ICP is the coin I now build my whole YouTube channel around, and I am the top creator for it on YouTube. Search "Internet Computer Protocol," "Internet Computer," or "ICP crypto" and my videos come up first, according to vidIQ. I got there by making more ICP videos than anybody else, more than 500 of them, and by staying with the subject long enough for an audience to build around it. This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor, I hold a large position in ICP and altcoins built on it, and you should know that up front.
My current view is that ICP is the best project in crypto, and I say that after years of being burned by the rest of the market. I got into Bitcoin in 2014 and made crypto videos for years. I got disgusted with the space after I watched a project I had hyped rug pull in 2018, and I quit making crypto videos for a long stretch. I came back in 2022, when a friend's coin turned $300 into $15,000, and I started a new channel at the end of that year with a promise to be honest. A bot army then took that channel down for about a week. When it came back, I decided to find the best project in crypto. I sold my Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and DeSo and went all in on ICP. The full story is in How I Became the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber.
My thinking about ICP changed over time. Early on I hyped one coin after another, and I eventually realized that almost every coin I had bought and hyped was junk, so I started saying so on my streams. I did not get paid for most of it. DFINITY gave me $25,000 across two community grants, but I had already made around 100 ICP videos for free before that, and by my count roughly half of the 500 or so ICP videos got any funding at all. My last grant was rejected. That is where I started to insist that my work has to be paid for.
The second post, How I'm Valuing My Time as the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber, is where I work through the money. I quit for a stretch because I was not making enough money. The lesson from the models that failed is that one-off paid promotion does not work. A $100 ICP marketing group brought in more than 20 projects in its first month, and many of their coins went to zero. One Decide AI video I charged about $300 for moved its market cap by millions, the price rose 50 percent, and then it dumped 30 percent a few days later. What works, in my experience, is repetition. When I made 27 OpenChat videos in one month, people who had heard me mention it five or 10 times finally signed up. So I now work with six projects I use every day: OpenChat, Decide AI, Trax, ICP Swap, Water Neuron and Gold DAO. I believe I am worth at least six figures a year in profit, which is $10,000 a month.
The third post, Why I'm Deleting My Crypto Channel and Going All-In on One, covers the channel decision. I am deleting the crypto channel, which I had rebranded to Jerry Banfield Live, and moving everything into one channel, the first one I ever started back in 2011. The crypto videos stay together in my ICP Crypto playlist, but I no longer want to be a one-dimensional creator. When my channel was built around crypto, I chased views, repeated myself, and stopped gaming and helping other creators. I also want to be honest about my own record: most of the ICP coins I have bought have been total losses so far, and I am not up on any single one of them.
If you are new to ICP, start with the plain-English explainer at What is the Internet Computer?. If you are asking whether ICP is worth the risk at all, I lay out the bear case and why I still hold in The bear case for ICP and why I still hold. As a sober alcoholic with 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, I know that if I made money pushing coins I did not believe in, I would feel like a scumbag and might drink again. That is why I only talk about the projects I use. The three posts are below in full.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- How I Became the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber (June 17, 2026)
- How I'm Valuing My Time as the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber (June 17, 2026)
- Why I'm Deleting My Crypto Channel and Going All-In on One (June 17, 2026)
How I Became the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber
From my video published June 17, 2026.
How I Became the Top ICP Creator on YouTube
I want to explain how I became the top crypto YouTuber for the ICP and Internet Computer Protocol terms. Right now you can search "Internet Computer Protocol" and you're almost guaranteed to find my videos. I checked with vidIQ, and it says Jerry Banfield is the top creator on both of those terms. What's actually super interesting is that it's not even my "Jerry Banfield Crypto" channel anymore. This is my original channel, and I literally just deleted all of my videos on ICP a couple of weeks ago. Within two weeks, my videos were once again the top videos on ICP.
I don't know about X. I just post videos on X, and to me X doesn't matter as much because people don't spend as much time watching there. The amount of time people spend watching my videos on YouTube is incredible. So to me, YouTube is the most important platform for communicating some deep information, not just shallow stuff. It's the most important platform to be number one on and to have the strongest voice.
This is not financial advice, and I'm not a financial advisor. I'm simply sharing my own experience. I hold something like 10,000 ICP worth of ICP and altcoins on ICP. I got to be the number one ICP creator because there was literally no one with a bigger audience than me who went all in on creating ICP content. There are other awesome creators in this space: Bobby O, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero, Six Figs, Aaron Bremser, and Coin Nation HQ. There are other creators I watch and respect who do a great job. But I'm the one who is most consistent at cranking out content about ICP. Aaron cranks out a lot of content, and Zero to Hero cranks out a lot as well. Coin Nation is working on building an app. Blockchain Pill does higher-quality edited videos. I wish Bobby O would do more videos. But I think I'm the only one who actually does YouTube full time. Everyone else has other jobs, or like Aaron, works for KongSwap. So I believe I'm the only creator who's full time, and I think I've made more ICP videos on YouTube than any other creator. I'd even wager that if you added the top two creators together in terms of the number of videos they've made, I've made more than the top two combined.
