Right now, on-chain revenue for Internet Computer is honestly pretty small, and if you look at it in isolation, it doesn’t look impressive at all. We’re talking about roughly $4.6K burned per day and somewhere around $1.7–2M annualized. For a project sitting at about a $1.3B market cap, that’s tiny. But here’s the thing: that number doesn’t really matter as much as people think. If you go back and look at what happened with Solana (SOL) in 2021, it tells a very different story about how crypto markets actually behave. SOL went from around $1.80 to over $170 in a single year, an insane move. Yet the network generated only about $28M in revenue for the entire year. Inflation was high, fees were negligible, and from a pure financial standpoint, it was operating at a LOSS. And still, the price exploded. That’s because in crypto, price usually comes before fundamentals, not after. The market doesn’t wait for strong revenue, it tries to anticipate where adoption and attention will go next. Solana positioned itself as the fastest and cheapest Layer 1, which pulled in retail users, memecoins, and DeFi activity. That created a feedback loop: more users led to more activity, then more fees and burns, and eventually stronger tokenomics. But all of that came after the price had already moved. ICP feels like it’s in a similar early phase, just with a very different angle. The tech vision is arguably even more ambitious, with things like full on-chain compute, Chain Fusion, agentic AI, and the idea of sovereign cloud infrastructure. The reason revenue is still low is partly because it’s not built around retail hype cycles like memecoins, it’s more enterprise-oriented, which takes longer to show up in the numbers. But that also means the same kind of flywheel could still kick in, just triggered by different catalysts. If we start seeing real signals, like meaningful adoption, strong developer traction, or key moments such as the Cloud Engines demo on May 10 combined with supply-side changes like Mission 70, that could be enough to ignite a narrative shift. And in crypto, narrative shifts are often what drive the first major leg up. So low revenue today isn’t necessarily bearish for ICP. If anything, it can be part of the setup for asymmetric upside, the same way it was for Solana before its breakout. The market can price in a future cloud and AI narrative long before the actual cash flows show up on-chain. The real question isn’t where the numbers are today, but what story the market decides to believe next. Do you think $ICP is following a path similar to Solana, or is this a completely different kind of play?
