If you're looking for passive income in 2025, the easiest, most perfect setup I see is with Internet Computer Protocol. Let me be clear up front: this is not financial advice, and I'm not a financial advisor. I have over 10,000 ICP, and I have at least $16,000 of it locked up indefinitely, earning higher than 13% APR right now. So I clearly have a strong bias in favor of saying all of this. That said, I've been in crypto for 11 years. I've looked everywhere, and I've invested all my money in ICP because I don't see any better technology and I don't see any better passive income anywhere. That's why I keep doing video after video about it on Jerry Banfield Live and on my original channel. In my assessment, this is the best opportunity I see in the world right now.
The Actual Passive Income You Can Earn
Let me show you the actual passive income you can earn. If you go to dashboard.internetcomputer.org and click on governance, you can right now get 13.4% APR if you lock your ICP up for eight years. I'll also share a way you can get the same thing without having to lock it up for that long.
This is the first thing I did after I took six months to research Internet Computer Protocol in 2023. I bought maybe $50, then a few hundred dollars, and got up to about $1,000. But at that thousand-dollar point I realized that if I was going to put any more into this, it needed serious investment, serious consideration, and deep, deep research. So that's exactly what I did. I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into researching Internet Computer Protocol and its alternatives.
Why I Believe ICP Is the Best Technology I've Seen
What I see today is that Internet Computer Protocol is the absolute best technology on the planet. For blockchain, for crypto, for a new financial system, for AI, for Web3, there's literally no competition in terms of the tech. Now, if you talk about hype and narratives and speculation, that's everything else. But in terms of the actual technology, there's nothing close. ICP is so far ahead of what anyone else is doing. If there were a site ranking crypto technology, ICP would be number one, and it would be farther ahead of second place than Bitcoin is ahead of Ethereum. The technology, from what I see, is at least 10 if not 100 times better than any other blockchain. Not even Google or any of the other large companies in the world seem to have this level of technology.
That actually makes the tech a little bit dangerous, which is one reason you probably haven't heard about it. Because it's so good, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money from this tech getting adopted and their tech heading down. It's important for me to say that, so I don't paint this as something it isn't. When you see a claim like this, your mind is likely to think it's too good to be true. I've just given you what I see as the big-picture reality: this is, in my view, the best tech in the world, and to me it looks drastically undervalued right now. Not financial advice, and what do I really know about these things, but if you go to icptokens.net, the entire market cap for Internet Computer right now is $2.5 billion. This is the number one technology I see in the world to run AI in a secure, tamper-proof, verifiable, micropayments environment on blockchain. In my opinion, there's nothing better. There are some people in AI who are desperate for others not to find out about ICP because of what it can do with AI. For a new financial system, I believe it's the best tech in the world, and nothing's even close. I covered that in a recent video.
The Dream of Passive Income
So here's the dream for passive income. I had a friend come to me the other day and say, "Jerry, I'm thinking about buying a business." I asked why, and he said, "I just want some passive income." I told him to look at my shirt. If you want passive income, this is as easy as it gets: 13 and a half percent.
But here's what's even better. The dream with passive income is that the principal also appreciates. Now keep in mind, the principal could go to zero. I think there's a small chance of that, but there is real risk involved. To me, though, it's asymmetric risk. So the absolute dream come true is to be getting these kinds of rewards while your principal potentially appreciates a lot. Right now I have 10,000 ICP worth of ICP and ICP altcoins. If this whole thing goes where I think it's going, in a theoretical scenario where it goes up 10x, what I'm earning in APR stays the same. Whereas if you have 13% APR in the bank, you're not going up. Your dollars are becoming more worthless every day, and your APR is barely offsetting inflation.
But, not financial advice and anything could happen, if ICP were to go up say 10x, I would effectively be getting 160%. Right now I'm receiving about 1.56 ICP in maturity per day. I'm actually getting 14.6% myself, because I locked this a little over a year and a half ago. In a theoretical world where the price goes up 10 times, I'd still keep getting the exact same amount of ICP. So that would effectively turn into, assuming I bought it all at this price, around 146% APR on the US dollars I put in. That is the absolute dream for passive income: your principal itself can greatly appreciate while you keep getting the same rewards on it. To me, there's no setup in the world better than Internet Computer Protocol right now.
How I Compound My Rewards
I'm actually compounding my rewards. In my neuron, I'm automatically staking the maturity, which is why I've grown to 546 ICP in it. By compounding, the amount of passive income I get daily keeps going up and up.
One caveat: this is not 100% passive. The rewards you get on Internet Computer Protocol are based on voting. The reason you get paid is that you're being compensated for voting on proposals. You can make this as passive as possible when you go into your neuron. If you want to see how I stake neurons, I have a tutorial. Search "Jerry Banfield ICP Crypto NNS Staking and Voting Rewards Tutorial" and that'll show you how I do it.
To make it passive, you go to follow neurons, and on the first three categories you add a followee. Then every time that followee votes, you vote too. All you have to do every six months is either vote one time yourself, or confirm that you still want to follow them and are active. Here's an example: right now I'm going to click adopt on a proposal for a signed node provider from DFINITY. I don't see why I wouldn't vote yes, so I'll vote yes. Notice it starts at around 36 to 38 million voting power, and when I click that button, a half percent or so of the voting power, millions of it, just moves. That's because everybody who follows me just voted at the same time I did. You should only follow one person, by the way; don't follow a bunch of people. Then every day ICP tallies the people who voted and gives you maturity. For passive income, all you have to do is keep loading up maturity, click spawn neuron, and it'll crank out ICP. Or, if you want to compound it, you can just automatically stake the new maturity.
How I'd Appraise It, and What I'd Do Next
This is the best setup in the world I see for passive income right now, because your principal can appreciate and because the technology appears, in my assessment, to be undervalued by at least 100 and potentially 1,000 times. If I were appraising this and looking at what other things are worth in the world, I personally would appraise it at about a trillion dollars. Not financial advice; that's just what I would value it at based on what the tech can do and the problems it solves. I'd appraise it about 500 times higher than it is right now, and I'd appraise almost every other crypto at least 10 times lower, if not 100 or 1,000 times lower, than where they sit in my analysis. For my friend who's looking for passive income, this is as easy as it gets.
However, I would not buy any of this until you've done further research. If you want to go deeper before making any decision, you can keep learning through my ICP Crypto playlist, where I record clip after clip walking through exactly how I approach all of this.