If ICP Is So Great, Why Only $5K a Day in Burn?

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]The question everyone keeps asking me lately is, "Jerry, if ICP only has a few thousand dollars a day that's being burned on the dashboard, then why is that any evidence that we're getting serious adoption? Why is this number so low and doesn't this mean it's a ghost chain that no one's using?" First off, that's ridiculous because it shows you're not understanding what all is happening with that cycle burn rate.

[00:00:29]This is reflecting thousands of transactions a second that includes web pages being loaded, entire coins and blockchains like Bob being hosted, and Ethereum and a Bitcoin layer two directly on the infrastructure, and all the transactions are very cost-effective. So, it doesn't cost that much to actually use the infrastructure.

[00:00:51]Now, yes, this is currently the revenue that ICP is making and it gets higher and lower at various times, but the bottom line is that building takes time, and I'm going to show you a very clear example of what I mean here and help you understand this because what people imagine is, "Oh, okay, well, somebody finds out about ICP and the cycle burn rate should just blow up immediately, right?"

[00:01:16]First off, it takes sometimes years to build something and then get serious adoption on it. There's a lot of things built on ICP that are just not having that much adoption at the moment, but they're working on it. They're doing their marketing. And with Caffeine AI, the time it's taking to build things is speeding up. And I'm using Caffeine AI right now to build an upgrade to my website. This absolutely amazing. At jerrybanfield.com, I've now set it up so that you can be a have a membership. You can pay with credit cards and with ICP, you can buy calls and have a community and post directly on the to my website. Like that as a page that comes up on my website when you post.

[00:02:10]I've got all my YouTube channels and I just built this in a couple hours with Caffeine AI. Now, there's some bugs to work out. So, if you give this a try, it's not fully functioning yet in terms of testing everything and making sure it works. So, over the next week or two, I'm going to test things to make sure it works on here. But, this is an example of I've had my website on ICP for like a month or two now with Caffeine AI. I'm just now building out the full on community platform so that you can actually deposit ICP and spend money on ICP. And then there's going to be this really cool feature where you have a leaderboard where whoever spent the most money on my website will be ranked on a leaderboard there. And this will have this has integrated payments both with crypto and cards.

[00:02:59]And you'll be able to post to my website and I'll be able to build in so you can advertise and boost posts on my website.

[00:03:06]And this will all get in for search results and this will have a chat community that's built into it so you can actually just sign in and do all this stuff at once. No need to send anyone to open chat anymore because this is on my website.

[00:03:21]But, this takes time. You see, even though I've known about Caffeine AI for a year and I've been using Caffeine AI to build different things for a month or two now, I'm just working on getting my app in position and I'm way ahead of everybody else. Now, how long will it be until my website with my membership plans here, how long will it be until my website is bringing in thousands of dollars a month and consistently has ICP deposits coming through and where users are on the website every day, where Google has indexed the pages from posts people have made and is sending traffic from the community discussions. I mean, it might be a year or two before we start to get some more serious traffic and income on my website. Now, imagine that, but for governments taking much longer. Like the government of Pakistan is not just going to plow everything on chain overnight.

[00:04:17]It The The bigger the entity, the longer everything takes. I'm an example of things moving relatively quickly because I'm a solopreneur and Caffeine AI allows that. So, it's going to take time for solopreneurs to learn this here, build stuff with it, and then deploy it, and then get people using it. But, the cycle burn rate right now is not reflecting all the usage that's going to come in the future. It is reflecting there's a lot of real things already happening on the network and the transactions reflect the same thing. So, from what I can see, there's a lot of silent building going on on ICP. I'm doing it myself. I see everybody else doing it, and in time, we will be rocketing up there. Not financial advice, and I'm ICP maxi.