$200 ICP isn't impossible anymore

[00:00:00]$200 ICP, it isn't impossible anymore.

[00:00:05]Sounds a little crazy, sounds a little extreme, but in this video, I'm going to be breaking down why I believe that a $200 ICP could actually be in its future. There's a lot of things changing, there's a lot of things that everyone should be well aware of when it comes to the Internet Computer. And that is what this video is all about. So, hi, welcome back to another walk and talk video. My name is Nick and I am just going to be walking through the woods with you guys today to explain what is going on with ICP and why I believe a $200 valuation could be in its future. So, as I get into this, make sure to smash that like button, subscribe if you are new to the channel, and let's talk the Internet Computer.

[00:00:51]So, the Internet Computer has been a very interesting protocol, all right? It's been a very interesting layer one.

[00:01:00]It launched back in 2021. You probably already know the story, right? In my opinion, it was almost the perfect launch, right? It was on every centralized exchange, pretty much, all the major ones, all the tier one exchanges, at the exact same time.

[00:01:17]The price absolutely rocketed to the upside. We saw valuations that a lot of people would only ever dream of.

[00:01:26]Right? We saw, I think it was like $700 plus for ICP in 2021.

[00:01:32]But, it didn't last. There are many reasons why, there's lots of speculation, lots of people will probably know a lot more details, you know, down in the comment section about what happened to ICP in 2021, but the gist of it is quite straightforward.

[00:01:50]The price fell 99.9%.

[00:01:55]It crashed. Many people were absolutely wrecked as a result of the price action of ICP back in 2021.

[00:02:03]And at the point of this recording, the price is very low. It's very cheap, right? We're talking just north of a couple of dollars, right? Which on contrast to its all-time high is crazy, crazy low, right? But that is the opportunity.

[00:02:20]Because whilst the last 5 years have been brutal for ICP holders, people who kind of maybe capitulated or just sold out of frustration have completely written it off.

[00:02:33]The actual team, the Dfinity Foundation, they haven't stopped shipping. They have been actively working, actively deploying, and progressing the mission of a global Internet Computer.

[00:02:48]And that's kind of where this video comes in here because the pain around ICP has been brutal, right? We all know it, right? We've all seen it, and it's hard to ignore it, right? The price, it has definitely not been what many people wanted it to be.

[00:03:04]But that opportunity is back, right? Because ICP has been actively developing a lot of things. Let's first of all just think about Mission 70, a reduction of its inflation by 70%. And this is interesting. We've spoken about this a number of times on the channel in great detail already, but it is a defining moment for the ICP tokenomics because if we can reduce the inflation by such a rapid amount, it's going to change the dynamics of the market.

[00:03:38]But it doesn't stop there. Mission 70 isn't just about slashing the amount of rewards that are being distributed to the stakers. It is also about increasing the amount of cycles that get burnt.

[00:03:51]Now, for those who are unfamiliar, a cycle is the actual gas that is essentially paid to keep a canister smart contract online. It's a little complicated, but for the most part, it's pretty straightforward.

[00:04:03]You take ICP tokens, you burn them permanently out of existence, and you turn them into what are called cycles.

[00:04:11]Now, those cycles can pay for compute, smart contract execution, essentially keeping the decentralized applications actively running on the blockchain.

[00:04:22]And that brings me to one of the most important parts about the Internet Computer. A lot of people don't fully understand what it is doing and why anyone would actually still invest in it. I mean, they they take a look at a chart that's 99.9% down from its all-time high, and they would ask ourselves one simple question, why would anybody want to invest in something like that? Crazy as it might be, it's because that's where the opportunity now sits. Right? A lot of people, specifically retail investors, they all get hyper-focused. They focus on the green candles. They buy the tops, they sell the bottoms, and that's not really investing, that's just gambling, it's chasing. Right? And we don't do that. We take a look at the current situation of the market, and we look at where the value opportunities sit, where there's a gap, where there's a disconnect between what the market is valuing something at, and the reality of the actual protocol itself. And that is what I want to talk about today, because Mission 70 is great, right? Slash the staking rewards, lower the emissions, increase the amount of cycles that you need to pay for compute, and then, you know, add in the actual use cases and the reality of that situation, too, and suddenly everything starts to click together. So, let's think about what's going on with the Swiss subnets. Now, this is an important one because it's not as clean as like say, you know, a new decentralized application is live on Ethereum and you got X amount of users and they're all going to pay gas fees, right?

[00:05:57]The Swiss subnet it is something a lot more important. It's indicating where the future is going. Basically, sovereign cloud infrastructure.

[00:06:07]Right? The ability to separate and segregate the really highly secure data at that sovereign level from foreign entities.

[00:06:20]Specifically, we are talking about the American companies having a monopoly on those data centers, right? If we can separate that and actually have the data centers be more sovereign within the boundaries of a country, well, suddenly the power shifts, right? That sensitive data, it no longer sits with a US-based company, right? So, the Swiss subnet is key to this whole evaluation idea as well. Because not only are we seeing tokenomics improve, we're seeing the the increase in cycles are required to keep our applications running, but we can now see that there's this new layer. And this layer is really important.

