which to me is the world's leading world computer, against a bunch of the other distributed computing platforms: Filecoin, Render, Bittensor TAO, Theta Network, Arweave (especially Arweave AO), MultiversX, Akash Network, BitTorrent, Helium, and more. We're not going to cover anything below that tier, but I'll give you my honest thoughts on all of these networks because so many of you have been asking for it, and comparing things side by side is what helps you make smarter decisions with your own money.
First, it's important to make my position clear. I am all in on Internet Computer. I've been in crypto for more than 10 years now, and I've spent thousands and thousands of hours, somewhere around 10,000 hours, researching cryptos, buying, selling, and trading. I've lived through a lot of bull markets and bear markets. Here's what I've found: Internet Computer Protocol is the best technology I have ever seen, by far. To me there is nothing close. So whenever you listen to someone, it's important to see where their money is, because of confirmation bias. A lot of crypto is simply paid marketing and lies wrapped in confirmation bias. I did a ton of research before putting my money into Internet Computer, because I'd been burned so many times and made so many bad investments before. Everything below is my opinion and my own experience, not financial advice.
What makes Internet Computer special: everything fully on chain
What makes Internet Computer really special is that, out of all these distributed computing platforms, Internet Computer is the only thing in the world you can use to build things fully on chain. For example, DFINITY has released some apps on Internet Computer Protocol. There's an application called DocuTrack, a decentralized document-sharing application developed in collaboration with a Swiss bank that had been struggling to find a secure way to share encrypted documents using cryptography. This use case is a perfect example of how Internet Computer is solving real-world problems, and it's something hardly anything else in crypto is doing: actually building a technological foundation where you can build something like DocuTrack. That single app could bring a lot of users onto ICP and gives enterprises a clear reason to pick it up and then expand into the ecosystem.
So what makes ICP special? It's the only platform where you can build everything fully on chain. Now, some of you are thinking, "Well, why does building things fully on chain even matter?" And others of you are thinking, "Wait, the crypto I'm invested in is not fully on chain?" What most people in crypto don't know is that everything except Internet Computer Protocol is mostly built off chain. In other words, all the ways you actually access it are off chain, which means most of crypto is not actually decentralized in any meaningful way when it comes to how you use it. For example, when you use an exchange that's not decentralized, even if it calls itself a decentralized exchange, it's still not.
"On chain is the new online"
Meanwhile, the CEO of Coinbase, who you'd imagine is in a pretty good position to know things in crypto, says that on chain is the new online. That's a big deal coming from him. And the only technology in the world where you can build things fully on chain at scale is Internet Computer. All these other distributed computing platforms flat out do not build things fully on chain, and this is my biggest critique of all of them.
Take Filecoin. The data is not stored on chain, and storing data is extremely cheap on Amazon Web Services already. I'd argue Filecoin isn't really needed, because if you want to store a bunch of data at a really low cost, Amazon already does a great job of that. Take Render. Render is a marketplace for AI computation and graphics using graphics cards. You can do lots of stuff with it, but it's a marketplace and everything is off chain. The machines themselves don't run anything on chain. Same critique as Filecoin: if you want to run a huge AI model and use a lot of computation, there are already great centralized solutions for that. So both Filecoin and Render are competing with big centralized tech, and while they say they're building something decentralized, because it's not on chain it isn't really decentralized either. You've got a small core team controlling the key aspects of how everything works, you have a coin on a blockchain that basically isn't that important, and all the genuinely important stuff is not controlled by the coin, which to me makes it inherently close to worthless.
Then you come over to Bittensor TAO. If you go look at the documentation, which honestly, how many of you doing your research actually read the basic stuff? You'd be amazed how many don't. If you do, that's good, but pay attention, because it says right there that all the tools required for validating the subnet mechanisms remain off chain. So for everyone who's been hyped up about Bittensor TAO, this is more of the same in crypto. It is not fundamental innovation. It is not pushing into the future of "on chain is the new online" the way ICP is. Go down to Theta Network and it's the same issue: all the stuff is built off chain, and then there's a little token.
Arweave AO looks incredibly speculative to me
Now, some of you have gotten very hyped up about Arweave AO. Some people have written that this is the future, but I don't believe it is, and when I compare it to Internet Computer it looks incredibly weak and speculative to me. If you read the news release, Arweave released a testnet for an "absurdly scalable compute layer designed for social media and AI." Let's break that down. One, it's a public testnet. It is not a real working platform. Maybe they'll get it working fully, maybe they won't. The team makes a lofty claim that it's more scalable than any existing blockchain, but that's yet to be seen, and that's the problem with most of crypto: nearly everything is yet to be seen. Internet Computer has something actually running right now that you can use. The capacity of the network is far greater than what's currently being used, and you can easily expand it indefinitely by adding more nodes, which they've already done a lot of.
