Is ICP a Scam? Why I Say No, and What a Rug Pull Taught Me

No, I don't think the Internet Computer is a scam. I went through its website, its dashboard, its supply numbers and its governance myself, and I found a working network with a real token supply and real things people do on it. But not a scam is not the same as safe to hold a lot of. The most useful thing I can tell you is that the risk on ICP is real, and most of the damage I have seen comes from smaller tokens built on top of the chain, not from the protocol itself.

The question keeps coming up because the ICP ecosystem has produced both an honest case and some ugly failures. Two posts on this page cover the two sides. My first one, How I Realized ICP Wasn't a Scam, was written in January 2024, after I had started using OpenChat and reading the numbers. The newer one, The BIL Token Rug Pull on ICP and What It Taught Me, is from June 2026, after a token called BIL was minted through a vulnerability and dumped until it went to zero. Read together, they show what I believe and where my thinking has changed.

In 2024 my case was about the protocol. I found the storage pricing, roughly $5 per gigabyte per year for smart contract memory, and the idea that applications, data and user experiences could live entirely on chain instead of on workarounds like IPFS. I was impressed that OpenChat had a wallet built in, that I could swap ICP for chain-key ether, and that the Network Nervous System was an active DAO where I had voted on proposals. The number that settled it for me was supply. I divided 5.13 by 4.69, the all-time supply against genesis, and got about 9% total inflation since genesis. Over the last year, 5.13 divided by 4.94 gives about 3.8%. Anyone can run that check, and it is why I stopped accepting claims that the tokenomics were broken without doing the math myself. Check the numbers yourself before you rely on mine.

Back then I went further than I would go now. I sold my other holdings and moved everything into ICP, and I called the risk asymmetric and speculated about where the price could go. That was my own bet at the time, not a forecast I can stand behind. Rereading the 2024 post, I would rather say that plainly than let the enthusiasm stand on its own.

The BIL episode changed how I think about risk, though not how I think about the protocol. BIL was marketed as a proof-of-work token on ICP, with EXE burned to create miners that mined BIL. Then a hacker exploited a vulnerability, minted a huge amount of BIL, dumped it, and the price crashed to zero. The lesson I took from it is about position size. When a token goes to zero, something else has to double just for you to get back to even, and the human mind feels losses far more sharply than it enjoys gains. I also said that Bitcoin has about as good a chance of going to zero as ICP does, so there is no zero-risk coin. My working rule now is that a token should be treated as worthless by default unless there is enough evidence that it is different. Almost nothing in the ICP ecosystem passes that test for me except ICP itself, and then OpenChat as my next-largest position, which I bought when it was around 0.05.

So my view has moved from calling ICP the most legitimate crypto I had found to saying the protocol can be real while the tokens built on it can still go to zero. The research has to cover the specific token you hold, not only the chain underneath it. Both posts are below, the 2026 one first, followed by the 2024 one. The contents list comes next, so you can jump straight to either post.

If you want the strongest case against ICP laid out before you decide anything, read the bear case for ICP and why I still hold. If your question is how much to stack, my ICP accumulation strategy covers that. This page stays on the narrower question of whether ICP is a scam and what the rug pulls taught me. Nothing here is financial advice. It is my own experience, and your position and risk tolerance are not mine.

If you are holding ICP or a smaller token and want someone to look at your position with you, you can book a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

The BIL Token Rug Pull on ICP and What It Taught Me

From my video published June 17, 2026.

We just had another rug pull on the Internet Computer Protocol, and the token this time was BIL. I want to talk about the number one lesson to learn from it and a little bit about how this happened. If you look at the ICP tokens, BIL had a pretty big market cap. It traded on EXE, and maybe it's still going, but it's not something I'm going to participate in. It was hyped up for a while as being a real proof of work coin on ICP. The basic idea behind the tech is actually pretty sweet: you burn EXE and you get miners, and the miners mine BIL.

But here's what happened. If you look at Luke's ICP status, a hacker identified a vulnerability and was able to mint a hundred, two hundred, a whole lot of BIL. They created a whole bunch of BIL, and then they were able to dump that entire market. They basically used that vulnerability to create a huge amount of BIL and then crashed the price to zero. People started buying it right back up, and then the price crashed again.

The more tokens you hold, the more risk you carry

To me, the key lesson here is that the more tokens you invest in, the more risk you're putting on yourself. And when you have something that goes to zero, something else has to double just for you to break even. Especially over the last few days, I did a video where I said I hate meme coins. What sucks about crypto, in my opinion, is all these tokens on the Internet Computer Protocol. Almost any of these smaller tokens could go to zero at any time, for any reason. That's why I care so much about finding the lowest risk place I can put my crypto.