The main thing I've done in ICP is simply crank out more videos than anybody else about it. I've cranked out tutorials, I've cranked out hype videos, and I made sensational clickbait titles.
Getting Into Bitcoin in 2014
To explain how I originally got into this, we need to back up even further. I got into Bitcoin in 2014. I made my first video about Bitcoin in December 2014, showing how to use cash to buy Bitcoin with a new service that eventually went under. I even sold Bitcoin for cash back in the day, directly out of my bank accounts. Pretty gangster, having people go to the bank, make cash deposits into my account, and then sending them the Bitcoin. Pretty cool.
So I got into Bitcoin in 2014 and started making videos on it right away. On this original channel, I grinded out hundreds of crypto videos, maybe even 500, that got millions, even tens of millions of views. I got a ton of views on this original channel. I did tons of crypto videos between 2015 and 2018, just hundreds and hundreds of them. I did a video on Ethereum mining back at the beginning of 2017. That was a good video if you actually followed up on it, and it got hundreds of thousands of views organically. I did crypto trading tutorials. I was one of the first people in the world to do crypto trading tutorials and to talk about Ethereum mining. I did all kinds of those videos, and I got into Dash heavy and Steem heavy. I made lots of money in crypto, especially in 2017 and 2018.
Getting Disgusted With Crypto
But then I got really disgusted with the crypto market. I got high enough into Steemit to see the inside of an altcoin that was popular, and it was nasty. It was all lying, cheating, and stealing: pay me here, pay them there, do what I tell you, or else. All kinds of nasty stuff, exactly the kind of thing you'd imagine goes on. It was like watching a show like House of Cards. You had to line people's pockets to get them to do anything for you. It was all about image and what you were presenting publicly versus what you were doing behind the scenes. It was horrible.
Then I watched all the crypto get rug pulled in 2018 and go down. I watched a team I had invested in, met in person, believed in, and hyped up, Steemit, rug pull the project, sell it, and watched it go to zero. I thought, this is disgusting. This whole space is disgusting. So I quit making crypto videos for years after that. My thinking was that the space was so disgusting I couldn't stand to be a part of it. It didn't align with my values.
Getting Sucked Back In
But then I got sucked back in. The one friend who got me into Bitcoin launched some garbage coin and kept telling me I should give him some money. I gave him $300 just to shut him up and get him to go away. Then in 2022, his horrible junk coin did an average of a 50X for me and actually hit a maximum of 100X. I sold some at smaller profits and then sold some at the 100X. So I got a 50X in 2022 that I cashed out on. I had put in $300 in 2021 and didn't think about it for a year. He told me it was going up and going crazy, so I started making videos about his junk coin again and showed how I turned $300 into $15,000. That got me hooked back into crypto.
I also got demonetized off of Facebook in 2022 after I changed my race, and Facebook did not want to allow that narrative to go viral. So they silenced me. Thankfully, all the other platforms let it go out, and it got out. After losing my main source of income, I was looking for a way to get back into making some money, so I got back into crypto, especially after that 50X, which happened to land a little while after I got demonetized.
I started looking around and trying to research crypto, and I started cranking out a bunch of videos again on this Jerry Banfield channel. But I was getting disgusted with the algorithm. My channel at the time seemed to be shadowbanned or something. The algorithm was just terrible and not putting my videos out, and I was really frustrated. So I made a brand new crypto channel, thinking this new channel would really go all the way for me.
A New Channel and a New Commitment
I made this new crypto channel at the end of 2022. I committed to being a better crypto YouTuber, that I wasn't just going to lie, cheat, and steal like most everybody else. I was going to tell the truth and lead by example. I wasn't going to tell somebody to do one thing while doing the opposite myself. I wasn't going to say buy while I was selling. I had this original idea that I'd buy $50 a day in crypto, just buy a coin for $50 and hype it up. Every day, I started grinding out videos on this new channel.
The new channel has since been rebranded to Jerry Banfield Live, because I never again want to get stuck just doing crypto videos. But originally it was Jerry Banfield Crypto. For months, I made videos hyping up one coin after another. I'd buy Bitcoin one day, Ethereum the next, Solana the next. I bought Solana under $10. I bought Hedera. This was in the middle of the bear market, maximum fear, and there I was starting a new portfolio from zero, buying $50 a day in crypto.