How does Arweave AO work? First you need to understand that Arweave right now is a decentralized data storage platform, but again, the data is not actually stored directly on chain. Where is the data stored? How is it stored? How do you even access it? The data is not stored directly in smart contracts that you can execute and run fully on chain like on ICP. Arweave AO is planning to split up the different parts of running a kind of world computer, slicing it into modular components and comparing itself to things like Aptos and Sui, most of which have almost no data actually on chain. And because they're not comparing it to Internet Computer, that tells me you're not going to be able to run the majority of your applications on chain. It would be more like a decentralized computation network, something like Render where the stuff actually running it isn't even on chain. I think it's ridiculous to claim something like this is an Ethereum killer when, to me, it looks like a computation platform that isn't even going to be fully on chain. And if it's not on chain, if it's not running smart contracts and data in canisters the way Internet Computer is, then you might as well just build on Amazon Web Services, because it's not going to have the security properties Internet Computer does. So Arweave AO, at this point, looks incredibly speculative to me.
Always check the team behind the project
If you look at Arweave AO and try to find the team behind it, go ahead and Google "Arweave team." If you look at "Meet Arweave," they tell you the Arweave network is like Bitcoin. Yeah, Bitcoin was the first to make a major technological innovation, and it's been very slow to adapt and upgrade, and it's difficult to even find good information on exactly who the founder was. There are very few obvious team members. That's why I don't hold any Bitcoin. So who is the actual group of people working on Arweave?
Now look up "Internet Computer team" and you immediately run into the DFINITY Foundation, a major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain. DFINITY is the largest research and development team in blockchain. Look at the founder, Dominic Williams, and you can find hours and hours of information about him, hours of video of Dominic explaining his vision of the future. When you listen to him, you realize he has one of the best, most advanced visions of the future I've ever seen in crypto, and he's actually executing it. DFINITY has the largest R&D team in blockchain with huge amounts of money, a big team of engineers and technical staff, because if you want to make a true breakthrough you need a team of exceptionally talented people all working together.
One of the things Dominic said is that if you want to review a cryptocurrency, you should start by looking at the team: how many engineers and technical staff, how many people with PhDs in programming and data science, how much real engineering talent is actually doing the work to make the product successful. We know that some of the most valuable companies in the world, like Apple, Google, and Amazon, built massive teams of thousands of engineers who created technology that changed the world, from buying things on Amazon every day to the iPhones and computers we use. Out of everyone in crypto, DFINITY has the largest team of engineers assembled, all working on improving the protocol itself. So when you consider these other platforms, ask what kind of team is actually engineering them, especially relative to their market cap. One way to check development activity is to look at a recent sentiment post ranking crypto's top projects by notable GitHub activity. If you want to go deeper on how I evaluate any of these projects, I keep these conversations going inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
DFINITY ranks number one in real building
You'll notice that DFINITY is number one above everybody else in crypto, which makes sense because they have the largest team and they're working on so many technological advancements at once. Internet Computer Protocol ranks number one in notable GitHub activity, above Cardano, Polkadot, Kusama, and Optimism, all of which have much bigger market caps. It even has more development activity than Cosmos, Ethereum, Sui, and Hedera. So this is one metric showing that the team on Internet Computer is doing a lot of real building, and not just shipping busywork, but building major technological advancements no one else has.
Look at this first: a Bitcoin and an Ethereum layer 2 on the same infrastructure. This is such a huge breakthrough, and hardly anyone outside the ICP ecosystem is even comprehending it. I've used the analogy before that if you watched the show Friends, there were two characters you were always wondering if they'd get together. They lived in separate worlds, bumped into each other, talked a little. Spoiler alert, they finally get together at the end of the show. Bitcoin and Ethereum have been a lot like that. They're two of the top cryptocurrencies, but because their technology is old and doesn't talk to each other directly, layer 2s have come out to expand what the networks can do. No one else has built a layer 2 for both of them on the same infrastructure. Right now there's no better way to get Bitcoin and Ethereum interoperability than Internet Computer.
