I want to explain why I believe owning 100 ICP is a big deal. To me, this is a critical threshold for Internet Computer that really sets you apart, and it makes a great potential minimum accumulation goal. Keep in mind, this is not financial advice. I'm not a financial advisor. I've shared my crypto portfolio before, and I hold seven thousand plus ICP along with value in ICP altcoins like OpenChat, DecideAI, and my own JBBJ meme coin. So I'm clearly drinking the Kool-Aid myself, and I'm sharing all of this as educational material. You need to do your own research and make your own decisions.
The Core Value Proposition
The number one value proposition with Internet Computer Protocol is that this is a new way to rebuild the entire internet based on decentralization, putting the entire tech stack directly on the blockchain. That's a huge potential mission and a huge potential market. That said, will we actually see it happen? I've laid out the bear cases. In a recent video I talked about the worst case scenario for ICP and walked through serious issues. So none of this is guaranteed. For this discussion, though, I'm going to focus on the scenario where ICP becomes the new foundation of the internet. In that case, we'd want to look at a few critical things to figure out just how much 100 ICP really is.
What 100 ICP Means Against the Supply
First off, let's look at circulation. Right now there are 531 million ICP in circulation. If you have just 100 ICP, that gives you one five-millionth of the entire supply. Here's some math to put that in perspective. If you had one five-millionth of the whole Bitcoin supply, that would be worth about four Bitcoin, which at today's prices would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. So for the exact same percentage of the supply that would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin, it only costs you about $500 at today's prices to get with ICP. Now, this is not financial advice. I have no idea what's going to happen with the price. Obviously I hope it goes up, but anything could happen.
Look at it another way. If we divided the entire ICP supply among everybody in the world, everybody would get less than one-tenth of one ICP. So just having 100 ICP, in a scenario where this became the new internet and it was all divided evenly, would give you more than a thousand people's fair share of ICP. From that angle, 100 ICP is a lot.
Why I Stake Instead of Just Holding
With ICP, I'm not just holding it and hoping the price goes up. ICP has a governance function through the Network Nervous System, which is fully on-chain, and it should always have that governance function. Right now you can earn around a 13.5% interest rate on staked ICP. I want to walk through how those rewards play out over time.
I'm running a simulation on the NNS neuron sandbox where you stake without compounding the maturity. That means you're constantly taking off the rewards rather than restaking them. What you see is that over a period of three and a half years you'd already have 47, 48, 50 ICP back in maturity. Over a period of four years you would still have your entire principal, plus, according to the current calculations and the current amount of staking, you'd have 54% paid back to you. So even if the price stayed completely flat, you'd have 54% returned to you, and it's constantly liquid, getting paid out the entire time.
Right now you need about one ICP, or one maturity or so, available in your Network Nervous System wallet to cash out. Once you're at that point, you click spawn neuron. If you want more tutorials on that, search for Jerry Banfield NNS tutorial, and I'll keep making more of those.
Personally, I'm staking all my maturity right now because that helps me increase my voting power, which gives me even more rewards. I want to maximize the rewards I get. In my opinion, and again this is not financial advice, this is a time to accumulate, not to cash out. So I'm constantly staking my rewards instead of cashing them out, because whenever I do eventually want to start selling, I want to maximize the amount I get.
Here's the practical part: 100 ICP is enough that every month you'll be able to spawn a neuron and sell your maturity without ever touching the principal. You can also use something like IDGeek if, for example, you wanted to sell your entire account, which I hope you wouldn't want to do anytime soon. But the option is there if you ever wanted to exit the principal. The ideal scenario, and what I'm doing, is holding for the long term. Imagine never touching the principal and getting paid passive income every single month. Four years works out to 48 months, so you'd be getting at least one ICP every month that you could then cash out.
Where 100 ICP Puts You Among Holders
Another metric worth looking at: right now there are only about 51,000 addresses directly on the blockchain, according to IC Terminal, that actually have more than 100 ICP. So having more than 100 ICP puts you in roughly the top 50,000 holders of all of ICP. To me that was the first real milestone. When I first bought ICP, I bought around 510 ICP. As I started stacking, I thought, I've got to get to 100. Then after that, I thought, I've got to get to 1,000, because if 100 is great, 1,000 is even better. We're now up to about 16,000 addresses with a balance of at least 1,000 ICP, and that number keeps climbing, going up and up, faster at some times and slower at others.
So to me, 100 ICP is the threshold, and being able to buy that for about $500 today is remarkable. In a theoretical scenario where ICP is adopted to the point Bitcoin is, you could potentially, and this is totally speculative and not financial advice, be earning hundreds of dollars a month in passive income from putting in $500 today. That seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. I don't see anything else with that potential right now. That's why 100 ICP is a lot, and that's why I've stacked up so much.
Compounding Your Maturity
This gets even more powerful if you compound your maturity. If your entire strategy was to auto-stake your maturity instead of selling it, then your staked maturity would rocket up and you'd be compounding your interest faster and faster. If you ever wanted to sell your account down the road, that auto-staked ICP could grow your account to a fantastic value. Watch how fast it appreciates in the simulation. After two years you've got 30%, and it keeps accelerating from there. If you didn't need to touch any of it, you could build a huge account with it.
If you want to play with this yourself, the NNS Neuron Sandbox lets you run the simulation, IC Terminal has the address data, and the governance details live on the ICP dashboard. You can also schedule a call with me to talk it through. I go live most days with all kinds of content, crypto and otherwise, and I'm happy to answer your questions. If you want to dig deeper into all of this, take a look through my ICP Crypto playlist.