We need to talk about ICP.
Are you down to clown?
No, I'm not talking about that rap group from Detroit that Eminem doesn't like.
I'm talking about the Internet Computer Protocol.
Imagine a version of the internet
where developers can't be controlled, censored or centralized.
Sounds too good to be true.
But it's being built right now.
Yes, ICP is another crypto,
but I don't want you to think of it in terms of a coin or a token.
We want to focus on the network,
the vast network of computers that run ICP.
And I think by the end of this video,
you'll understand how ICP is totally revolutionizing Web3 and the internet as we know it.
Get your clown paint on.
Let's get it!
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Today, we're going to be talking about ICP.
So everybody knows the internet is controlled by big tech firms.
They invade our privacy, sell your data and censor things like they shouldn't.
Am I right, Twitter?
All these big centralized tech behemoths,
they all run off the same set of servers pretty much.
ICP on the other hand is an alternative to the way things have been done.
It's an alternative to the standard.
That stays true to the core ideas of crypto and the philosophy of decentralization.
There's no one single point of failure.
And there's no server that can go down to take down ICP.
You know how everything comes out and says they're going to be the new Ethereum killer?
Well, ICP has a much different approach to this idea.
You see, they want to be a big tech killer.
I think we can all get behind that.
But they're creating symbiotic relationships with the other top projects in the world
to getting up together to reinvent the internet
that takes away power from the big tech and redistributes it to the people,
which is what crypto's all about.
Back in 2015, founder and creator Dominic Williams came up with this idea for ICP.
His goal was to create a world computer that could not get shut down.
In 2016, Williams created the DFINITY Foundation,
which, of course, the non-profit arm of ICP.
From early on, this project was very well backed,
including backers Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain.
They're both still supporters today.
But, of course, many people, well, they remember ICP as being a scam.
Why?
Go back to May 2021 when it launched.
It went over $500.
[chuckles]
It was never supposed to go above $50 even in the wildest expectations of the team.
But it quickly dropped 90%.
Now, we know why.
Now, the connections between FTX and The New York Times,
well, they're quite extensive.
Let's just start with Sam Bankman-Fried just appearing at their DealBook's conference
to give the first interview to Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Remember at the end when all the people stood up and clapped for Sam
like we were in the middle of The Hunger Games?
Absolutely ridiculous.
But, you know, there's more connections.
Did you know that Sam Trabucco, former CEO of Alameda,
was actively working at The New York Times in the crossword puzzle department?
Yes, while he was still at Alameda.
New York Times is a patsy cover-up for Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.
And they've worked together many times to be able to destroy projects and push narratives.
We do know also FTX just was discovered giving $27 million to the CEO of The Block,
a crypto media publication.
There's also about 10-20 other crypto media publications that Alameda invested in
or just outright paid to be able to get whatever narratives in crypto they wanted through.
So back to the story.
It came out on the heels of the price dropping tremendously for ICP.
So, why did the price of ICP drop?
And why did The New York Times, probably paid by Sam, try to cover it up even more?
What happened involved something called perpetual futures.
These are synthetic assets,
paper dollars, if you will, except in this version, paper synthetic ICP.
They listed on FTX four days before spot trading.
How could you trade futures on an asset you have no concept of the price on
because it hasn't launched yet?
Very interesting.
What this allowed FTX and Alameda to do was to pump the price of these perpetual futures up,
these fake contracts,
to an unsustainable price
because this would push the actual spot listing on Coinbase
up tremendously at the day of the launch.
And then you know what they did?
They tried to short it to zero,
like they did with almost any competitor that Alameda or FTX ever touched.
And they never listed ICP as a spot item on FTX.
Very strange.
There's plenty of evidence. We made a video about this a while back.
It's very clear that FTX and Alameda intentionally tried to destroy ICP.
A New York Times article comes out.
Very fascinating.
The information actually contained in the article was not that bad in reality.
However, when a project's down 90%
and then you got mainstream media jumping on top of it,
that's going to push it down even more.
This was the goal of this hit piece.
Now, I will tell you I have spoken with Arkham Intelligence.
There's a lawsuit right now between DFINITY and Arkham Intelligence,
the group that put out the information that went in that article.