This alone demonstrates so much. The DFINITY team made Bitcoin and Ethereum layer 2s with non-custodial holding, where the private keys are sharded among many different nodes that rotate. They created chain-key cryptography. The technology to do this literally didn't exist, so they invented it. They made breakthrough after breakthrough in cryptography to make it possible. Their technology is actually working and pulling off the biggest deal I've ever seen in crypto. Meanwhile, all of these other projects are extremely speculative and they have competition. Filecoin competes directly with Amazon Web Services, whereas with Internet Computer there's nothing else. There's no other crypto with a Bitcoin and an Ethereum layer 2 on it. There's no other crypto where you can build everything fully on chain. There's no other way in the world I know of right now to build an open-source alternative to traditional document sharing, fully on chain and secured with cryptography. That's where Internet Computer has no competition, and where there's no competition is exactly where I like to invest.
The hot sister in crypto
Think about it this way. If I'm building an app and deciding whether to put my data on Filecoin or just stick it on Amazon Web Services, most people would just use the bigger, cheaper solution. Do I want to use the Render network and the Render token, or just run on existing centralized AI compute? Yes, both have uses, and we can easily live in a world of abundance where all of these succeed. But the question is which one is the clear outlier and the best opportunity today, and which ones are not even priced accurately. To me, most of these are greatly speculative and overvalued, except Internet Computer, which looks greatly undervalued.
Many of the crypto reviewers covering all these technologies intentionally do not talk about Internet Computer, because if they mention it and you find out about it, you'll see how good it is relative to everything else. Internet Computer is an outlier. Yes, some of these others have made much bigger price gains, and in many cases that's because they're paying huge amounts of money to get people to talk about them. I'll use the hot sister analogy again: Internet Computer is the hot sister in crypto. I had a friend, and I knew he had a brother, but for years he hid the fact that he had three hot sisters. He didn't tell me about any of them until I was already dating my wife, and then suddenly he tells me about all the sisters. That's crypto. Internet Computer is so good that, especially at the highest levels, it keeps getting hidden, because once you find out about it you're not going to want the rest of this stuff. Once you can see that on chain is the new online, and that on chain only really exists on Internet Computer, everything else starts to look different. I share a lot more of this in my ICP Crypto playlist, and I've made the same case in why crypto market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real.
Where are the teams? Arweave, Bittensor, and Filecoin
Let's check the teams for some of these. When you search "Internet Computer team," you immediately get the DFINITY Foundation, which takes you to the website I showed you, full of engineers with names, photos, and qualifications. Now do the same thing for Arweave. Search "Arweave team" and it goes to the Arweave site, but there's nothing about the team. I don't trust anything that leans on a Bitcoin analogy, because Bitcoin is 15 years old, it does about seven transactions per second, and the fees can be $10 or more just to send it, which makes it unusable for everyday use. So where's the Arweave team? I just want to know which people are actually working on Arweave when there's all this hype about Arweave AO and the token price is pumped. Can someone please just show me the team? There's a list of employees on LinkedIn, but I don't use LinkedIn because I don't use social networks that are purely a waste of my time. Check Messari, and you still don't see who's behind this. There's not one page that the Arweave team has put out giving you the equivalent of what Internet Computer offers, with pictures and qualifications. That's untrustworthy to me, and unfortunately it's how a lot of crypto operates. A lot of you tolerate investing in things with no transparency. The number one thing you should know when investing in a project is which people are doing the engineering and the planning. What kind of talent is behind the money you're putting in? Would people have bought Apple stock without Steve Jobs and the team around him? It's nuts what people put up with in crypto.
Look at Bittensor TAO. Same story. This is why I gave Bittensor TAO a brutal review when it was a tenth of the price, because I was already aware of all this. Look at the fully diluted market cap on Bittensor TAO: around 15 billion. Look at the fully diluted market cap on Internet Computer: about half of that. This is what's wrong with crypto. People are buying things they don't understand, holding them on exchanges, and they haven't done their research at all. Don't be like that. Bittensor has a long "about" page, but where's the team they keep talking about? Google has an AI team and a storage team with real names. Bittensor tells you it has an AI team, but who's on it? Can you picture being a fan of a basketball or football team and not knowing who's on the team? On their about page, they do not list their team. That is incredibly untrustworthy. Bittensor was built for developers primarily, well, who built it? If you want to learn about Internet Computer, the site has all kinds of links and depth. One thing that stood out to me researching Internet Computer was the sheer depth of information on their site. With these other cryptos, there's not much reality to them. On top of that, Bittensor shows around 69,000 active accounts on a fully diluted market cap of $15 billion. That's so overhyped it's disgusting to me, because people are getting ripped off.