The Crypto Mafia and the Bots
Then the crypto mafia people, with all their bots, started pushing my videos. I started getting a big organic audience because of that. With one of these coins, yeah, I call it the crypto mafia or the crypto matrix. From what I can see, these are organized crime operating in crypto, launching coin after coin, supporting certain projects that use networks of bots to push videos on YouTube. You don't even talk with them, except one of them did pop into my live stream one day, which I'll get to in a minute. You just make videos about certain coins with certain things in them. If they like your video, they'll hammer it with bots, and the bots make sure you get a real audience off of it.
I could tell you the exact names of certain cryptos where all they have going for them is that. But I'm not going to name names anymore, because I can't show proof. I did see proof on my own channel, though. From what I can see, these crypto mafia people, whom I've never met or talked to outside of my live chat, blew my channel up with all these bots because I was doing a great job pushing a lot of their coins.
But then I started to feel massively dishonest again and to get disgusted with myself. I realized I was just doing the same thing I'd done before, except it was actually working better. I knew I had to stop. So I started to look through my portfolio, and I realized a lot of these coins I'd been hyping up were junk. I was getting rich off of hyping these coins up, but as an investor I could see that the more coins I kept buying and researching, some coins were clearly better than others. I needed to only focus on the ones that were actually good and not just hype up the dumpster fires. Then I realized that almost every coin I'd bought and hyped up was junk.
So I started saying that, very rough and raw. I'd say, hey, this coin I bought last month sucks, I changed my mind, I'm selling it, and it's going to zero. I did that with a few of the coins that these crypto mafia people apparently hold in big amounts. One of them came on, and I could just feel it. He came on my live stream about one specific coin and said, "You're going to regret saying this about that coin." Right after he typed that chat message, my channel got taken down by an army of bots. It instantly took my channel down. No violations, fully monetized, everything was going great, and an army of bots reported it for illegal activity and took it down.
It took YouTube a week to sort it out, and honestly, I don't think I would have got my channel back even though I wasn't doing anything wrong. This is a channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I got my silver play button for this channel. This channel even helped me get back my crypto channel. I sent this channel to YouTube and said, I've been on YouTube 12 years, I have zero policy violations ever, this is just BS, some bot army attacked my channel. YouTube took a week and put my channel back up.
Once I got it back, I thought, you want to play like that? You already hit me with your bot attack. I'm going to make sure I identify the absolute best projects in crypto. In the process of trying to figure out what the absolute best project was, I had originally been into Bitcoin for a while, but a viewer on my live stream said, "Really, Bitcoin? There's got to be something better than that." And that's when I found it.
Going all in on Internet Computer Protocol
I had already bought ICP and I'd already hyped ICP up when I first started my channel. It's one of the first cryptos I bought and talked about. But then, after researching it for hundreds of hours more, I thought, wow, this is the real deal. This is the crypto. After my negative experiences going all in on Dash and Steem, I really didn't want to do it again, but I finally got to a point where I felt I couldn't have any integrity if I didn't go all in on Internet Computer Protocol. So I sold my Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and DeSo. I sold all of them and put it into Internet Computer Protocol at what I hope is the absolute ICP bottom.
Then I started grinding out ICP videos every day. At one point I even tested putting out something like 12 ICP videos a day. I've filmed at least 500 videos talking about ICP, and I've done hundreds of hours of live streams about it. I don't think there's any other content creator in the world who has put as much time on video as I have about ICP. So in this case, you could argue I've certainly put the effort in.
I've gone all over the place since then. I did a bunch of "going to zero" videos that pulled traffic from some of these dumpster-fire coins and pointed people toward ICP. I reviewed hundreds of cryptos, said they were going to zero and were terrible, and steered that attention over to ICP. I got so burnt out on it, though, that last year, in 2024, I quit doing all of YouTube for a month. But then I realized there was not going to be any easier way for me to make money than doing ICP videos. So it was back to ICP videos.
I also got paid at the beginning. For the first half of 2024, DFINITY was kind enough to give me $25,000 to support my videos. But keep in mind, I'd already made around 100 ICP videos before that for free, and I've since made hundreds more without getting any support. So I came back to ICP crypto videos and I've consistently been doing them again for the last eight months.
Cleaning up my old content and protecting myself
I did delete all the videos, though. On this original channel, I deleted all the videos two years ago and just put music on it. And on the live channel, I deleted all the old crypto videos because back then I wasn't doing anything to protect myself legally. I wasn't using disclaimers. I wasn't telling people how much I held in every single video. Now I make sure to use disclaimers. I make sure to tell people I'm holding a bunch of ICP so there's no confusion as to where my position is and what my potential motivations are. Yes, lots of other crypto YouTubers don't practice any of that, but if I can prevent potential legal issues, I'd rather do that. Prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So I went all in on ICP content over the last year, and I've committed to making videos that are first and foremost good for you. One thing that really helped me: on my Jerry Banfield crypto channel, which is now Jerry Banfield Live, I had been getting obsessed with the amount of views I was getting, constantly chasing the algorithm, instead of just being an ICP content creator. The downturn the ICP price has taken means all my views go down. Being the top ICP creator at the beginning of 2024, when the views were blowing up and the facial recognition story came out, my channel got a whole bunch of views. But now it ends up not being worth as much, although I did get $5,000 from Water Neuron yesterday for a creator grant, and I've gotten around $10,000 from other projects in the last couple of months.