Now, there isn't any zero risk option. Bitcoin is absolutely not zero risk. At this point, I'd say Bitcoin has as good a chance of going to zero, for one reason or another, as the Internet Computer does. Even though ICP is newer, it has a huge team behind it. All kinds of things can happen. There's no coin you're guaranteed to never lose everything on. But a lot of these coins that get created, especially on smaller projects, are extremely risky.

Why losses hurt more than gains feel good

Not only are these tokens risky, they're distracting. The human psyche is wired to overemphasize loss. For example, if you lost money on the BIL token, here's how your mind works: if you lost $100 on BIL and you made $1,000 on ICP in price appreciation, your mind would probably be far more upset that BIL went to zero than it would be happy that you made $1,000 on ICP.

I see this in practice with my kids. If I fine them a dollar or I give them a $10 bonus, they're much more upset about losing the dollar than they are happy about the $10 bonus. This makes sense in a primal, reptilian-brain kind of way. You're wired to prioritize danger and negativity over just having a peaceful environment. In prehistoric times this made sense, where there's a tiger or a bear coming up to eat your young, and the brain says, okay, we're going to quit paying attention to how serene everything is and focus on this bear. That same wiring is now firing over a token like BIL.

Pick a handful of projects and research them to death

The lesson I take from the BIL token is that I don't want to be in any of these coins except ICP and maybe one or two carefully chosen others. The main way I've gone wrong in crypto, and the way almost everyone goes wrong, became clear to me again recently. I talked to some people in person last night, and they're telling me XRP is going to go to $10,000 and that they bought the Trump meme coin. I try to tell them the tech is crap on those others, the market cap is already huge, and it's like they can't hear me. It's like I'm speaking another language. I'm talking about things that matter, about reality and huge amounts of research, and they're talking about one video they saw, some guy saying XRP is going to $10,000. That's locked into their mind now.

So what we can learn from the BIL token going to zero is that you need to pick your projects extremely, extremely carefully. Don't just buy something without doing a stupid amount of research on it. New projects like BIL should take a lot of time to prove themselves before most of us invest. By this point, OpenChat is my second largest position. It's proven itself, but it's still dumped quite a bit since I bought it too. Honestly, I'd have been better off buying ICP than OpenChat, because the price against ICP has dumped quite a bit. But the difference is this is a real project, and it was around 0.05 when I started buying it.

Default to skepticism: a token is worthless until proven otherwise

So the key takeaway from this BIL token, for me, is no more than a handful of tokens for most of our portfolios. We do technical analysis, we talk about the most recent news, and I do try to look at whichever coins are the most interesting and keep an open mind. But I think a lot more of us in crypto need more skepticism and more disbelief that any token has any value at all. To me, a token should be considered absolutely worthless by default, unless there's enough evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it's different. In the ICP ecosystem, and the same as in the rest of crypto, almost nothing passes that test for me except the Internet Computer Protocol itself. And then OpenChat is my next biggest position.

I think the best part is that if you did lose money on BIL, it's a good chance to reevaluate your portfolio. Some of you said that after you lost money on BIL, you dumped everything else back into ICP. And yes, in the short term, some of these meme coins, if you were in on them super early, would have made you more money. But if you watch these coins over the long term, ICP is usually beating them. If you want to go deeper on the projects I actually hold and trust, you can follow along through my ICP Crypto playlist, where I work through this thinking in detail.

How I Realized ICP Wasn't a Scam

From my video published January 24, 2024.

Many of you have asked me how I figured out that the Internet Computer is not a scam. So many people just say that Jerry's promoting this scam coin, or it's a rug pull, or the tokenomics are bad. Here's how I figured out that everyone who is saying ICP was a scam or a rug pull was either lying about it or simply repeating someone else's lie.

The first thing I did was my own research

The first thing I did is I actually did my own research. I actually went to the Internet Computer website. You'd be amazed how many people don't go to the website when they're researching crypto. So I went to the website and I started to notice some things, like $5 per gigabyte per year for smart contract memory. And I started to see, wait a minute, this is something different. This is a smart contract cloud that hosts everything on chain: data, content, computations, and user experiences. You don't need to use legacy IT.

I was aware that many cryptos were built on things like IPFS, and that the stuff wasn't actually on chain, but I didn't see why that was important, because I didn't know there was an alternative. I did not know that there was another way to build until I found the Internet Computer. And I looked at the website, and I've seen a lot of crypto websites and projects. This one stood out to me. I'm like, wait a minute, you can ditch legacy IT and build tamper-proof, unstoppable Web3 stuff.