Now Filecoin. Search "Filecoin team" and you get the Filecoin Foundation. Filecoin actually does have a few people listed: a board of directors and a group of advisors. But who are the engineers? As Dominic Williams said, where are the engineers actually working on the product? You have a board of directors, advisors, officers, and staff, but where are the engineers? Notice how DFINITY shows you all these engineers and technical staff. Dominic's point is that appraising a project can be this simple: look at the engineers and technical staff actually doing the engineering, because that's what's difficult and expensive to put together. It's very easy to launch a coin, do a little marketing, and pay people with an audience like me to talk about it. It's very difficult and very expensive to assemble a team with real talent. And even where some of these others do have talent, they're not being transparent about it.
There's room for many projects, but I pick the outlier
Here's another thing for the people saying Arweave AO is going to end ICP. There's room for many of these projects to coexist. Kyle from DFINITY made a great response to a toxic post that was putting ICP down while promoting Arweave AO, and he said exactly what I've been saying: ICP has been swimming in its own lane. There's nothing else currently doing what Internet Computer is doing, and it's been doing it for years. Internet Computer does not need to win every single category. It's one of the only things that's in almost every category, and there's plenty of room for Arweave AO to be successful alongside it. There's room for many different distributed computing platforms to succeed.
That said, I don't think MultiversX belongs in the conversation. To me it's a layer 1 with terrible technology that was branded to basically rip people off. Some of these are better than others, and MultiversX is the weakest one in distributed computing in my view, because in simplest terms it's kind of a copy of Ethereum. There's almost nothing actually on the chain, everything's off chain, and it markets itself like it's some new technology when the technology is garbage. You can't do much of anything on chain. As Kyle put it right after that exchange, ICP is not meant to replace all chains, it's meant to amplify all chains. To me that's a really smart thing to be invested in, because ICP is the best scaling solution in the world right now for both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The better Bitcoin and Ethereum do, the more they need ICP. There's nothing else with that functionality and that engineering talent behind it. These other projects are not producing technology that's truly unmatched. Even if Arweave AO succeeds at letting people run something like a social network, there are already plenty of things you could use to run a social network.
In fact, many of these crypto projects build apps "on" some other chain, and then the whole app, all the pictures and videos, is hosted on Amazon or a similar centralized solution, often called IPFS in the process but actually resolving back to some Amazon node. Then they just have a token, and you make your account, hold the token and a little bit of other data on the chain, and everything else is off chain. There's already infrastructure that does that very well. So even if Arweave gets AO running successfully, do you really need it over an existing solution? Internet Computer, by contrast, stands alone. To me the most intelligent thing to do, in terms of crypto, is to be all in on Internet Computer, and then diversify outside of crypto. I'm diversified outside of crypto: I have equity in a house, cash in a bank, and a wife with a great job who makes great money. If my ICP holdings went to zero, it wouldn't materially affect my life. If ICP goes where I think it could go, I might never need to work for money again, my wife might never need to either, we'd be completely debt free, and we'd have huge amounts to give back. That's the kind of asymmetric upside I'm personally betting on. None of that is a guarantee or a recommendation, it's just how I've chosen to position my own money. I explain more of that thinking in why I sell altcoins for ICP.
Render is just a token on Solana
Another point about ICP is the utility of the coin itself versus these others. Take Render. Render is a token that lives on Solana. Solana is basically another Ethereum copy where they made small changes and called it their own chain, but almost everything is built off chain, all the apps you'd use are off chain, and there's just a tiny connection to the blockchain, and then Render is a token on that chain. So even if the marketplace itself does well, giving the token real utility and value will be very difficult.
Render also has nothing to do with NVIDIA, as far as I can see. Render is a marketplace for graphics rendering, and NVIDIA makes graphics chips. Does Render need to buy chips from NVIDIA? Possibly. But the same people in the blockchain industry who got paid to promote Solana seem to be getting paid to promote tokens on Solana like Render. That makes it very difficult to maintain value over the long term.
Theta, Akash, Helium: tokens without real ownership
You've got Theta Network, where I once saw someone put their life savings in, and I figured this person must not like money, because Theta's vision was to be an alternative to YouTube or Twitch, but again it's not built on chain. When things aren't built on chain like Internet Computer, when the smart contracts aren't all running in canisters with everything on chain, then the tokens have only speculative value.