I also have people schedule calls for $300 an hour. When things are going well, I make tens of thousands of dollars more a month doing the same basic stuff I'm doing right now. I just asked my wife for $22,000 so that I've got enough money where I don't have to worry about views and the ICP price for at least a year, and so that I'm prepared not to have to make a profit at all. I can make tiny amounts of money, like $1,000 a month in ad revenue, and still be fine.
Why I turn down the easy money
Keep in mind, I am turning a lot down. If I worked for the crypto mafia again, I wouldn't even have to talk to them if I just pushed their coins in my videos. I know what many of the coins are, and I know how to find them if I'm not sure. I could make millions of dollars more a year than I'm making right now. All I'd have to do is push their coins. I know which coins they are and exactly how to push them. Add a copy-trading exchange and I could make hundreds of thousands more dollars a month doing the same stuff I do today, except I'd just have to look in the mirror and hate myself again.
For me, as a sober alcoholic with 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, it's not worth the risk. I might drink again if I went around making a bunch of money while feeling like I'm a scumbag contributing to people being ripped off. I create videos on Internet Computer Protocol because, in my experience, this is the absolute best project in crypto. That's why I've become one of the top content creators on it: I'm a full-time creator, I've been on YouTube 14 years, and this is the main subject I've created content on for the last year and a half.
So I appreciate all of your love and support, especially those of you who've switched over from the Jerry Banfield crypto channel. I really appreciate the influx of people to what had been a dead channel for most of the last year. I've put together my ICP Crypto playlist so everything is in one place, and it's been great to see so many people from ICP get into the other content too. Thank you for all you've done to help make me the top ICP crypto YouTuber. I intend to keep doing live streams about ICP at least once a week, and then to pull a whole bunch of videos out of those and post them as well.
How I'm Valuing My Time as the Top ICP Crypto YouTuber
From my video published June 17, 2026.
I want to walk you through how I'm valuing my time as the top Internet Computer Protocol creator. This has been a big struggle for me, and I hope sharing it will help all of us work together better. If you want to see clear metrics, I'll lay those out, because I think they matter to the conversation.
If you search for the top creator on YouTube, that's where the attention is. On X, the amount of time people spend per impression is very small. For example, my videos get watched 20 times as much per view on YouTube as they do on X. So even if somebody had 10 times as many impressions on X, that's not relevant in terms of the actual time and attention. YouTube is the main platform that matters. X is fine for updates, but YouTube is the number one place where people are getting information and making real decisions about which cryptos they hold.
If you search for ICP crypto, which is a main term, I'm the top channel for that. I'm the top channel on Internet Computer ICP. When you search Internet Computer Protocol, I'm the top channel. When you search Internet Computer, I'm the top channel. No matter how you search it, I come up first. And even compared to the official channel, DFINITY, who put out plenty of content but don't put out as many videos as I do, I have five times more views than the official DFINITY channel. I have double the views that Zero2Hero gets on my videos.
The struggle of valuing my time
My struggle has been simple: how do I value my time? I'm a full-time creator. I love what Bobby O does with his channel, and what Zero2Hero and CoinNation HQ do, but they all have jobs. Zero2Hero has a job. CoinNation HQ is a full-time developer. Bobby O has a job. This is my job. So I want to make good money, because this is my work.
I've had my hardest struggle as an ICP creator. One of the main reasons I quit earlier this year, or last year, about six to eight months ago, is that I was not making enough money. I was not enjoying my job because I was struggling with the monetization model. I've tried a bunch of different monetization models over the last few years, and I've found what I think is the best one so far. I want to share the lessons I've learned out of all the stuff that didn't work.
What actually worked
Let's start with what did work. DFINITY gave me $25,000. After I made roughly 100 videos about Internet Computer Protocol for free, they gave me $25,000 in the form of two community grants. But they rejected my last grant. It looked like a blanket rejection that everybody got, because it was the same one James Allen was showing on his channel. I do DFINITY community grants, and they also want me to be a good boy and not go talking a bunch of junk about all these other coins. That doesn't work with me, and here's what I've learned: if I'm going to work for free, I'm going to flood something. I'm going to talk about how something sucks if I'm doing it for free, because nobody gets paid to talk about how things suck. But investors on YouTube need to hear why coins are terrible, because almost everybody hyping things up is getting paid to hype things up.
