You are about to get an in-depth, honest review of Toncoin versus Internet Computer Protocol, OpenChat, and Taggr. All of these are extremely relevant because they're all cryptos and they all have similar ideas behind them, but some are far better than others. I've been in crypto ten years, I've researched tens of thousands of altcoins, and I'll tell you exactly where my money is based on my research.
Toncoin is the largest market cap of these at about $18 billion currently. Then you scroll down to Internet Computer Protocol at around $4 billion, and then OpenChat and Taggr are much smaller. OpenChat is something like $20 million, and Taggr is around $1 million. What do they all have in common? All of these are based on a social media or messaging kind of application.
Toncoin is a coin that's being used with Telegram, which is how it has gotten so big. They've onboarded a bunch of people from Telegram. Internet Computer Protocol, by comparison, is the world's first third-generation blockchain doing fully on-chain computation. Internet Computer is an infrastructure you can build entire applications on, from websites to databases, pictures, videos, and NFTs, to a Bitcoin layer, an Ethereum layer, all on one chain. You can build a single chain with AI fully on chain, decentralized order-book exchanges fully on chain, DAOs fully on chain, and Web3 social networks fully on chain. This fully on-chain element is very big in my comparison of Toncoin to ICP.
If you haven't heard of OpenChat, it's like Telegram, but it's built on Internet Computer Protocol. It's fully on chain and has some incredible features. I use it every single day, and I have about 7,000 of the coins. On jerrybanfield.com I have links to both my Taggr and my OpenChat. Taggr is also a fully on-chain application built on ICP, with thousands of users. This is a micro-cap potential altcoin gem where you've only got about 300,000 circulating. The whole market cap is a tiny fraction of where the bigger projects are.
Why Toncoin's biggest market cap doesn't impress me
Let's talk more about Toncoin first, because it's the biggest market cap of the group and a lot of people are hyped up about it. But I see some critical problems. Toncoin first started off when the Telegram team put out a native cryptocurrency called Gram, and the SEC sued them and took that down. What's been problematic since then is that a quote "independent community of developers and blockchain enthusiasts" is behind it. If you go to the TON Foundation, there's almost no transparency about who actually is working on this. You've got a few foundation council members listed, and that's it. We have no transparency about who the actual developers are who are building and working on giving this value.
Ultimately, what I see crypto investing comes down to is the team you have that is building and giving your protocol true value and the token true utility. This is where Internet Computer Protocol shines. They have the largest research and development team in blockchain. I need to compare things, because I've done videos just reviewing Toncoin by itself and listing the problems I had with it, but unless you compare it to other things, you can't really tell. That's what's wrong with crypto: so much stuff happens in isolation, and without comparing, you don't really have perspective. You might just take it for granted that with a given crypto you're only going to get three names and hardly any transparency about who's working on it. I don't take that for granted, because 90% of my portfolio is Internet Computer, which has the largest research and development team in blockchain, with a huge number of engineers.
Dominic Williams, the founder and chief scientist of DFINITY, which is a lead contributor to Internet Computer Protocol, said that if you want to research an altcoin, what you should do is look at how many engineers are actually building and improving what the protocol itself can do. This is where you'll find the weakness of almost every single altcoin: there are very few engineers, very few PhDs, very few senior technical people who are coding and making the infrastructure better. So consider that right now the Toncoin market cap is about four times bigger than ICP, and yet we have almost no transparency on who's actually building and improving the quality of the protocol. To me, this looks like a project that's primarily marketing at this point. Getting people from Telegram to use this blockchain is great marketing, but marketing doesn't last the test of time. You ultimately need some foundational products that people enjoy or get addicted to. Coca-Cola has lasted because a bunch of people actually drink the sodas. In blockchain, it comes down to what your technology can do. If you want to keep going deeper on this with me, I share the whole journey in my ICP Crypto playlist.
What OpenChat does that Toncoin cannot
OpenChat is an example of what the tech can do that Toncoin cannot. On OpenChat, I'm able to swap all kinds of different coins directly in the application, fully on chain. If it's not fully on chain, it's not verifiably secure and trustworthy, and stuff always gets hacked. On OpenChat, I'm able to put a gigabyte of data directly on chain. So I don't have to worry about the Amazon account not getting paid by the developers and going down, or some hacker swapping the data, or my NFT picture getting swapped out for something else. This goes directly on chain and is all secured in the app. Even if you're a free user, you can put 100 megabytes directly on chain. That's a lot when you're talking on chain. You can use OpenChat totally for free, and this is what you can build on ICP.