Then I went down the rabbit hole on the dashboard

Where I really got down the rabbit hole is I went to the dashboard, and I'm like, wait a minute, this is doing thousands of transactions a second. The computation is massive compared to something like Ethereum and anything else in crypto. This thing has terabytes. This thing has a lot of data stored on chain, millions of internet identities.

And then I started actually using the applications and the technology. As part of my research, I joined OpenChat. And when I started using OpenChat, I realized, oh my God, this is truly special. You have a wallet right in OpenChat. I'm holding all these cryptos in my wallet right now. I can send people crypto effortlessly — I just sent a half ICP in my OpenChat to someone to bully Bassett for giving me a video idea that I liked. I effortlessly sent a half ICP.

Once I started using OpenChat, I read what OpenChat is, and I realized this is built on chain. And because it's built on chain, it has a token with real value. It has capabilities like sending, and you can swap coins. I could swap ICP right now. If I wanted to swap ICP into chain-key Ethereum, I could get 0.005 ckETH for ICP right now, and it just pops into my wallet. Once I started using the technology and I signed in with internet identity, I realized the things other cryptos were hoping to do, talking about doing, ICP has already done — and way, way more. Which then made me more and more curious.

DFINITY is the largest R&D team in blockchain

So I looked up DFINITY, and they're the largest research and development team in blockchain. I'm like, how has nobody told me this before? Out of all these crypto people making all these videos and posts, I had never once heard that DFINITY, the team behind the Internet Computer, was the largest research and development team in blockchain.

And then I started looking up Dominic Williams on YouTube and on X. And I watched the videos, and I saw the things Dominic was talking about. When I started listening to Dominic, I'm like, this guy is the Steve Jobs of crypto. This guy is an absolute visionary superstar in crypto. He sees way beyond what I hear anybody else talking about. His team has built the most technologically advanced project by far in crypto. I've watched hours and hours and hours of Dominic's videos, read his posts, and I researched the Internet Computer.

And then I started using the Network Nervous System. To me this is the most powerful DAO in all of crypto. It is the most used active DAO in all of crypto. Once I started using this, I'm like, holy crap, this is such a sleeper. And then I realized everybody that's saying it's a scam is either clueless or a blatant liar. And why would people blatantly lie about the Internet Computer? Because they've been paid to lie. As someone who's been deep into the conspiracy world, I'm very familiar with all of that.

The more I've used the Internet Computer, the more convinced I've become. I've voted on proposals. I've participated in the Internet Computer's launchpad, which to me is the most advanced launchpad in all of crypto, open to anyone with an ICP account. I did real research. I looked at the governance and the staking. If you want to follow how I keep digging into all of this, I share my newest research in my ICP Crypto playlist.

The Hex comparison that made it click

Joe Parys said to me, explain how Hex pumped so much off of basically great marketing — or let's say effective marketing. "Great" makes it sound like I agree with it. I don't, but it was effective. Hex pumped hugely off of effective marketing and token lockups.

And then I looked at ICP. I'm like, wait a minute. I can lock up my ICP and get 16% annual rewards. And I remembered how much Hex exploded just off of token lockups with no other real value. I looked, and in my opinion this thing is going to rip harder than anything I've seen since Ethereum in crypto — which has done a thousand X and maintained it since I found it. While I slept, I took small profits on Ethereum and didn't see the big vision. I'm like, I'm not missing ICP this time.

I saw that 48% of the ICP was locked up, and that most of the token unlocks — like two thirds of them — have already finished. I looked at the supply. I looked at the circulation, because all the liars and naysayers were saying that the tokenomics were terrible. And I did the calculation myself. You don't have to take my word for it — you can do it yourself too.

Here's all you have to do. You take 5.13 divided by 4.69. That's the all-time supply against genesis, and it works out to about 9% all-time inflation on ICP since Genesis. To all the "unlimited tokenomics" people: it's 9% since Genesis. Now, if you want to look at the last year, which is most relevant, you would divide 5.13 by 4.94, and you get about 3.8% real inflation on ICP in the last year — 9% total since Genesis. So I realized ICP wasn't a scam because I looked. I freaking looked. I looked myself. If you want to go deeper on why the tokenomics actually hold up, I broke this down further in why crypto market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real.