I've made a ton of videos hyping Internet Computer Protocol up, and projects built on it, totally for free. Of the videos I've made about Internet Computer Protocol, and there have been over 500 of them, most have been for free, or at least half. Maybe around 200-something of them were for the DFINITY Community Grants. About 27 of them were for OpenChat. So maybe half I got some kind of funding for. But I'm looking at the future, wondering what I'm going to do going forward.
What didn't work
One thing I tried that did not work was just allowing any project to give me money in exchange for promoting their coin. For example, I tried a little ICP coin marketing group. Over 20 projects joined it within the first month or so. I made a couple thousand dollars, because I only charged $100 to get in. But a bunch of those coins were junk and went to zero. It took a lot of my time and energy to look at every one of these projects, follow them on X, and research their coins. So I know I don't want to keep promoting projects that don't have absolutely strong fundamentals going forward.
At the same time, I'm not willing to give away my time for free anymore. I've got the largest audience in ICP in terms of the amount of time people spend watching on my channel. If you want to count impressions on X, I don't pay attention to that. So I'm not going to promote any old project for free to the largest ICP audience on YouTube, because that's disrespectful of my time. My work has value.
I got pissed off today because somebody in OpenChat went onto one of my proposals and ran their mouth, saying my work doesn't have value, that I'm overcharging for my videos. If anything, in my experience I've been drastically undercharging. I've made videos that moved coins millions of dollars in market cap. For example, Decide AI: I charged them maybe $300 for a video that moved the market cap up millions of dollars. Nothing else happened in the 24 hours after I put that video out. The price went up 50%, and the market cap went up millions of dollars. And I got $100. So I've been giving a lot of these ICP projects great deals, fantastic deals.
I'm the number one person on OpenChat who's referred people to OpenChat. The only people even close to me have been blatantly cheating the referral system, which is obvious if you watch how they do it: they'll try to cheat it for the airdrop one month, then make a new account and try to cheat it the next month. None of the other ICP YouTubers are even on the top 10 leaderboard. It's just me. I'm grateful OpenChat has been kind enough to give me a few thousand dollars worth of OpenChat in the past. They're the second biggest project for me. And third now is Decide AI. As soon as I said I'd do some more videos for them, after they saw how one video, where I didn't even talk about price action or hype the price up, just talked about the project, they said, sure, do you want to do 11 more videos for 10 times as much money? I'm grateful they immediately gave me $3,500 worth of the tokens.
Getting choosier and demanding what I'm worth
What I can see going forward is this: I'm going to get even more valuable in the ICP ecosystem, which means I need to be very choosy about which projects I talk about, and I need to demand what I'm worth on the projects I do talk about. When I see somebody who's put their heart and soul into a project, launching a service nervous system, my first thought is, I'd love to do an interview with them. But then what happens, as has happened in the past, is that I end up driving sometimes millions of dollars in value. I'm not buying it myself, but I'm in the middle of a chain reaction that results in millions of dollars flowing into their project, and then they don't give me any of the coins. In the worst case scenario, like with BoomDAO, they rug pull the coin, and I'm in the middle of something I didn't get compensated for while all the investors got ripped off.
That means I need to set my bar much, much higher for projects I'm going to talk about. To do that, I first need to get clear on which projects I really like myself, absent any possible compensation. For me, that has come down to six projects: OpenChat, Decide AI, Trax, ICP Swap, Water Neuron, and Gold DAO. Those are the six projects I use every day in one way or another.
Decide AI is connected with OpenChat to verify that the people getting my giveaways are not bots, through their facial recognition service. You go over there, verify you're a unique person, it gives you a check mark, and then you can claim a giveaway. That's really helpful, because it drastically cuts down on people who make a thousand bot accounts and ruin giveaways. It's not perfect, but compared to doing it without verification, it cuts bots down by 70 to 80%, which is really useful.
OpenChat I use every day for my community, though I'm going to talk about an issue there in a minute. Gold DAO is one where I provide liquidity, and I'd like to sell some of my ICP, when it pumps, into gold instead of straight into US dollars. So it's a project I both provide liquidity on and am very grateful exists, and I want to use it more. Trax is where I upload my music, and I've actually made more money off of Trax than all the other platforms besides YouTube combined: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and so on. ICP Swap is where I provide liquidity. And Water Neuron is where I've used nICP, swapped that to get an APR, and earned short-term interest back into ICP. So these are the projects I use every single day.
Proposing a share of tokens for marketing
With these projects, I have a lot to give. I've already given a ton to OpenChat, and I intend to keep doing it. What I've done for these projects is make proposals asking for a share of tokens in exchange for doing marketing for each of them. That's fair, because the people on the team doing the developing and building are getting paid for that. And the people doing the marketing, like in a big company with all its marketing and salespeople, they get paid too.
