ICP

Internet Computer

Layer 1

A blockchain that hosts whole applications on-chain, betting its comeback on AI-built apps and a 70% inflation cut.

Speculative turnaround v1.13 · as of 2026-10-20 · framework v1.13 Coinsight · all analyses
Bottom line

Distinctive technology and an active foundation, but the token is 86% below its 2024 cycle high (99.6% below a launch-day spike) and the network minted about 28 times more ICP than it burned over the last 12 months. Mission 70 is the thesis: if cycle burn from Caffeine, Cloud Engines and other apps grows enough, ICP turns from inflationary to roughly neutral. Until burn data shows that, treat it as a high-risk option, not a core holding.

Scorecard (1–5)
Project
Token performance
Tokenomics
Price
$2.65
−2.9% 24h · −14% 30d · CoinGecko 24 Oct
Market cap
$1.48B
rank #64 · FDV $1.48B, no max supply
24h volume
$48.0M
3.2% of market cap
From cycle high
−87%
$20.90, Mar 2024 · launch ATH $700.65 = −99.6%
2026 YTD
−6%
$2.84 → $2.65
Staked
44%
of supply locked in neurons · ic-api 19 Oct

The last 12 months

$2$4$6$8$10Oct 25NovDecJan 26FebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec2025-11-09: $8.9774$8.98 peak2026-01-15: $4.5606$4.572026-08-02: $2.0215$2.02 low2026-10-20: $2.8624$2.911Market-wide crash2Caffeine public launch3Rally fades4Mission 70 passes5Swiss national subnet6Pakistan subnet deal7Cloud Engines unveiled8MCP server preview9Attack absorbed10Rally to $3.59 on Cloud Engines news1120% revenue burn plan12Cloud Engine coupons
MarketProductGovernanceAdoptionTechTokenomicsUpcoming

Daily closes from CoinGecko, 21 Oct 2025 to 20 Oct 2026. Intraday wicks, like the October 2025 crash to about $1.61, do not show.

Key events
  1. 1
    10 Oct 25 Market-wide crash. ICP wicks to about $1.61 in the October liquidation cascade.
  2. 2
    04 Nov 25 Caffeine public launch. DFINITY's AI app builder opens to the public; ICP +45% that day and about +200% within a week.
  3. 3
    28 Nov 25 Rally fades. Price back near $4, under half of the peak.
  4. 4
    15 Jan 26 Mission 70 passes. NNS vote (53%+) to cut inflation from 9.72% toward ~2.92%. ICP closes at its 2026 high of $4.57 the same day.
  5. 5
    22 Jan 26 Swiss national subnet. Sovereign Swiss subnet presented at Davos.
  6. 6
    15 Feb 26 Pakistan subnet deal. Partnership/MoU for a national AI subnet; status still unclear in reporting.
  7. 7
    10 May 26 Cloud Engines unveiled. On ICP's 5th birthday Dominic Williams previews a sovereign cloud: pick nodes from a marketplace (hyperscalers, data centres, on-prem) and swap them without downtime.
  8. 8
    23 Jul 26 MCP server preview. AI agents can find canisters and send on-chain transactions without custom code.
  9. 9
    25 Aug 26 Attack absorbed. Coordinated malformed-Wasm attack across hundreds of canisters; no reported downtime.
  10. 10
    06 Oct 26 Rally to $3.59 on Cloud Engines news. Run from $2.40 (1 Sep) peaks on 6 Oct; back to $2.91 by 20 Oct.
  11. 11
    09 Oct 26 20% revenue burn plan. Node providers keep 80% of Cloud Engine revenue; 20% buys and burns ICP. Coupons for early access announced.
  12. 12
    Soon Cloud Engine coupons. Early-access coupons (a month+ of cycles) said to be imminent, agent infrastructure first. No date given.

How a request flows through the Internet Computer

User
Opens a web app

Plain browser, no wallet or gas needed.

Boundary nodes
Route the call

HTTP gateway forwards the request to the right subnet.

Subnet
Nodes agree

13+ independent machines run consensus and replicate the result.

Canister
Code + data run

Smart contract serves the page and stores state on-chain.

Chain-key
Signs outward

Subnet key signs Bitcoin/Ethereum transactions and calls web APIs.

Where ICP comes in: developers burn ICP into cycles to pay for compute (the burn). Stakers lock ICP in the NNS to vote on upgrades and earn new ICP (the mint). Node providers are paid in newly minted ICP.