Why I put my entire portfolio into ICP

I took an hour or two after my initial research, and after I've looked at hundreds, maybe thousands, of altcoins by now, my first impression of ICP was very positive. So then I put some more serious time into researching it, and I realized this is the real deal. Not only is this not a scam, in my view this is the opposite of a scam in crypto. To me this is the most legitimate crypto out there. There is nothing even close to ICP today. ICP is so far ahead of anything else that, once I realized this, I dumped my entire portfolio into it.

I sold every single coin. I sold all my Bitcoin, all my Ethereum, all my Solana, all my DeSo, and every other crypto I was holding. I sold all of them when ICP was at $3, because my research indicated that to me it was so asymmetric in risk. If you look back at how that's gone for me, I put everything into ICP under $3, and I went all in on it publicly back in October, buying and buying and buying all through October. This is my own experience and what I chose to do, not advice for you. And now, to me, this is nothing compared to where I think we're going. If you're wondering how much is enough, I shared my own framework in 100 ICP is enough, 10,000 ICP is God tier.

Think about this: I discovered the Internet Computer for free. Nobody paid me to talk about it, or not talk about it. I found the Internet Computer for free. And based on my research, after being in crypto since 2014, I've realized that in 10 years in crypto I haven't seen anything ever this promising. In my opinion, Bitcoin was not this promising compared to this. This is the first technology that you could truly rebuild the entire internet off of. In my view this could have a 10-plus trillion dollar market cap one day. I've never seen anything this promising in the history of crypto, with the price it's at versus the technology. Never. The closest I've ever seen was Ethereum in 2016 and Bitcoin in 2014. I've never seen anything this good before. This is my opinion based on my own experience, and you should do your own research before making any decisions.

Why people keep calling it a scam

The last question I'll wrap up with is, well, why do people constantly put out these scam lies about the Internet Computer? Think about what I'm saying. To me, this has the best technology in crypto. There's nothing that's even close to this good. Now think of the implications of that. Think about the amount of money once people who are in Bitcoin go looking for something better and they find the Internet Computer. Think about the money that will flow out of Bitcoin and Ethereum into the Internet Computer.

Think about massive exchanges like Binance. They have a lot to lose if people pull their money out of BNB and put it into the Internet Computer. Think about Solana and all the FTX money and sketchy stuff that went on there. They have a lot to lose if people in Solana realize that, compared to the Internet Computer, it's like comparing dial-up internet to cable fiber optic. You can't hardly build anything actually on Solana — you have to use centralized tech and oracles, and that's expensive and it's vulnerable to security flaws. In my view Solana cannot become like the Internet Computer. Even if they could, it'd take years and years just to get where the Internet Computer is at today.

Imagine all the people who are in Solana. Imagine the people holding XRP, Cardano, and Dogecoin, realizing that instead of holding Dogecoin, you can buy the Internet Computer and earn 16% on something I personally believe has a very high likelihood of appreciating. Now, can you see why there are so many lies and so much silencing and ignoring of the Internet Computer, and why so many people call it a scam?

The Internet Computer is the grim reaper

To me, the Internet Computer is the grim reaper. It's going to annihilate many of these other coins. There's no need for them to exist once you know the Internet Computer, and that's what's happening. The way I see it, the entire rest of the crypto space is looking at the Internet Computer like you might be laying in a deathbed waiting for the grim reaper to come take you home. The Internet Computer is going to consume. It's a singularity that's going to consume most of the rest of crypto. The way I see it, you're either going to move your coin into the Internet Computer and try to make some use case for it there, or make some kind of niche network that can do something and plug into the Internet Computer, or you're going to have your crypto collapse like a house of cards. That's where I see the future going.

So I'm saying that, to me, the Internet Computer is a guaranteed number three one day, and probably number two or number one one day — even above Bitcoin and Ethereum, because the Internet Computer doesn't need Bitcoin and Ethereum to scale. In my opinion the only reason ICP is where it's at is because people don't know any better. Once people know better, the Internet Computer, as we've seen, quickly rocketed from the thirties into the top 20, and I believe it's going to rocket into the top 10 anytime. From there, I think it'll be a steady climb up to number three, number two, then number one. That's my speculation, not a prediction you should act on — I dug into the upside more in why I think ICP can pump to $100 anytime.

So that's how I figured out the Internet Computer is not a scam. I realized ICP wasn't a scam because I did my research. The percentage rewards on the dollar amount, as the ICP price rises, are way more than 16% to me, and that's incredible. If you value my research, I'm a full-time creator here to assist you in building the life of your dreams — a wealthy life, a healthy life, a meaningful life. My website is actually hosted on the Internet Computer, and you can't do that anywhere else in crypto.