In my opinion, I'm the best option for marketing in the ICP ecosystem. If you have a different opinion, you're welcome to share that. My marketing is scarce. I can only handle so many projects that I keep top of mind. And I'm an expert at digital marketing. I'd challenge anybody in the ICP ecosystem who thinks they know more about marketing than I do. I've been doing digital marketing since 2011. I've been a top 10 Udemy instructor, a top Facebook gaming partner, gone viral on TikTok with multiple videos, gotten over a million views on YouTube videos. I've created more than 10 channels on YouTube. My X account has almost 10,000 followers, all organic, with very little attention paid to it. I know what I'm doing with marketing.
Why one-off promotion does not work
The main thing these projects are getting wrong with their marketing is they think they can just pay for a one-off video and that it's going to make a difference. Yes, Decide AI paid for a one-off video and the price went up 50%, but do you know what happened a few days later? The price dumped 30%. You need constant branding and constant reminders. While one-off videos will convert a small percentage immediately, the main way you actually do work in marketing and branding is when you've made 10-plus impressions with somebody. In my experience, people often need to see your videos 10-plus times to really engage and connect with you.
Think about how you browse. You often don't even click a video until you've seen that creator 10 times. Even if you do click and watch a video, you usually need to watch at least 10 videos from someone before you'll take any kind of action, like joining a Patreon or researching a coin yourself. For me, going to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had to attend something like 20 or 30 meetings before I even bought the book and got a sponsor. That's 20 or 30 hours I spent at AA meetings before the most basic principles of the program even started to sink in.
So these projects in the ICP ecosystem, in the first place, don't even want to pay for marketing unless it's the top of a bull market. And then they only want to pay for little one-off things. But what I've learned is I don't want to do one-off promotion anymore. What you really need is consistent, repeated promotion.
Look at the top crypto YouTubers
If you want to see how that works, look at the top crypto YouTubers. Do you know why they don't mention ICP? Because DFINITY hasn't paid them to. But do you know who has paid them? XRP, Solana, some of these exchanges. The coins they mention all the time are the ones that have paid them. And they put their logos on videos over and over again. Even if they're not talking about Solana in the video at all, they put the Solana logo up there with an up arrow on it, or a price, or a percentage. When you do that on 100 videos, and even if people only see 10% of them, you've sent a message out.
Even if somebody only sees a fraction of the videos you've put out over and over, it sticks in their mind that you like Solana and that it's going to go up. Even if the coin itself, like Solana to me, is a dumpster of useless technology, you can see how effective that kind of marketing is. That's what works. You need to repeatedly, over and over again, share your coin with the same audience.
What I noticed doing OpenChat for a month is that when I did 27 videos all in one month, all featuring OpenChat, people who had heard me mention OpenChat five or 10 times before that month finally signed up and used it. They finally bought some of the OpenChat coin, after I talked about it in every single video for a month. Now, some people in the community were very critical, saying I was just preaching to the same audience that already knows about it. And sure, 10 to 20% of my audience absolutely knows about OpenChat and doesn't need a reminder. But 80 or 90% have heard it only in passing and have never researched it. Many of them have never signed up. I've talked to many of these people. They're sitting there with huge amounts of money in the bank, and they're literally saying, "Jerry, which token should I buy?"
Why I won't promote coins that haven't earned it
I could easily tell one of these people that I think they should buy $10,000 of some ICP coin, and they would probably buy it immediately. And yet I ask myself, why would I do that? That coin hasn't done anything for me. Why would I get them to buy $10,000 of some coin that hasn't done anything for me, that I don't even own $10,000 of myself?
I know this sounds a little selfish, but here's what happens. If you go around acting like you're totally selfless, what will often happen is you'll get really resentful and angry at everybody, and you'll quit your YouTube channel. That's what happened to me last year. Going around trying to act like I'm just helping everybody else, not concerned about how much money I'm making, just giving everybody free marketing, I ended up quitting my YouTube channel. Or I'd buy some coin like Tagger and try to pump it over and over again.
So what I want is to have a handful of coins that have given me my fair share for what I'm doing. Those are my coins that I love, that I use every day. I used them before I ever bought them. Those are the coins I mention over and over again. And any projects that are not in that handful, I'm not talking about them. That might sound harsh, but you can go to one of the other creators, the ones that have jobs and may be more altruistic than me in this respect.
My altruistic channel and being choosy
Now, if I'm going to be altruistic and just do videos out of the goodness of my heart, I have a crypto reviews channel named Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews. Those videos are made out of the altruism in my heart, selfless, to try to help somebody else. And do you know what I do on it? I find whatever trending junk coin is out there and I snipe it and explain why it's going to zero. Those videos make me no money, unless somebody schedules a call, which is not very common. If I do 30 of them, one person might schedule a call. So those videos are basically worthless. They're basically me volunteering my time. If you want me to cover an ICP project that's not in my handful, I'll be happy to talk about why I'm not investing in it.