Meanwhile, if you look at the actual technology and how Toncoin is operating, when you want to put up an NFT, for example, it seems the vast majority of the computation and data is hosted on IPFS or on other servers that are not in the blockchain itself. If you're directly on the blockchain, like on Internet Computer with OpenChat, everything you do is secured. This matters if you're using Telegram and then interacting with Ton, because the blockchain is just a tiny little thing and almost everything else ends up being centralized. Whereas on OpenChat, on Internet Computer Protocol, you're actually directly on the chain. So you get all the security benefits of crypto built into everything you do, from sending a simple message on OpenChat to swapping crypto. The Toncoin side is built on IPFS, so I generally refer to things like this as Web3 theater.
When Toncoin talks about "the open network," you're picturing a decentralized and open internet created by the community. When most people think about a decentralized and open internet, that's what Internet Computer actually does, for real and verifiably. You can look at the dashboard, you can see the thousands of transactions a second, you can see the cycles being burned. My website is fully on chain. You can see applications like Taggr that have been built by a single developer with no marketing budget as a side hustle. ICP's tech is so good that one single developer built an entire profitable application on chain. That's how powerful the tech is.
IPFS, Telegram bots, and the risks built into Toncoin
When you're using IPFS, this often resolves back to centralized storage like Amazon Web Services, because it's so cheap. IPFS is just being used to kind of obscure exactly which server it goes to. Amazon even has documentation showing you how to put an IPFS node on Amazon. So what's happening is you've got a development team you don't have transparency on, beyond a council, and you have to ask: are these council members engineers, or what is the role of the council? Then you've got IPFS often resolving back to centralized storage like Amazon. If the storage bill doesn't get paid, that's all happening off chain too. So the whole promise of a decentralized and open internet is blockchain theater, because all the important stuff is off chain. Whatever you're doing besides sending transactions, or holding a hash for an NFT with a link to store it off chain, almost everything you're doing besides just sending transactions is off chain.
And if it's a link to your Telegram profile, Telegram is filled with bots that are ripping people off and scamming people all over the place in crypto. That's why I deleted my Telegram channel, and it's why I use OpenChat instead, because OpenChat is not filled with bots trying to scam you and rip you off. This means that on the Toncoin side, you could easily misclick a few places or get tricked by a bot and lose all your Toncoin. In theory, things on Telegram could get hacked, and then your Toncoin could get drained when you think you're sending a legitimate transaction, because the front end was hacked. Because it's not all fully on chain, there are a huge number of potential problems that come into play. It's making promises it can't deliver. My dad used to say something like, your mouth is writing checks that your ass can't cash. That's what it's doing. Yes, it can transfer tokens from one chain to another, but that's going to require a bridge, which then brings in more risk, as we've seen bridges get hacked.
When it talks about having a DAO, staking, and on-chain governance, what we've seen in many other cryptos is that the quote "DAO" really is just a polling mechanism, and then the developers have a backdoor to actually execute the real changes to the blockchain. That's how these chains end up forking a bunch. With some of the Ethereum upgrades, they forked the blockchain, abandoned the original one, and made a new version of it. That's an oversimplification, but that's what happens when you're using something that's not all fully on chain with fully on-chain governance.
Why OpenChat ownership is real and Toncoin's is not
So to me, the fundamentals of the coin for the long term are very weak. In the short term, there's marketing. But this is also based on Telegram, a centralized application that you have no ownership over just by using it. By comparison, when you use OpenChat, you can buy the OpenChat token, and then refer a friend and get a diamond membership, which is pretty cheap — I don't know, $10, $20, maybe $30 for a lifetime one. You get a lifetime membership, and you can then refer people to OpenChat. I've earned hundreds of OpenChat just by referring people to join OpenChat, who've then become members themselves. And then I hold the OpenChat token; I have thousands of them. So the OpenChat token is a real ownership and governance token, because it's all fully on chain. That means the success of OpenChat benefits me.
Whereas with Telegram and Toncoin, you can get a bunch of people onboarded, but there's no real decentralization present in that system. Even though Toncoin is proof of stake, you've got some huge addresses on it, like this "believers fund," which maybe is a staking fund, but I clicked on it and it didn't load. A lot of the supply sits in the top four or so wallets. This is extremely problematic. As big a market cap as it is, I'd much rather hold OpenChat. OpenChat is a roughly $20 million market cap that hasn't even been listed on centralized exchanges yet, although that's coming pretty soon. For OpenChat to get up to where Toncoin is today would be something like a thousand-x. So in my opinion, Toncoin is drastically overvalued. If you look at the explorer, Toncoin does have a lot of addresses, but that traffic is being funneled from a centralized application where people are losing huge amounts of money to scams and bots.
I think people who really start to understand crypto are going to keep moving into Internet Computer organically, and then they're going to end up on OpenChat and/or Taggr. Taggr is more like Twitter, where it's open and you can post to everybody, whereas OpenChat is more directly like Telegram. If you've never tried either, you can use both for free, and you're always welcome to come hang out with me and the rest of the Jerry Banfield Family while you do.
