Pakistan's national messenger app that they're building on ICP might be one of the biggest applications we've ever seen for ICP, and almost no one understands why. I don't know if this is the big announcement that Pierre has been teasing, but this is a much bigger deal than people think it is.
What Pierre Actually Announced
On the profile of Pierre, who's the chief business officer for DFINITY, he posted that the national messenger app they're building for Pakistan is making great progress. It's live on the Pakistan cloud engine and in the testing phase with a smaller group. It's become one of his favorite chat, audio, and video apps, and he said it's so nice to see how all the technological breakthroughs are coming together: sovereign, tamper proof, always-on cloud, an on-chain messenger, identity encryption, and scalable architecture.
That post has about 17,000 views right now, and on the surface this doesn't look like a big deal to crypto retail, because it just sounds like one more thing, one more partnership. Especially if you're down on ICP, you're thinking, oh, one more thing that doesn't matter. But it matters so much more than you think because of the architecture. Did you catch all the features Pierre mentioned? These are important. Sovereign, tamper proof, always-on cloud, on-chain messenger, identity encryption, and scalable architecture, all in one spot. That might just sound like buzzwords, and you're like, who cares? Here's why it matters: this could burn more ICP than everything else put together that's happening on ICP right now. And that means things like this on ICP are potentially a huge deal for the token.
Why "Built on Ethereum" Doesn't Help the Token
By comparison, I was listening to Blockchain Pill, and there's a guy on there, Aaron, talking about what a big deal it is that all this stuff is being built, quote, on Ethereum. Well, even if you build trillions and trillions of dollars of real-world assets, quote, on Ethereum, almost everything is actually off the blockchain, and the blockchain itself just settles small transactions. The problem is that almost none of that — a millionth or less of the economic value from building all of it — will translate to the actual Ethereum token. You could have trillions of dollars of assets sitting on chain, but what does that do for the Ethereum token when you're paying tiny gas fees, most of the time you're not even transacting, and most of the time you don't even need Ethereum to do anything? That means you can have tons of value accumulate in stablecoins and things like that, while the actual Ethereum token does not get that much utility.
I set that up to explain how this is different with ICP. The huge difference is that if this app were built using anything else — if it were, quote, on Ethereum or on Solana — the way it would be built is that all the other components would run on Amazon's or Google's infrastructure or some other infrastructure. The majority of the expenses to host it would not use the token at all; they would be paid in fiat currency to cover all those off-chain components. Which means that if this were built on something besides ICP, the real chance for the token to capture value is zero. It is minuscule.
Now, many things like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, and XRP simply have a lot of marketing and speculative value, but in my view that's not going to last forever, because when people are speculating, at some point they expect and need a real business system. I'm amazed how long crypto has been able to go along without real business systems by just speculating that maybe the token will be more valuable later. At some point, there's going to need to be a real revenue driver for the token.
How ICP Turns a Hosting Bill Into a Burn Engine
So how is this different for ICP? With this app, the actual hosting bill is paid via cloud engines, and then 20% of that hosting bill is burnt, and all of it works with the ICP infrastructure. For a national messenger app serving a country with hundreds of millions of people like Pakistan, the hosting bill would be the largest single expense. Again, if all this were built somewhere else, that hosting bill would not be bringing value to the token — but on ICP, it is. Something like this at scale for an entire nation could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in hosting, based on the previous research I did. That means this single app could burn maybe ten times as much ICP as is being burned through everything else on ICP.
And what's awesome is that this is just the first public example we're seeing of this. The important takeaway is the infrastructure, the setup, and how this is fundamentally different from everything else happening in crypto. No matter how much stuff you supposedly build on these other blockchains, the hosting — the most expensive part — doesn't need the token and doesn't get spent through it. That's why building on those other tokens requires insane amounts of partnerships and adoption just to make a little bit of real revenue for the blockchain. Meanwhile, ICP does not need that much adoption to send the actual burn rate up huge. Just one app like this could 10x the entire burn of the entire ICP ecosystem.
Why Pakistan Wants This Architecture
But here's the thing beyond that. Why is Pakistan building this? Why wouldn't Pakistan build a national messenger app some other way? Because they want the unique technology properties that you can't get anywhere else. They want something sovereign. They don't want China or the United States to have control over their national messenger app, to be able to spy on everything happening on it, and to be able to shut the app off anytime they want. At the same time, they don't want to build out the data centers and the infrastructure to do all this themselves.
They want something tamper proof, where the US and China and hackers can't easily come in and steal people's data, change people's data, hack, phish, and do all of that. They want something resilient, because especially in Pakistan, you don't want to have to worry that your data center gets hit with a missile, or that there's an uprising in one spot and your entire app just gets turned off. And they want something that is on chain, with data verifiability, with everything in a secure environment, plus identities tied into all of it.
