I've researched thousands of altcoins over the last 10 years in crypto, and I've found only one that I actually love. It's the one I put all my money into, because it has the biggest real-world use case. I want to explain exactly why, and I'll lean on several tweets from Kyle Langham of DFINITY to do it. Yes, the coin is Internet Computer Protocol (ICP).
Here's the clearest way I've seen it explained. Most of crypto is trying to compete with other cryptos. But ICP's competitors are not other cryptos at all. It isn't just a crypto. It's a platform that competes with big tech cloud: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. It has built a platform where you can run everything fully on-chain, the first platform like that in the world, and to me that is huge. This is why, out of every altcoin, I believe ICP is the only crypto with a real, massive possible impact on the world, not just hype, speculation, meme coins, and token transfers.
Why ICP belongs in the cloud computing market, not the crypto market
Let's look deeper, because right now almost all of crypto is just talking change and wasting your time. Here, in my view, is the real opportunity. According to recent estimates, the global cloud computing market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and it's on the way to over a trillion dollars. That's where ICP is relevant. None of these other cryptos fit into the global cloud computing market.
All the rest of crypto besides Internet Computer Protocol ends up building back on top of Microsoft and Google. They call it things like IPFS, but those nodes often route right back to the existing centralized cloud computing market. That's because any blockchain besides ICP can't do hardly any computation on chain. So they have to use centralized tech to run the websites, the wallets, the games, the NFTs, and the blockchain itself stays tiny.
ICP has made something different, and you can see it on the dashboard. There are six terabytes of data on chain. That's 10 times as much as on the Bitcoin blockchain, and close to all the other blockchains combined. ICP also does more computations every hour than all other blockchains do combined in a year. That's how powerful this network is. So it doesn't fit into the crypto market. It fits into the global cloud computing market. From what I see, ICP is positioned to be the fastest-growing player in this trillion-plus-dollar market, and that means far more growth potential than anything else I see in crypto, and what I'd call insane growth potential for something only valued at a few billion dollars right now.
The path forward: AI-generated apps deploying on-chain
Now look at the path forward for ICP. Another tweet by Kyle puts it simply: the path forward for ICP is AI-generated Web2 and Web3 apps deploying on ICP because of the ease of development, deployment, and maintenance. If I were you, I'd be thinking, wait a minute, other blockchains really have to use centralized tech? Yes. Hardly anything is on the blockchain itself. If you play a crypto game, it doesn't matter whether it's on Ethereum or some Ethereum so-called layer two; the game, the assets, and the website are all on centralized tech, except for some tokens on the blockchain. Everything else in crypto runs right back on centralized tech.
They don't want you to find that out, because once you see it, you realize ICP is the only infrastructure where you can access the blockchain directly through your own website. I can prove this. In my experience it's the cheapest, fastest, and most scalable way for me to host a website, and that's what I love about ICP. All the other cryptos talk about what they might do in the future, which they mostly won't deliver. ICP has delivered. The tech is here. You can use it. You can see it.
Take OpenChat, for example. It's a website, a Discord or Telegram-style community-building app, built directly on the blockchain. That cuts out the middleman. We don't have to go through Amazon or Google to host the actual website. With anything else in crypto, you go to a website that's hosted on centralized tech, which means whatever you're using is not actually decentralized, because whoever controls the website controls the user experience. So what is even going on the blockchain if the website is controlled by one single party? ICP is the only thing built where you can experience what crypto was really meant to be. I got excited about Bitcoin because of the idea of cutting out the middleman, but only ICP lets you execute that across the full tech stack, from the website to the backend, to the pictures, the videos, and the games. No other crypto can take this path. In fact, there doesn't appear to be any other technology in the world that can take this path right now.
Caffeine.ai and infrastructure secured by cryptography
That's why AI-generated Web2 and Web3 apps deploying on ICP matter. Soon they're releasing an app called Caffeine.ai, where you can just talk to the AI and it'll crank out a website on-chain, crank out an app, with the URL. The existing cloud infrastructure cannot do this, because that infrastructure is inefficient and insecure. It's not secured by cryptography. The big breakthrough ICP made is to take the whole infrastructure and secure it with cryptography, from the node machines in the network, which you have to vote in on the Network Nervous System that runs entirely on chain. The whole infrastructure is secured with cryptography, which I believe is the best solution we have to cybercrime. And cybercrime is massive for destroying the value of AI.