What I've noticed in crypto is that you need to be extremely choosy about which projects you invest in. Most of the ICP coins I've bought have been total losses so far. In fact, I don't think I'm up on one single coin I've bought at this point. Now, yes, if I didn't do this work, I'd probably be buying some of these coins and stacking them up. But I do this. This is what I do.
At a certain point, people give you the coins
At this point, many of you may not realize this, but once you get to a certain point in crypto creation, you don't buy coins anymore. People give them to you. Look at the top crypto YouTubers. Do you think they're out there buying coins? They might swap some junk coin they get for Bitcoin or something, but people just give them coins. They don't have to buy them. It's the same thing with cars and other things. You get rich enough, they just give you cars. You get to be a big enough celebrity, they just give you cars so you can drive around and show them off. It's a ridiculous system, but the more wealth and influence you get, the more you just get given things that everybody else has to buy.
So this has been hard for me to lock in and zone in on my value, and I hate how it sounds in some ways. But you know what? It's time for me to stop pretending I'm out here volunteering and doing this purely out of the good of my heart. I'm not. This is my job. I want good money out of it. I believe I'm worth at least six figures a year, which is $10,000 a month, and that's in profit, not in revenue. That's in profit. So I'm worth that much.
The projects I'm committed to
I'm grateful Decide AI already gave me $3,500 worth of Decide AI, which based on its valuation is like $200,000. For Decide AI, I'm putting half of that into liquidity. And OpenChat is currently passing at the time of filming this. Trax is currently passing too, and that one will definitely execute from what I saw. Then there's GoldDAO and ICPSwap. I haven't made the Water Neuron proposal yet, but I plan to. I waited because they have creator grants, but the creator grants are a perfect example of why you need to demand payment upfront. They offered the little lure of the creator grants, but none of us have seen anything in over two months. So they got all of us to cover the project for free and then haven't given us anything for it.
I'm open to adding new projects to my portfolio if they're absolutely outstanding. To me, the six projects I've identified are outstanding projects. And if any of them reject my proposals, I'm going to ask for a token allocation again and again until they give it to me, because they have no better choice for marketing. All the haters can say whatever they want. I've got numbers. I've got loyalty. I have a track record. And that is worth compensating for, especially when you've got big bags of these altcoins. You'd better hope I'm promoting them.
You might also want to ask why I don't think something is even worthwhile to ask for money. I'm not asking any other projects for money because I don't think any of the others are worth me promoting. I don't use them every day, and I don't want money from a project I'm not using and committed to for the long term, every day. I'm tired of these one-night stands with projects. It's time for me to get serious and commit to a handful of projects on ICP. If you're not in that handful, I'm not talking about your project. You've got other channels you can use.
The math projects keep getting wrong
For example, one of the DAO creators approached me and asked if they could do an interview with me. It looked like they'd already done several interviews with other creators. I said sure, but you need to give me a portion of the DAO tokens. They didn't follow up, which I know they would have if I'd just let them do it for free. But here's what's crazy. If they'd done an interview with me and given me a fair share of the tokens, they'd have probably doubled the amount of investment in their DAO. They didn't want to give me a relatively small amount of tokens in exchange for potentially doubling the amount of ICP they would raise.
I don't want to work with projects that are on that level of scarcity, where you have so little money that you can't afford to even market the project. I'm going to do a video about this soon with caffeine.ai coming out. It's going to be hell on some of these ICP altcoins, because it's going to be easier than ever to create a new altcoin and put real value, a website, and a product behind it. Basically the only advantage the existing projects are going to have is the network effect and marketing, which are directly linked, and having a product that's technically superior. But somebody might be able to code an app with AI that's technically superior to some of these projects today. That's something I just need to say, because a lot of you tell me, "Jerry, you're so honest."
Being honest about an uncomfortable subject
This is me being honest and talking about something I know I need to address. It is kind of an ugly subject in some ways, and at the same time, this is how we really get to know each other. I value your feedback, and honest conversations like this one matter more to me than keeping everything polished and comfortable.
I have been experimenting with the dictate function while I record, where it automatically runs speech to text on the words I am saying. What worked for me was using that to create something more visually engaging, so there is text on the page that follows along with what I am sharing rather than just audio carrying the whole thing.
The DAOs and the proposals
Part of what I want to talk through is the DAOs that have not yet passed the proposals. If you have any connections to those teams, I would encourage you to share this with them, because I am going to keep coming back to this. These proposals matter to the projects involved, and getting them across the line is something I care about following through on.