[00:07:04]Sovereign data cannot be understated. In fact, recent EU regulations are making it very difficult, very difficult for these US-based monopolies on these centers to still exist within the Euro region. And the reason is who controls the data, right? If there is root access to the server, then a US company could access really sensitive information, really sensitive data that could be detrimental to the sovereignty of a country.

[00:07:37]And that's where you can then start to see that the Internet solves a real-world problem.

[00:07:45]But it doesn't stop with Switzerland.

[00:07:47]Pakistan has also started to explore subnets, specifically looking at the artificial intelligence sector. Again, another area where there's a lot of data that is being transferred between people and, you know, or between everyday individuals like you and I, and of course these large entities and these larger data centers.

[00:08:08]But that's also a problem because how can you trust that data at the sovereign level? If you're running artificial intelligence on, let's say, you know, banking or, you know, governments and things like that, well, how can you trust the data that you get back if you it's not actually controlled within your own sovereign borders? If it goes into a black box, how can you trust that data?

[00:08:30]So, artificial intelligence trust is an additional layer that the Internet Computer is tackling.

[00:08:36]So, if we start thinking about all the different things that the Internet Computer is doing, it's actually kind of setting itself up to be almost indispensable, right?

[00:08:47]>> [snorts] >> Not only the tokenomics improving, the burning of cycles is improving from like a retail investor point of view, that helps build the case, but the actual real-world utility is increasing at a level that is very much needed. And if we go back to the EU and the regulations that they're putting in, they are demanding that if something is stored in a data center, that it can only be accessed within the borders of that company or that that kind of economic region.

[00:09:19]And that's really important because it means that the United States has a problem.

[00:09:25]Microsoft has a problem. Google has a problem.

[00:09:28]Right?

[00:09:29]Amazon Web Services has a problem. And the problem is that the current setups of these data centers, they do not allow for sovereign only cloud control.

[00:09:41]Essentially, these companies and their entire structures, they require root access at their headquarters. Those headquarters, they're going to be positioned somewhere. Sometimes that's in the US and sometimes that's in Ireland for tax reasons, right? And so, this is really important to understand that the Internet Computer being decentralized and you can run subnets in the economic region that you want and isolate those machines from the wider kind of node structure, but still get the global decentralization for consensus, well, Internet Computer is solving a big problem for the entire Euro region. But, it goes deeper than just the regulations of the EU, right?

[00:10:26]This is also about how countries protect their sovereign data, the data of their users, and how that data isn't going to be monetized by a foreign entity.

[00:10:37]So, Internet Computer is very uniquely positioned. But, it's not stopping there, either, right? And this is why it's so crazy with the current valuation of ICP because on top of all of this, we now have artificial intelligence that can live on chain. That means that there is no data center that is basically a black box for artificial intelligence. We now have Caffeine, an artificial intelligence that can write code, deploy applications just by typing a text prompt to it. And it's live on chain.

[00:11:13]That is different. That is different than ChatGPT, which is hosted inside a, you know, a black box on a centralized server. It's different than Google Gemini, right? The Google booboo, Google, that is, by the way. Not like I can talk today, but it's different than these chatbots that live and have that black box. And don't get me wrong, there are other protocols dealing with the trust related issues, such as Hedera, Nvidia, and all these different things are going on in the space.

[00:11:38]But, if we really break it down, does ICP's current value make sense in that bigger, broader picture where we can see that we're getting sovereign data regulations from the EU. We have 70% reduction in inflation and an increase in cycles, so there's a little mixture of everything going on there. And we can also see that artificial intelligence, which is a massive boom, is now fully deployable as an on-chain entity in itself, with everything being verifiable and trusted via the decentralized network. This is a very different value proposition than what we saw back in 2021 when we hit an all-time high, right?

[00:12:19]So, being down where we are with a 99.9% crash in the price, to me, it's a bit of a disconnect. It's a disconnect between the reality of what is being shipped from the DFINITY Foundation, where this technology is going, and where it is being used, with the Swiss subnet, with the Pakistan memorandum of understanding, and of course, just where the general direction of the entire world is heading. Artificial intelligence can't be dismissed either. So, when we start stacking all of these things, and we know that the supply of ICP will eventually start to decrease as the economic activity increases, well, to me, it doesn't make sense for the price action to be where it is.

[00:13:02]Instead, I think there is a true possibility where ICP could become a $200 asset. But, in order to do that, we do have to weather a storm because it isn't going to be smooth sailing, right? There is going to be a bit of an issue when it comes of timing this, right? It's not going to happen instantaneously. There's definitely going to be some issues where we can see that uh you know, everything is going to take some time. But uh for the most part, I can see a future where we can have a $200 ICP. You can let me know what your thoughts are though in the comments down below. Otherwise guys, smash the like button, subscribe if you're new, and I'll catch you all in the next one.