To me, personally, after having that conversation with them,
I tend to feel like there's a missing piece here that people don't know about,
which is I think this entire thing was orchestrated by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Sam Bankman-Fried
to destroy ICP.
I'm not sure if Arkham Intelligence was paid or not paid for this article.
It's very unclear on exactly what happened there.
I know that the DFINITY Foundation, I know that ICP,
I know that a lot of the community feel like Arkham Intelligence played a large role in this.
However, if you actually look back at the article, what you'll find is, is that, in reality,
the information used in the article wasn't that bad.
The way it was shaped inside of the article is what the problem was.
That's what compounded people's feelings of negativity towards ICP.
So I can't say for sure whether Arkham Intelligence was paid or not.
I do know that that's going to come out probably in discovery in this lawsuit
because it is being pushed and I don't see them dropping it anytime soon.
But like you see a lot of times with anything Sam was ever involved in,
it's always smoke and mirrors.
It's made to look like one person did something when they didn't do that.
So I ask everybody to take all that into consideration when looking at this story.
The New York Times is the bad actor here.
So, basically, what the argument tells you this report was
is that it found 44 probable insider addresses
that deposited 10 million ICP worth over $2 billion at the time to exchanges,
which coincided with the drop in price.
Arkham stated that DFINITY did not follow the playbook of other successful projects.
They quietly allowed the treasury and insiders to send billions of dollars of ICP to exchanges,
making it difficult for their longtime supporters to access the tokens they were promised.
Now, I have a little bit of insight into what actually happened here.
I do have to admit that's a terrible line by Arkham Intelligence.
But we were all thinking that was true at the time.
You have to understand the time that this was happening,
the very peak of the bull run, beginning of the first downswing
as we head into the summer last year,
and the story was ICP launched and it absolutely tanked.
That was the story.
So you start looking for people to blame,
you start looking for bad actors,
and, all of a sudden, you find these addresses
and they seem to indicate that people on the team or insiders
were dropping the price and dumping on retail investors.
Well, that's not actually what happened.
The DFINITY Foundation, by the way, had their tokens locked up.
They couldn't even sell them. And unlike Solana,
it's not a scam where they create synthetic versions and still dump them.
That's reality.
Early on in the days of DFINITY,
they would pay developers and pay other people that worked on the project
bonuses and extra in ICP.
Now, at the time, I think ICP was worth somewhere between 10¢ to 30¢.
So many of those people were not even involved with the project anymore and long gone.
So, yeah, of course, when those people see the price going out of the roof,
they're going to sell the tokens.
Dominic didn't make any money, to my knowledge, on the sale,
or, if he did, very, very, very little.
I don't think he made any money, to be honest with you.
But the fact is this was not insiders.
They make it sound like there was a group popping champagne in a boardroom
excited to dump on retail investors,
but that's not the story of ICP.
And they could have pushed this narrative that this was not them
and they could have focused on, you know, "Oh, woe is me, New York Times," blah, blah, blah,
but instead they didn't.
Instead, they went back to work on the Internet Computer Protocol
and they just kept working on the tech and they kept building it
knowing that their reputation is bad.
Well, thank God we discovered what FTX did to them
because now the story is clear.
They weren't bad actors.
They weren't pumping and dumping.
This is actually a good team that cares about its project and its community.
And that's one reason why I want to do this review.
To give you guys an idea of a fair shake about ICP
and why it deserves a second look.
It's not a scam like people thought in the beginning.
It's actually the opposite.
They're the only people who are doing what they are supposed to be doing.
It was everybody else around them
and the stock market 2.0 traditional finance world of pump and dump that framed them.
That's why this is an important story.
So, of course, there was a time where I said I wouldn't cover ICP,
but that's because I bought into the scam, the narrative that's being pushed on me.
And, thankfully, I have a brain.
So it's taking new information, I changed my opinion.
I've got to say my opinion on ICP was changed 180 degrees.
So despite a rocky beginning,
and, on some exchanges, even going up to $750,
right now, ICP sits at $4.
There's a reason we're talking about it today.
The tech is good, unbelievably good.
And it's even integrating with Bitcoin, which we'll get to in a minute.
So, why is the tech so good? And why do people love it?