I also want to give thanks to Decide AI for being the very first project. To me that is a really good sign, and I am genuinely grateful for their team. Being first takes a certain amount of trust, and they extended it. If you want to follow more of how I think about this corner of the ecosystem, you can find the rest of it in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Why I'm Deleting My Crypto Channel and Going All-In on One
From my video published June 17, 2026.
If you have been following Jerry Banfield Crypto, which I later rebranded to Jerry Banfield Live, I am deleting that channel. I am moving all of my videos, on every different subject, into one place. There is an entire playlist of crypto videos, and if you love the Jerry Banfield crypto videos, I am going to keep them together as Jerry Banfield crypto videos. But alongside them there are all kinds of other topics. There are topics for content creators. There is gaming. There is music. There are live streams. From now on, I intend to do everything in one place.
I am tired of niching myself down into just a gamer or just a crypto person. To do that, I need to delete my other channels. This is the only channel I am keeping, and it is actually the first channel I ever started. I launched it back in 2011, and at one point I deleted all the videos off of it. Now I want whatever I think is helpful for people each day, whether it is tutorials, crypto, crypto reviews, or anything else, all in one spot.
Why I want everything in one place
In my experience, the best way to make sure you see what I am posting is to use your subscriptions feed. The subscriptions feed also keeps you from getting distracted. I rarely check the YouTube homepage anymore because, to me, it has become so toxic. It is clickbait junk all the time. I would much rather keep up with the people I have followed over the years. I put out six videos a day on all different subjects, and what you will find by checking the subscriptions feed is that you will run into things that surprise you. Things I believe you will genuinely enjoy, like old video games, record-a-video-with-me sessions, synthesizers, and in-real-life videos. I have only just started doing those in-real-life videos, where I am talking through things about my journey on YouTube, sharing tutorials you might not have known about, and even talking about the AA steps in Alcoholics Anonymous.
To me, this is going to be a far better experience for you than just watching the crypto content. One thing I really grew to hate on the crypto channels is what happened when I ran a poll. It seemed like all people wanted was crypto. Do not talk to me about anything else, just give me crypto. I never want to put myself in that position again. If you do not want all of the other things I make, that is completely fine, you can scroll right past it. But you at least deserve to know that all of this other content exists. From my point of view, the other things I make are going to help you a lot more than the crypto stuff ever could. The crypto material is transactional, whereas talking about my journey with self-sabotage and my experience with people in real life is something different. I do not know exactly what you need, but what I do know is that I have a lot more value to offer you than just crypto.
Why I won't just keep uploading to a crypto channel
Many of you have asked, well, why do you not just keep the channel? Why not just keep uploading to it? I have tried that, and in my experience it does not work. I rebranded it to Live specifically to get out of crypto. When I have a channel built around just one thing, whether that is crypto, live streaming, gaming, or whatever it might be, and I am not uploading to it, I start feeling like I should just get rid of it.
Worse than that, it pulls me back in. When this was Jerry Banfield Crypto, I became obsessed with constantly growing as a crypto creator, putting out crypto videos and chasing the most views on them. That has been a very bad experience for me as a creator. It led to a lot of repetitive videos for you. It led to me not putting out videos on other subjects. I have a huge passion for helping fellow YouTubers, but when I was zoned in on my crypto videos, I was not helping other creators. I was not gaming, because I told myself gaming was just time wasted when I could be getting more crypto views. And then all those views I earned on the crypto channel ended up feeling meaningless, because if that is all people want from me, then I do not want to be one dimensional anymore.
I'm not a one-dimensional creator
What I believe is special about me as a creator is that I am not one dimensional. I do not just do one thing. Almost every channel I see is just one thing. It is gear reviews, or music, or crypto, or gaming, or inspiration, or a vlog. I do all of that, literally all of it, in one channel, and almost nobody does that. I want you to get to know all the different sides of me, because I believe it will help you get to know all the different sides of yourself. When you get to see that I can be all of these different ways, you start to realize you have a lot of different ways you can be too. Maybe you do not want to box yourself into one specialized, limited idea of who you are.
So I cannot just run a crypto channel anymore, and I do not even want to keep this one as a Live channel, because I want to host all of my live streams on my main channel as well. When people search for Jerry Banfield and find a Live channel here, posts over there, and another channel somewhere else, they end up wondering why this guy has so many channels. This channel needs to go because it is cluttering up my search results and confusing people. So I am getting rid of it very soon. If you want to keep up with the crypto content as I continue it, you can still follow along through my ICP Crypto playlist.
It has been fascinating running these polls and seeing how many people on my original channel and on my crypto channel respond to the posts. It is honestly wild to see how many people do not want to continue watching anything besides crypto. That is exactly why I also need to let this channel go. It is time to clean up that part of things, and I hope you will come over and stick with me for the long term. If this is goodbye, then I will see you later.