The math on why I hold 90% ICP
If you want some gains, I just can't see the gains you're going to get holding Toncoin. It's already so big. The fully diluted valuation says 37 billion already. Ethereum is only about ten times bigger than that. Whereas ICP, I believe, is easily going to get to where Ethereum is now, and ICP would have to do roughly a hundred-x to get to where Ethereum is now. As I said, just to get to where Toncoin is now, OpenChat would have to do a thousand-x, and Taggr is only a $1.7 million market cap. They're so tiny that relatively small amounts of money can move them much bigger. That, to me, is why 90% of my portfolio is ICP. Whether OpenChat or Taggr succeeds individually, ICP, the protocol, is the infrastructure that's prepared to succeed almost regardless of everything else. Then I have smaller positions in OpenChat and Taggr, because to me these are delivering, for real, what Toncoin is only trying to make it look like it's delivering.
Look at the staking, too. On Toncoin the staking APY is only around 3.9%. On Internet Computer Protocol the staking APY is almost 14.9% right now, which is about three times bigger, with a smaller market cap, which is absolutely amazing. And Taggr actually pays you out. Taggr is like an ownership token, and because it's fully on chain, and the business system is fully on chain, you actually get paid out ICP every week from the profits of the platform itself. The platform is self-sustaining and fully funded on ICP.
Now, OpenChat and Taggr, if ICP goes down, they're going to go down with it. So ICP, to me, is the least risky, while Taggr and OpenChat are more risky but smaller. Whereas with Toncoin, you look at them posting about "bringing the future of Ton gaming to life," and there is no real Ton gaming. You cannot actually do gaming on the Ton blockchain. You can have games that are built on IPFS, off chain, that then integrate tokens, but that's not real Web3 gaming. As I've seen playing Gods Unchained, when you play a game that is not actually on the chain, and you hold a token that does not give you real voting power, it's just another Web2 game with a token, where the company changes the NFTs and changes the rules of the game, and you sit there as a user with no real power, just like playing every other game out there. That has nothing to do with crypto. This is the same reason I've been so skeptical of crypto gaming in general, and it's a big part of why I'd rather just be bored and level up in ICP and OpenChat than chase that hype.
Web3 theater, transparency, and leading by example
This is the issue I have with most of crypto right now: decentralization and Web3 theater. The technology is not actually able to do everything on chain, and therefore it can't give you a true Web3 experience. The more people figure this out, the more they're going to dump things like Toncoin, because to me this is mostly hype and speculation. It's mostly marketing, and marketing wears out. I've called out scams like Hex, which was all marketing and simply a token, and people were so pissed off at the time when I said that, but now it looks pretty accurate, doesn't it?
The lack of transparency, as big as Toncoin is, bothers me. Now, I'll tolerate something like Taggr, with a one-plus-million-dollar market cap, having an anonymous founder who works part-time on the project, because it's so small. OpenChat, by contrast, has a team you can see exactly who's on. And for a big-market project, you should have a really impressive team of engineers extensively listed. Having almost none of that listed is just ridiculous.
So I've done a thorough comparison of all of these, because they all have a lot in common. This is why I've chosen not to hold Toncoin: it doesn't look like a very good investment to me. I'm transparent about exactly what I'm holding, because the biggest problem I see in crypto YouTube is a lack of transparency. People aren't telling you how much they got paid to promote cryptos. People aren't telling you which coins they're actually holding and how much. So I will: I'm about 90% ICP, around 5% Taggr, and roughly 3% or so OpenChat, and then I have a couple of smaller coins on ICP with a few hundred dollars in each. I'm leading by example, and I hope more and more people who create content will do this as well. I love comparing these projects head to head, and if that's your thing too, I did a similar deep dive on Binance Coin (BNB) versus Internet Computer (ICP).
I've done a huge amount of research here. I've used Taggr for months now, I've used OpenChat for almost a year, and I've been on ICP for more than a year. I've used Telegram a whole bunch, and I don't see any good reason to use Toncoin. I don't even see that I want to use Telegram at all going forward, for everything I've already said about the bots. My actual website is hosted on Internet Computer Protocol, and I originally filmed this comparison live because one of the viewers asked me to please compare Toncoin to ICP. I figured bringing in OpenChat and Taggr would make that a much better comparison. If you want to try OpenChat and Taggr for yourself, you can try both of them totally for free. You don't need to buy any of the coins to get started, and you can see exactly what they're doing. If you defend or critique Taggr the way I do, you might appreciate my full response in Dear Taggr critics, and you can always come talk all of this through with me directly.