Monero versus Internet Computer Protocol. Both of these cryptocurrencies are near the same market cap, and the question is: which one of them, for me as an investor, based on 10 years in crypto and thousands of altcoins researched, looks like the best long-term investment? If you've followed my work before, you probably already know where this is going. But let's take a look at Monero first.
Monero is a privacy coin that's been around since 2014, and unlike a lot of other altcoins, it's actually still up about 100x from when it first launched. But there are some big problems I can see coming for Monero. For example, Binance delists Monero. One of the things governments are most actively hostile towards in crypto is privacy coins, because other than privacy coins, governments can pretty easily track who you are. In fact, something like ICP has the technology, if desired, where you could KYC and automatically report your transactions and submit them if you wanted to or if it was required. Whereas with something like Monero, it is the leading privacy coin. But what is the future of privacy coins? Let's look at some more of the details of how Monero works, and then we'll look at Internet Computer.
Monero: a privacy coin with no visible team
If you go to the Monero website, it definitely has an older look and feel to it. But one of the big problems with Monero is, which group of people is actually working on Monero? And what is the real utility of holding Monero going forward? There's no team at all listed on Monero, which means no transparency. And to me, without transparency, I don't have trust in something. They value, understandably, privacy on a privacy coin, but that also means who's actually working on this — we can't tell. And where's funding going to come from for future development? We can't tell. This is proof-of-work mining, which to me is pretty outdated.
Monero says it's the coin with the highest level of privacy. It is the leader in privacy coins, and it explains how this is done: basically, when you send a transaction, it slices it into a ton of small transfers of random size that get sent to a whole bunch of other people that the recipient can receive. But if what happened with Binance delisting Monero is any indication, other exchanges have refused to list it in the first place. This is not something I've ever seen on Coinbase. So those are two of the big exchanges, and it's not listed on either of them, which means who's going to be able to access this in the future?
The chart will trick you
If you look at Monero compared to Internet Computer Protocol by market cap, these look very similar. And for the people who just look at the chart, ICP is down 98% from its all-time high over the past 10 years, while Monero is down 66%. If you just look at the chart, you might be tricked into thinking that Monero is the better investment. But if we start thinking about where this is going to go in the future, the picture flips. This is exactly why I believe crypto market caps are a distraction — the number on the screen tells you almost nothing about which protocol is actually going to matter. I've spent years working through this kind of comparison in my Money playlist, and the chart is almost always the most misleading part.
What Internet Computer actually does
Monero is a privacy chain that functions very similar to Bitcoin — it splits up the transactions to make them private. Meanwhile, Internet Computer Protocol is the world's first true third-generation blockchain, with the world's first massive level of computation that you can do directly on chain. It's the world's first real scalable world computer. To give you an idea of the absolute basics, Ethereum and many of these others are kind of like a starter version of what a world computer can do. This is a real world computer that can run social networks fully on chain and run AI fully on chain. Nothing else can do this. With no other crypto could I put my website directly on chain and then send people to another fully on-chain application to chat with me that's paygated by ICP.
ICP is set up for the absolute best in DeFi and meme coins. On OpenChat, you can swap all these cryptos. And if you consider that Monero is very close to ICP in market cap, it looks like ICP is drastically undervalued compared to Monero. I keep all of my deep dives on this in my ICP Crypto playlist if you want to see the full case. I also go deeper on all of this with members inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
Flat price on Monero pays you nothing
Here's an even bigger thing. With Monero, like Bitcoin, when you're holding your coin, you're just hoping the price goes up. The price over the last several years has been relatively stable — you've had a few pumps and it's been down a bit in the bear market, but the price has consistently gone up just a little bit since 2017, when it had its first bull-market pump. Since that pump, the line has been relatively flat. Well, if the price stays flat with Monero, you make nothing. You just literally sit there and make nothing.
Whereas with ICP, even if the price stays flat, I think ICP is undervalued at least a hundred times — for ICP to 100x, it would be at the market cap of Ethereum where it is now. And it's very deserving to be there, because it has by far the best tech in crypto. Nothing even compares. It has the biggest research and development team. On top of that, in ICP you get an estimated 15% rewards for just locking it up in the NNS. I've written a full walkthrough of exactly how to do that in my ICP NNS staking tutorial.