Here's an analogy. What if I sold you a stock in a company that didn't actually give you any real ownership? You'd ask, "Well, does this give me real ownership?" No. "Well, what does it give me?" Technically, nothing. That's the Render token, because all the assets that make Render valuable, the marketplace, the website where you browse it, are not on chain. That means one person or entity controls that website. They control the gateway to the whole marketplace. Even if your token votes through DAO governance, you're still dependent on them to actually do what you voted for. We've seen cases like Arbitrum where the DAO voted one way and the developers did the opposite. There's no real control and no real ownership. It's a token on a chain where most of the resources you use to interact with it are built off chain. This is the entire problem with crypto. So to me, none of these distributed computing platforms hold up. Collectively they're consistently overvalued and speculative in my opinion, and they'll struggle to have real value.
Akash Network has the same issues as the others. It's not on-chain computation. It's similar to Render except more general-purpose computation. Helium is nice, but it's just a token on Solana, with all the same problems as the rest: everything that makes the network valuable is off chain, the token is supposed to bring that value together, but since it's not all on chain you can't really concentrate the value or control it through a real DAO the way you can on Internet Computer. I'm well aware of all of these, and I've bought some of them in the past myself, before I really understood the difference between Internet Computer and everything else.
My honest bet for eight years from now
Yes, it's absolutely possible some of these could do well. But I think eight years from now it will be extremely unlikely that the majority of them are still in the top 100. I'd personally bet that eight years from now Internet Computer is in the top five, while the majority of these are well out of the top 100, forgotten about, so that by the time my kids are in crypto, they'll have never heard of most of them. To me, most of these, besides Internet Computer, are short-term money-grab projects. That's why the teams aren't listed, and why they make it difficult to find the people involved. The people behind them don't really feel confident about what they're doing, so they don't want you looking at their faces. DFINITY, on the other hand, is very proud of what they're building. They want you to see their work, their faces, their bios, and there are videos of many team members talking on YouTube. They're building right out in the open. Most of these other projects are building in secret, and you can't even tell who's working on them, because on some level the people working on them are aware that these things don't have value.
I once talked to a guy building on a project like this. I can't say what he was building on or who he is, because he didn't want anyone to know. He told me he doesn't hold any of the project's coin. As soon as he gets paid in it, he dumps it right away and buys another crypto. Even though he's an engineer building on the project, his profile isn't public, and privately he doesn't believe in it. He's simply taking the money, working a job, doing what he's told, and dumping the coin as soon as he gets it. I'd say most of the people working on most of these projects operate the same way, and that in most cases there are very few real developers or technical talent on any of them. If there were, they'd list them, and it would be expensive to pay them all. So what most of these projects actually pay for is pure marketing to get their token hyped and speculated. But once the value collapses, there's no more building, no more innovation, and the token just bleeds to zero. I made the same argument directly to one community in my open letter to Bittensor TAO holders.
Do your own research: actually use it
So to me, while yes, one or two of these projects might work out, maybe Arweave AO will be successful, maybe Render will be successful with a marketplace for computation since there seems to be big demand for that, I seriously doubt anything will outperform Internet Computer over the long term based on the values I'm seeing. That's why I've put my money into it personally, and it's already number one out of all of these in real building while sitting at a fraction of their market caps, which to me means it's grossly undervalued.
That said, I did a lot of my own research to reach these conclusions, and I encourage you to do the same. First off, actually try using Internet Computer, and actually try using whatever you're considering investing in. So many of you who are hyped up and buying Arweave, Filecoin, Render, or Bittensor TAO have never actually used the thing. It's just sitting on an exchange. You've never done the most basic form of your own research, which is to take the coin off the exchange and see what you can actually do with it. That's how I figured out Internet Computer was different from everything else, because I actually used it, and I used a whole bunch of other stuff too. With almost everything else, all you do is let it sit in a wallet and hope the team behind it, who you can't even identify, does something. Internet Computer has a massive amount of things you can actually do, from staking on up, and I've made a lot of other videos walking through those.
So to me, all these other cryptos are extremely speculative and, in my opinion, very dangerous places to put your money. I believe they'll underperform Internet Computer over the long term. Some of them will get manipulated into fake hype pumps, but over time the vast majority, if not all of them, will underperform Internet Computer. I've repeated myself a lot here, and I hope it really sinks in so you can understand why I see it this way. None of this is financial advice, just my honest opinion after more than a decade and thousands of hours in this space.