Right now it's hard to even take advantage of AI beyond generating images and things like that, because it's difficult for the average person to do anything except interact with centralized AI. If the average person wants to make a website or an application, AI isn't even that useful, because you have to go back to the centralized tech stack. This is a game-changing paradigm where you can go straight onto ICP and say, "Hey, I'd like to make an application like YouTube, and I want the like button." You just tell the application what you want, and the AI cranks out the code and puts it directly on ICP. Then, if you want to use the application, you need to buy and burn ICP to pay your web hosting bill, which gives ICP far more utility than any other crypto in the world.
Even Bitcoin, to me, is basically a meme coin, a speculative asset people hold hoping the price goes up. With ICP, you buy it and burn it to pay your web hosting bill. That's real utility.
Why Bitcoin developers are building on ICP
If you're into Bitcoin, there are major Bitcoin apps that have already been built and are launching on ICP. Right now Bitcoin developers hate building on centralized tech, but they have to. Almost all interactions with Bitcoin currently go through centralized tech. If it's a wallet, like a Ledger hardware wallet, that's a centralized company that built the wallet, and you access it through their software. If you're going to a website, who do you think is serving it? Right back on centralized tech. If you're trading Bitcoin on a crypto exchange, who's hosting that website, and whose app store is the app on? Almost everybody interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain isn't even touching the blockchain themselves. They're going through a centralized entity running on centralized tech to interact with Bitcoin, which to me removes the majority of the value proposition.
Bitcoin developers have been looking for a long time to build something on decentralized infrastructure itself. ICP has built the world computer, which can interact directly with Bitcoin, so developers can make Bitcoin apps on ICP that talk directly to the Bitcoin blockchain. Instead of going through a centralized third party with all the insecurities that come with it, you can use a crypto to directly control applications and send and index transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, staying in a crypto environment the entire time. So the bigger Bitcoin gets, the more Bitcoin developers find they want to build their applications, the website, the database, and the interactions with the Bitcoin blockchain, on ICP. I've covered some of these Bitcoin developers building on ICP before, and I'll do another piece looking at more of those applications and developers in the future.
AI agents only make sense fully on-chain
Then there's all this hype about AI agents. Do you realize AI agents are worthless if they're hosted on centralized tech? The whole idea of an AI agent is to be customized, do what you want, and run with your data. But if you're running an AI agent on centralized tech, you can't trust that your data is secure. Even I wouldn't want to run an AI agent, like some Jerry Banfield chatbot, on centralized tech, because then a hacker could come in and mess with my agent and get it to tell people anything. My agent could secretly be hacked and be ripping people off of their crypto while they're asking it questions. ICP gives you an environment where you could run the AI agent 100% on-chain, executing in smart contracts, so you could be certain it would do what it's supposed to do. The more AI devs find ICP, the more it's going to keep getting built on.
And if you're not that hyped about the AI aspect, consider how big AI is. Go to Google Trends, look at worldwide web search over the past five years, and compare Bitcoin, crypto, and AI. A few years ago Bitcoin was actually bigger than AI, but that has recently changed. The future is trending heavily toward AI. Bitcoin has been trending pretty flat, with a recent spike, but only growing a little, while AI has been growing rapidly. Right now AI is about five times bigger than Bitcoin on Google web search. ICP is aiming at, and hitting, the position of the best technology that uses crypto and offers something unique in AI hosting and infrastructure, a market at least five times larger than Bitcoin.
If you multiply roughly two trillion by five, you're looking at ICP having an impact across cloud computing and AI with a potential market cap of 10-plus trillion dollars. That is so much bigger than anything else happening on any other crypto right now, hundreds of times bigger. And if you switch the data to YouTube search, you'll see that while crypto is a bit bigger there, it tells the same story: AI is way bigger than Bitcoin or crypto, and that's exactly where ICP is hitting. Recently there was even a video where Kyle and Dominic showed Caffeine AI to some big players in the AI industry.
Technology That Drops Jaws in the AI Industry
What I've seen is that the technology DFINITY built is dropping people's jaws in the AI industry. This is a big breakthrough in what's possible. Out of all the thousands of altcoins I've looked at, no other crypto has presented technology that I see as truly disruptive. So many of them use technical terms they've often made up or borrowed from other cryptos to get you to think they're smart and that you just don't understand what they're really doing. The hope is that you'll assume they must be doing something useful. From what I've seen, they're not. I've researched thousands of altcoins, and the main thing most of them are actually doing is talking. Are they delivering anything like this? No.