So let's say in two worst-case scenarios, the price for both Monero and ICP just stays flat. On ICP, you would at least get that estimated 15% in rewards. With Monero, you're going to get nothing. However, the real opportunity is based on what I see: I expect ICP to easily 100x within the next bull market or two. The future, to me, does not look good for Monero, because Monero is a privacy coin.
The future of privacy coins worries me
Governments, at least in any foreseeable future, are going to do one of two things. Either they're going to find things like the IRS putting out contracts to trace Monero, and exchanges like Binance delist it — so governments fight these coins and don't allow exchanges to trade them, making it hard to even get into it. Or they're going to break down the algorithm and just trace all the transactions. So I personally don't have confidence that my transactions on Monero for the indefinite future would actually be private, which to me compromises the whole integrity of the project. I went through this same worry in more depth when I asked whether I can really trust that Monero's transactions are private.
And as old as this is, it's creating blocks every two minutes at this point, whereas ICP is doing 40 blocks a second. A big consideration when investing in crypto is how well a technology is going to remain relevant in the future. I see no technology in crypto that will be as relevant in the future as Internet Computer Protocol, because even Bitcoin really needs something like Internet Computer Protocol to scale. And it turns out Internet Computer is the first in the world to have both Bitcoin and an Ethereum layer two on the exact same infrastructure. So if you fast forward a year to five years from now, Internet Computer is likely to grow exponentially. Is Monero likely to grow exponentially? No.
Now, while Monero could have a decent bull market, most cryptos don't even have a better second bull market than their first. If you consider the price of Monero against Bitcoin, its first bull market in 2017 and 2018 was actually superior to its last one, measured in the price of Bitcoin. You've got to account here for how much the US dollar was inflated. ICP, meanwhile, has not even had a proper bull market, because it was manipulated up. So we don't even have any idea how high the ICP price could go, especially when the truth about the level of the technology, the team, and what you can do with it gets out. The organic growth from the network effect is going to go really well.
A real team vs. no team
So when I compare and think about that: when I said Monero has no team, compare that to the DFINITY team behind ICP. I might even get to meet some of them in person at an event in Nashville — I just sent out an application for it. There are hundreds and hundreds of engineers that actually work there who have technical experience from pretty much everywhere — IBM, Google, Microsoft — and they're constantly upgrading the protocol.
Now, if you're holding a coin, you're basically investing in the value of the protocol in the future. With Monero, I don't think the protocol itself gets that much more valuable. With something like ICP, you can build the ability to have private transactions right into ICP — you could build the equivalent of a coin mixer on ICP, or launch your own token and do essentially the same thing on ICP that Monero is already doing. Whereas Monero is never going to have on-chain AI. It doesn't even look like it could have something like proof of stake in the future. So to me, the utility of the technology in the future is going to keep dropping. It's going to become less and less relevant every bull market and more and more down every bear market compared to the high end.
Why I hold zero Monero and 5,000 ICP
So I wouldn't put any money in Monero, because that's money I could have in ICP instead. If you look at previous crypto markets, there's usually a very small number of outliers, of winners. There's a handful of cryptos that drastically outperform Bitcoin and the rest, while most cryptos barely keep up with Bitcoin and are pretty disappointing investments in the long term. ICP, to me, is in a position to shoot up into the top three cryptos. And Monero looks to me like it's going to keep getting passed by meme coins — you've got meme coins that just pop up and have already passed Monero in market cap. You've got Shiba Inu; there are at least three meme coins, and there are going to be more meme coins that shoot up past Monero. Things like the artificial super intelligence token, which combined three AI tokens that I reviewed negatively, are up there in market cap with Monero too. So I think Monero continues to drift down, and ICP continues to go up.
Naturally, I have no Monero and I have 5,000 ICP. So I've put my money exactly where my research has told me to go. If you want to see how powerful ICP is yourself, go to jerrybanfield.com, which is actually hosted on Internet Computer Protocol. Other people, like Cityscape, who's a developer in the ICP ecosystem, have cross-referenced and verified that — yes, my website is actually on ICP. Just hosting a website on ICP is better than any other hosting option I'm aware of. If you want to talk through any of this with me directly, the door is always open inside the Jerry Banfield Family.