Polkadot is another cryptocurrency that, in my opinion, is going to zero. The technology is far outdated when compared to ICP. The whole promise and excitement for Polkadot is having these parachains and being kind of a layer zero, which the Internet Computer does way, way, way, way, way, way, way better. That, to me, means Polkadot is irrelevant and is going to get left in the dust.
So I'm going to dissect Polkadot here for you, because I can't stand y'all having these altcoins that to me just look horrible. I could take ten minutes to explain why, and at least then, if you've watched a 100x video and you watch mine, you've got a balanced opinion. I'm bringing balance to the force.
The price action over the last year
Polkadot's price action has been sucky, sucky over the last year. It's up about 12%. You've got ICP, Bitcoin, and Ethereum up like 100% or so over the last year, and Polkadot's up 12%. It had a speculative pump up there for, you know, no good reason, and I saw just almost all of it dump right away. It already had a big drop too. It's down 90% from its bull market high.
But I don't get stuck on price charts. Y'all love talking about the price, so I start off with that. To me, the last year's price action can be some of the most relevant. Is this a good time to get into Polkadot? In my opinion, no. Why? Because it has an $8.5 billion fully diluted market cap. That's bigger than the Internet Computer.
An $8.5 billion market cap for outdated tech
Given it's bigger than the Internet Computer, I would expect vastly superior technology based on the market cap. What you have instead, in my view, is technology that sucks. I mean, it's better than nothing. If you look at how they explain it, they basically learned and copied from Bitcoin and Ethereum. It says multi-chain protocol, but can you use native Bitcoin on it? Can you use chain-key-secured Ethereum on it? No, you can't do that.
Now it does have some cool features I'll go over, but they're not cool enough to me to merit taking money out of ICP and putting it into Polkadot. No way.
Layer zero, parachains, and bridges
Polkadot is known as the latest layer-zero meta-protocol. It's got a bunch of different chains on it, but it doesn't really interact with these other coins, like Ethereum or Bitcoin, at a protocol level. You have to use bridges, which then introduces centralization and ruins all the potential value I see in it.
It does have parachains. For example, Moonbeam is a parachain on Polkadot, and Polkadot and Moonbeam can interact directly on the network. But that's useless to me, because the Internet Computer's technology is already out there doing it better. If you want to see how I keep comparing these projects head to head, I keep that going in my Money playlist.
Look at the team first
If you want to size up a project, the team is one of the easiest places you can start to get an idea of what we're really working with, because this is where almost every crypto falls short. Polkadot has three people listed on the team. If you'd like to do some more research, just go to the website and Google Gavin Wood, and do your own research on what's out there.
You've got a team of three people here. Where's everybody else? Is this it? Three people for an $8 billion market cap. By comparison, look at DFINITY, the major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain and the largest research and development team in crypto. The Internet Computer has a smaller market cap than Polkadot right now, and yet there are hundreds of people listed. Many of these people you can watch in videos where they talk about stuff they invented, and you can see them posting on the forum.
So either Polkadot has a tiny team that's not impressive, or they're not being transparent about what other engineers are actually working on this. That, to me, is the easiest way you can start to get an idea of whether an altcoin is serious or not. Dominic Williams put me onto this research strategy: look for the team and how many real engineers, PhDs, computer scientists, and real developers are actually building the protocol itself. Because the protocol itself, if you're holding the token, is what you're really investing in. That's why, in my opinion, the Internet Computer's tech just crushes everything else — because its team crushes every other team. They've innovated more.
Native Bitcoin and what "on chain" actually means
One of the main hype things for Polkadot is being this layer zero, but ICP shreds these capabilities. The Internet Computer has a native Bitcoin integration built in. It can directly hold and sign transactions and read and write directly to the Bitcoin network, fully on chain. That is so vastly superior to the old, outdated technology that Polkadot is choosing. This is the future, and this is why people in the Bitcoin community are getting hyped up and building things on the Internet Computer Protocol.
You're seeing these tokens now, like ckBTC, ckETH, ckLINK, and ckUSDC, all on ICP. Compare that to having a couple dozen parachains. You can see how the transactions have continued to go up. There are over 185 million tracked Bitcoin transactions, with millions of transactions in ckBTC alone. That's just one single thing the Internet Computer does. So when you look at three people on Polkadot and this old technology, it's ridiculous to me to compare the two, because ICP is so vastly superior.
Putting an NFT on Polkadot
But it gets worse, because I took the time to find out: okay, what if I want to do something simple, like put an NFT on Polkadot? If you read Polkadot's pitch — "a scalable, interoperable, and secure network protocol for the next web" — they're talking a bunch of web three, claiming any type of data across any type of chain. That certainly sounds better than just having tokens to be transferred. It says Polkadot is a true multi-chain application environment. But can it do what ICP can do? Not even close. Not even a fraction as close.