So, first of all, in the world of crypto,
the speed it takes to finish a transaction is called the time of finality.
The time finality for Bitcoin is, well, 30 minutes.
You could watch a whole TV show.
But ICP is the fastest of the bunch because it uses web speed.
Take a second and look at this chart.
Nobody else in the world is running this fast.
Let alone creating 22.5 blocks per second.
And if that didn't blow your mind,
just know scalability, well, it's not a huge issue for ICP,
regardless of volume,
making it the first unbounded blockchain.
This is all made possible by what is known as Chain Key Technology.
Now, it consists of several things,
but, first of all,
it's made up of a noninteractive distributed key generation,
which is very complex
and is the DFINITY Foundation's first release of novel core cryptography.
If you're going to take a deep dive on that, we'll put a link down in the description.
Another part of the Chain Key Technology is the Network Nervous System,
or NNS for short.
That's a decentralized system of algorithms
that govern the operation of the Internet Computer network.
Now, remember, ICP is the governance token of the project,
and when people stake ICP,
well, they become a neuron in the nervous system.
And the more you stake, the more of a say you have.
You think of NNS as the brain of the Internet Computer network.
Now, to stake on ICP,
you first have to gain access to the NNS dApp,
and to do that, you must go and get an internet identity.
On a device you use to log in,
you need to have some kind of security feature like biometrics.
See, instead of using a password, they want you to connect your identity
and use that to log in.
That's much safer than two-factor authentication even.
But if for some reason your device get compromised,
your seed phrase can always let you back in.
Now, we're going to be doing a tutorial on the BitLab Academy pretty soon
to actually walk you through all this with ICP
because it's very unique.
There's nothing like it on the internet or in crypto right now.
It's a standalone network.
I think this gives it a good advantage.
Now, the final element of the Chain Key Technology is its Threshold Relay consensus mechanism.
You can think of it as an optimized version of proof-of-stake.
Now, another place ICP outperforms a lot of other projects, if not all,
is in the world of smart contracts.
See, things on ICP don't need web servers.
They don't need Amazon Web Services.
they don't need firewalls or external databases
or any other headache experienced by Web2 developers.
This is all made possible because of their canister smart contracts.
These contracts,
these canisters are so advanced
that back in September of 2021,
they voted on integrating them with Bitcoin
so finally Bitcoin can have DeFi and smart contracts.
This is the key to doing that.
And earlier this month, the integration finally began.
So, keep in mind, ICP's goal is not to kill Bitcoin or kill Ethereum.
It's to work with them.
It wants to reinvent the internet as we know it.
Why wouldn't Ethereum want to adopt ICP canisters?
This would help them fix all the problems that they have,
and the cost of on-chain storage,
well, that's definitely enough to make people take a second look at ICP.
Each ICP canister, it can hold four gigabytes of data.
The price to hold one gigabyte of data on Ethereum for a year,
it's $240 million!
I kid you not.
The price to hold one gig of data on ICP?
$5
That's all it takes.
This is why Ethereum has already done some integration with ICP.
They have cross-chain bridges called Terabithia.
This allows users to interact with Ethereum at web speeds
while simultaneously paying less.
This integration helps Ethereum with scaling problems, fees and congestion.
But look at it like this.
Forget the price action.
ICP is coming.
Look at the progress they've made.
They're already integrating with Bitcoin for smart contracts and DeFi.
They've got over 200,000 of those canisters already deployed.
They're making it easier for everyone to create software on the internet,
and no, not the kind controlled by big tech.
If you're a dev out there, right now, they've got over $200 million in funding available.
And if you're a user, well, there's over 340 ICP dApps currently running.
These range from decentralized social media to wallets to games, DEXs, metaverse, NFTs,
gambling and more.
The mass adoption of crypto, people wonder why it hasn't happened yet,
well, it's because it's probably being held back by the banks and big tech.
Apple taking 30% of gas fees?
Highway robbery.
So we can either opt for that system, stay in and continue to lose,
or we can choose decentralization.
Projects like ICP,
well, they're working us towards that goal.
I know personally ICP is a project that I'm extremely interested in
and can't wait to explore even more.
Alright, guys.
That's all we got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.