With ICP, they get one identity system that they don't have to manage. DFINITY already built out the identity system with the network nervous system, so Pakistan doesn't have to figure out how to make it so you can sign in on every device, have a consistent experience, and use passkeys — that's already figured out. Then add encryption and scalable architecture: this is a test right now, but it could scale up to a very expensive hosting bill that a government could afford to pay. You can see why, for a government like Pakistan, this is ideal infrastructure. There's nowhere else they can get all of these properties together. This is the best technical solution for exactly what they're trying to do.
What a National Deployment Would Burn
When or if this gets deployed at a national level, the government would be footing the bill, and the bill might be millions of dollars a month. I researched this, and that's a reasonable bill for a national messenger app that would serve up to 500 million people. That could cost millions of dollars a month in hosting. Then you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of dollars a month, in ICP being burned just from one single app. If this weren't built on ICP, you'd be lucky to burn a few hundred dollars a month in ICP to run it, with all the money getting paid to someone else.
The Bigger Signal for the ICP Thesis
What to me is bigger than this app specifically is that this is a sign of everything. All of our theories, all of the things we've been saying about ICP: you have a real government building a real app with huge potential, and you can see exactly why they're building it. To me, this is a clear sign that our thesis for ICP is correct. While the rest of crypto is chasing meme coins, settling for tiny little gains, and getting excited over a few percentage points of a pump in Bitcoin or Ethereum, with ICP we have infrastructure that pays off even with relatively small adoption.
Consider Amazon Web Services. As I recall, AWS brings in hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue to host websites and infrastructure, and it's valued at around a trillion dollars, which is around where Bitcoin is. Even if ICP only captures 10% of that in the foreseeable future, in my view you're talking about something that should be valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, which would be 100x from where ICP is today — and something that could bring in tens of billions of dollars a year just in hosting revenue. Do you realize tens of billions of dollars a year in hosting revenue is pretty small compared to the entire world's infrastructure for hosting the Internet? And tens of billions of dollars a year flowing through things like cloud engines and the ICP mainnet equals billions of dollars of ICP being burned every year. That's from a tiny percentage of global revenue.
Here's your sign. This is your sign that real things are being built, and it doesn't even matter how this one in particular goes, because this is just what Pierre is allowed to say publicly. How many other things are being built privately? How many companies and governments are waiting on DFINITY, or consulting agencies associated with DFINITY? How many others are waiting to try this out because they want the technology and the properties of what it can do? We will find out. But to me, this is great validation. We are in the right position. There is something special here with ICP that is not present with any other coin. Even if we only get a tiny fraction — maybe 10 percent or even less — of the global revenue for hosting websites and infrastructure, I believe that will be worth billions of dollars a year in ICP being burnt. That's more than the entire market cap of ICP right now.
And the more real building like this happens on ICP, the more the speculative price of the token will kick in too. Because right now, the way I see it, ICP is just being sat on with financial engineering, which you can only do until there's even one app like this deployed at a government level — maybe within the next year or so. Even one app like this would mean you just couldn't keep the price down too far, because there'd be constant buying and burning.
I'm Building on ICP Too
And what if there are five or ten other things like this already secretly building that just aren't as far ahead? What if there are more and more people like me who keep building on the ICP blockchain? On my website, I've got my book Officer Banfield on there, and it has, I think, a few hundred megabytes of audio files in it, which costs me about five dollars, maybe a little less, in cycles. I'm going to put more and more books on my website, so that's going to increase my hosting bill on ICP. Even if all you get is more and more people like me who just keep building as solo players on the ICP blockchain, the real burn cost — the real revenue from the token itself — keeps going up.
So this is great information we've seen with the Pakistan app. Things are going in the right direction, and to me this is clear evidence that everything is in place and everything is okay. In my view, the cheaper the price gets, the more that can be made when the price pumps — but this isn't financial advice; I'm all in on ICP. I literally have my entire website hosted on ICP, and I'm paying cycles every day when you come and use it.
When you go buy my book or you join my chat, that burns ICP too — and I'm grateful we had somebody join the chat almost every day this week. If you want to talk with me, joining the chat is the best place to do that.
I've even got a leaderboard on the site to show the top spenders.
I've got tips on there as well, paying in ICP or credit cards. All of this is burning ICP every day.
If you want to keep following how stories like this play out, I cover it all on my ICP Crypto playlist.
I've even got coaching for YouTube on my website.
Talk to me — everything I just listed runs on chain, with the hosting paid in cycles.
And there's coaching for dating on there too.
So we're in the right position. Stick with it. Don't get fudded out or distracted. I hope to see you again soon, especially on jerrybanfield.com.