You look at those parachain bridges, and a bridge is a crappy way to interact with Ethereum. Then the site says "built with the best technology." That's not funny to me. Are you making a joke? Because to me, this is not the best technology. Y'all are just covering your eyes and ears and saying, "Hey, we built with the best technology." I don't see any technology there that's better.
They talk about having it compiled to WebAssembly, which ICP does too — except ICP can run an entire application, like OpenChat, fully on chain. You can execute that and go directly in the browser. And what can you do on Polkadot? Well, if you want to put an NFT on Polkadot, guess where you can stick that NFT — right onto Pinata and IPFS. That's not on chain. And their long-term plan is an integration with Arweave. Their long-term plan is vastly inferior to what you can do right now on the Internet Computer Protocol.
You know how easy it is to put stuff on chain on ICP? I put the thumbnail I made for this Polkadot review fully on chain instantaneously, for free to me, because of the reverse-gas-fee model — directly on the OpenChat application, which has fully on-chain decentralized governance. That is exciting technology. Polkadot, to me, is the same old crap they're doing on Ethereum, Solana, and all these other copycat chains. When you see that reality and then read a website that says "built with the best technology," it's ridiculous.
PolkaBot AI and the "on chain" claim
You look at what Polkadot is doing on their X recently, and they're talking about PolkaBot AI — "trusted, AI-powered education on chain." PolkaBot AI. It is, in my opinion, absolutely not on chain. The only place you can really do AI on chain in the world is the Internet Computer, which is why Dominic Williams demoed the first AI on chain in the world on the Internet Computer Protocol. The computation on Polkadot is probably 10 to 100 times less than what it needs to be to do AI on chain. So this is, to me, blatant misinformation. If they're calling it on chain, are they putting one tiny little token on chain and then hosting the rest of it on IPFS? That's not on chain.
What the explorer actually shows
If you go look at the explorer, you see more problems. Events per second: people hyping Polkadot up talk about all these ridiculous 100x things at a price, but almost nothing is happening on Polkadot. This is not quite a ghost chain, but it's pretty close. Six seconds between blocks, around 47 events. This metric is linked on an official explorer, so it might be a little under the real number, but if you look at the actual events, almost nothing has happened over the last minute.
Compare that to the Internet Computer Protocol, where you've got 5,000 transactions a second. That's doing some serious computation, and the cycle burn rate on average has gone up constantly. Right now it looks like it's about two or three times what it was a year ago. The cycle burn rate has done nothing but go up and up and up. Because the Internet Computer lets you build everything fully on chain, that's the most real way to see what's actually being done computationally on chain. Compare that to Polkadot, and in one second there's often more happening on the Internet Computer than on Polkadot in a whole minute.
Why I think Polkadot is going to zero
As I said with the computation before, the raw computation power of the Internet Computer looks to be 10 to 100 times as much as what you can do on Polkadot. Yet the market cap for Polkadot looks to be 50-plus percent more, depending on the exact price of each today — 50, 60, 70 percent more for Polkadot. To me, the only reason you buy Polkadot is because you don't know any better. There's better tech out there.
There's going to be a day, as I've said in some of my previous videos, where people stop accepting a team of three people and old technology that, in many ways, is just kind of a copy of what's already been done — using the same Web2 crap, like IPFS, to do stuff off chain. To be fair, three people is better than some of these projects that have nobody. But there's going to be a day in crypto where people get pissed off about hyping things like this up. PolkaBot AI. Ridiculous. The vast universe of Polkadot. Outrageous.
So I think this has a very high likelihood of going to zero. I think it has a very high likelihood of continuing the same crappy price performance it's had over the last year. And the more people who do further research about Polkadot, the more people I expect to sell. Because, in my opinion, there's just no way this beats ICP. There's no way ICP doesn't crush this — and crush almost everything else in crypto — just based on the tech and the team alone. That's why I think Polkadot is going to zero. This is my honest opinion and my own experience, not financial advice. If you want the rest of my honest coin reviews, this is the same lens I used on Berachain, another multi-billion-dollar coin I think looks like a zero.
Why it costs me money to tell you this
It costs me money to tell you this. If I put up a video saying Polkadot was a 100x and stuck some unrealistic price on it, I guarantee you I'd get more views doing that. I'd get sponsorships offering to show their garbage token on my channel. That's what almost everybody does in crypto. I'd rather care more about your success than how much money I can put in my own wallet — which is also why I think market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real, and why I keep saying you might sell your altcoins for ICP before it's too late. If you want to go deeper on this kind of head-to-head research with me, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and ask me directly.