I watched a video where Kyle was talking about how DFINITY has demoed this technology. I don't think most of us in ICP, even as bullish as I am, fully comprehend how good things can go. I remember when Bitcoin went from $170 to $1,700. I bought at $170 when it touched the bottom on Coinbase, and at $1,700 I thought, wow, this has gone really well for me. Then it went to $17,000, and I thought, how did I not see how much higher this could go? Now it's over $100,000. If you'd told me when I was buying Bitcoin at $170 that one day it would be worth thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, I just couldn't have believed things could go that well.
A Path ICP Is Walking Alone
This path forward for ICP is a path it's walking alone. None of the other cloud computing platforms can even do this without getting DFINITY's technology. Some people have asked me, well, aren't Google and Amazon going to fight ICP and try to kill it? From what I see, DFINITY has a kind of utopia here. What they're going to do is use this technology to secure their own AI. DFINITY has made a private version of this that Google and Amazon can use to put the technology on their existing infrastructure. The most popular use case I could see for that would be Google and Amazon starting to secure their own infrastructure against cybercrime and putting their AI on this technology. But ICP is essentially the public, open version that anyone can build on.
These cloud platforms like Amazon and Google want to be relevant in the future. Right now, cybercrime is weakening them to an unbelievable degree. If you know what you're doing with AI, there are so many use cases that require your data to be secure that you just don't want to run on centralized cloud. And the average person can't easily deploy an application with AI on their own. So to me, this is the future. We are all very privileged to be able to have this information before almost anybody else knows it.
Why I Believe ICP Is Where Wealth Gets Built in Crypto
My goal is to help. If you're in crypto today, I imagine you got here because you want to build wealth. In my experience and belief, the only place you need to be to build wealth in crypto is ICP. All other blockchains feel completely irrelevant to me by comparison. The rest of crypto, even Bitcoin, isn't even interesting to me anymore, because the potential use case and the value it can deliver to the world relative to its market cap just doesn't excite me the way ICP does. I believe ICP could have a market cap a thousand times where it's at today, and in the short term, easily 10 to 100 times where it's at today over the next year or two.
I've come to believe you've got to be in before this gets out into the general public, before everybody starts to know about it and realizes that you don't even need to think of ICP as a crypto. Think of it as the future of cloud computing. Cloud computing on crypto. That's how I think of it. This is the future of the internet, the way the internet gets built going forward. This isn't some crypto coin I'm hoping the price goes up on. This is a utility token that, in my view, has the most promising infrastructure behind it in the world.
I'm excited to help as many people as possible see this in time, because by the time most people figure it out, the opportunity as an investment will be gone. By the time everybody knows this, ICP's price will be so high that it's just like Bitcoin. It's too late to be talking about Bitcoin at $100,000. The time to talk about Bitcoin was 10 years ago when I was in it, when I was talking about it, when almost nobody thought Bitcoin was a good investment. Almost everybody thought it was awful, and I was in it then. To me, this is the next big thing.
IC Lighthouse and What the Tech Can Actually Do
One of the projects I want to highlight is IC Lighthouse DAO. This is an example of what you can do. All these other so-called decentralized exchanges outside of ICP call themselves decentralized, but the website isn't decentralized. If you're using a website running on centralized tech, that's not a decentralized exchange. With IC Lighthouse DAO, you get incredible functionality, and you can trade on it the same way you can on a centralized exchange. All you have to do is sign in with your Internet Identity. Then you can trade, and it's all on the blockchain. You can put in orders and trade all these different coins on ICP. I've swapped tens of thousands of dollars of Bitcoin against ICP there.
This is an example of what the tech can do. Nothing else could put an entire crypto exchange fully on chain. If your whole crypto exchange is not on chain, then in my opinion you're just wasting people's time and misleading them, because it's not actually decentralized. On ICP there are several exchanges like this. You also have ICP Swap. There's a new one, Kong Swap. There's Helix. This is the future of trading crypto, rather than sitting on some centralized exchange with a website hosted on centralized tech where they can manipulate things in the background. This is much more trustworthy, much safer, much more transparent, and much more secure.
This Is Not a Ghost Chain
What's so great is that you can look around and find all kinds of projects. Somebody said ICP is a ghost chain. That's probably false. There are big projects, like Gold DAO, decentralized exchanges like IC Lighthouse, and OpenChat. There are so many projects building directly on ICP. But unlike these other chains, ICP also has the cloud computing element built in. That's why the equivalent of paying your web hosting bill on ICP is burning cycles, and that is at all-time highs. The amount being burned, essentially the equivalent of paying your web hosting bill, is going up and up. It's up hundreds of times from earlier this year. That's not a ghost chain. That's the future. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, you can explore my Money playlist.