Many of you have asked: if ICP is that great in terms of technology, wouldn't the price reflect it? My answer is that today's price does reflect how great the technology is — because every effort imaginable has been made to keep ICP as cheap as possible and to hide it from everybody else in crypto. Most people in crypto are never going to scroll down and figure out that the 59th coin on the price chart is the only real thing in the space, while almost everything else is faking, lying, and cheating to trick as many people as possible into dumping money into something that is, based on the technology, completely worthless. By worthless I mean the tech is so useless there's almost no reason to use it outside of hype and speculation. This obviously isn't financial advice, and I'm an ICP maxi because of the tech.
My fair appraisal
If I were to fairly appraise ICP right now, the absolute minimum price I'd give it — a number off the top of my head — is $69. That's where it should be if the market had any integrity, if spot buying were a real indicator of price, and if influencers across the space had any integrity. At $69 the market cap would sit between Solana and Tron. People do look down into the top 10 (and you can exclude Tether and USDC, since those are stablecoins). If there were integrity in crypto, Bitcoin would be far lower, Ethereum far lower, BNB far lower, XRP would be zero, Solana far lower — and ICP would probably be the third-largest market cap, just behind an Ethereum that wouldn't be valued that far ahead of it, behind a Bitcoin that wouldn't be valued that far ahead of Ethereum.
Who benefits from keeping ICP cheap
Instead, you've got people and large entities who already bought Bitcoin and Ethereum cheaper and do everything they can to shill them — because if they're honest they can sell what they hold, and if they're dishonest they can sell two to ten times what they actually have. Then you've got exchanges that created things like BNB out of thin air and made CZ a billionaire. What did CZ actually do? Created a crypto exchange. And is there any transparency about how much ICP Binance really holds versus how much is on the blockchain? None that I can see. Exchanges are one of the main drivers of crypto prices, and they have every incentive to keep ICP quiet — because every time ICP pops its head up, people get interested, research the technology, and then everything else starts to look like grossly inflated, useless garbage.
Once you understand ICP, everything else looks overvalued
XRP is so useless — it's all hype and paying people to talk, with no technical reason to do anything with it that ICP wouldn't do better, faster, cheaper, more secure, and tamper proof. Once you know about ICP, Bitcoin at best is a collector's item, Ethereum is mostly useful for bringing some liquidity onto ICP as a layer two, and BNB is useless because you don't need crypto exchanges anymore — DFINITY itself seems to be experimenting with a Hyperliquid-style exchange. You don't need Solana for meme coins, since anything you'd want to do can be done better on ICP aside from current liquidity. Want to gamble online? Build your whole casino fully on chain and provably secure, with no need for Tron. Hyperliquid isn't actually decentralized from what I can see; you could build something like it fully on ICP and it would be trustworthy and far more useful.
How many people actually research this far down? Even as a crypto YouTuber, I often didn't. The further up ICP climbs, the more exponential attention it gets — and right now you've got absolute junk ranked above it. Polkadot sits above ICP. Bittensor (TAO) is, from everything I can see, blatant AI fraud with nothing decentralized happening at all — and it's up to them to prove me wrong, because they launched a coin and ought to show something real. Cardano has been around since 2017 and a lot of people in crypto have never even heard of it; the tech, to me, is useless at this point. Plenty of people have no idea what Chainlink is, old-schoolers forget Bitcoin Cash, and most people have no idea what Hedera is — and no reason to, because it's useless. That's the whole point with ICP: if it had a real price, it would be very well known in crypto.
How the price gets suppressed — and what breaks it
The exchanges set the price artificially high when ICP launched, and have since done everything possible to suppress it so people can't see it. The downside of suppressing a price is that when real, serious money shows up, they buy all of it cheap. There's nothing stopping a dishonest exchange except integrity: if one held, say, 10 million ICP, there's nothing to stop them selling 100 million ICP they don't actually have to their users, then suspending withdrawals when they run out and blasting the price down again to get people to dump. You see how nasty this gets — the price today is about as fake as you can imagine, because the exchanges in a position to manipulate it, both legally and illegally, have every incentive to. We may well see one or two exchanges go down completely: if ICP pumps while other cryptos dump and users try to withdraw, some will find an FTX-style hole where the money and the crypto are simply gone. That could even help ICP pump more.
Will the fake price last forever? No — because the technology is going to become so dominant, because it's genuinely needed, that all the games only work until buying demand gets so large that the exchanges playing with the price either stop suppressing it or collapse. Not every exchange is dishonest, but almost every exchange and crypto media outlet I see fails to give ICP accurate coverage, and nearly everyone connected to power in crypto is doing what they can to keep the price down. You can see that even small shifts in momentum make the ICP price shoot up. I'm genuinely excited to watch how this unwinds. If you want the deeper case, watch my ICP Crypto playlist, and you can join the Jerry Banfield Family at jerrybanfield.com.