Usage and adoption

Minted vs burned per month (ic-api, through 23 Oct 2026)
MintedBurned1M25k2M50k3M75k4M100k5M125kburn/mintSep 2025: 1,015,061 ICP minted, 44,521 ICP burnedSep 254%Oct 2025: 1,083,741 ICP minted, 41,551 ICP burnedOct4%Nov 2025: 1,763,527 ICP minted, 44,697 ICP burnedNov3%Dec 2025: 4,945,166 ICP minted, 38,962 ICP burnedDec1%Jan 2026: 1,658,773 ICP minted, 82,817 ICP burnedJan 265%Feb 2026: 1,752,267 ICP minted, 67,696 ICP burnedFeb4%Mar 2026: 1,441,519 ICP minted, 81,182 ICP burnedMar6%Apr 2026: 1,403,120 ICP minted, 61,374 ICP burnedApr4%May 2026: 1,105,429 ICP minted, 100,085 ICP burnedMay9%Jun 2026: 1,243,333 ICP minted, 30,103 ICP burnedJun2%Jul 2026: 1,013,750 ICP minted, 29,004 ICP burnedJul3%Aug 2026: 994,329 ICP minted, 45,522 ICP burnedAug5%Sep 2026: 829,627 ICP minted, 55,625 ICP burnedSep7%Oct 2026 to 23 Oct 2026: 1,225,019 ICP minted, 30,232 ICP burnedOct*2%
ICP minted (gross), left axisICP burned, right axis* month to dateTwo scales: minted on the left (up to 5M), burned on the right (up to 125k), so bar heights do not compare across colours. The % row is the true ratio.
ICP per month, 12-month average
Burned
~57k
Burn needed for Mission 70
~0.94M
Minted (gross)
~1.60M

Oct 2025 to Sep 2026: 0.68M ICP burned vs 19.2M minted, so burn covered 3.5% of new supply. Minting eased from ~1.5M a month early in 2026 to 0.83M in September; December's 4.9M is a one-off spike. Burn moves between 29k and 100k a month with no clear upward trend. Mission 70 target: 0.77 XDR/s of cycle burn. Minted = net supply change + burned, from month-end ic-api snapshots.

  • strong signal
    Cycle burn
    ≈ $6.7k / day

    0.057T cycles/s on 19 Oct, about 2,300 ICP a day (ic-api). Developers paying for compute: the cleanest revenue signal.

  • medium signal
    Canisters registered
    1.17M

    ic-api, 19 Oct. Many are idle or test deployments.

  • weak signal
    “Active wallets”
    ~1.24M

    Secondary source, definition unclear.

  • weak signal
    Transactions
    449.5B in 3 yrs

    Chainspect, Aug 2026. Mostly canister messages, not user payments; not comparable to other chains.

  • weak signal
    Throughput
    ~1,300 TPS

    Sustained, Jul 2026; 25,621 peak. Shows capacity, not demand.

ICP's activity counts are huge because the network counts every message between canisters. Paid usage is small: over the last 12 months burn covered about 3.5% of new ICP. Treat monthly ICP burned vs minted as the adoption scoreboard, alongside Caffeine and Cloud Engine revenue.

Project

What it is
A layer-1 where “canister” smart contracts serve full apps, front-ends included. Developers prepay compute with cycles (reverse gas), so users need no wallet or fees.
Team
DFINITY Foundation, Zurich (non-profit), founded by Dominic Williams. Mainnet since May 2021. Large research staff; the foundation still steers most of the roadmap.
Tech edge
Chain-key cryptography, subnets, direct Bitcoin and Ethereum integration (ckBTC, ckETH via Chain Fusion), HTTPS outcalls to web APIs.
Traction
Caffeine, an AI app builder, launched publicly 4 Nov 2025 and triggered a 5× rally. MCP server in preview Jul 2026. Swiss national subnet (Jan 2026) and a Pakistan subnet MoU.
Roadmap
Cloud Engines: a sovereign, AI-ready cloud on ICP with an Open SaaS suite (CRM, email, HR, accounting). Previewed May 2026, early access via coupons “soon”; governments reportedly using it already.
Competitors
Ethereum L2s and Solana for apps; AWS-style cloud and decentralized compute (Akash) for hosting.
Key risks
Usage still small against the minting rate; governance weight concentrated in DFINITY and large neurons; 2021 launch sell-off left a trust deficit.

Token performance

1-year return (25 Oct 2025 → 24 Oct 2026, CoinGecko)
ICP
-16%
BTC
-28%
ETH
-40%

ICP fell less than BTC and ETH over 12 months only because it started near a low; 3-year return is about −3% vs BTC +174% and ETH +49% (3-year figures are manual, the free CoinGecko API covers 365 days).

Range 2026
$2.02 low (2 Aug) to $4.57 high (15 Jan), daily closes; now $2.92
12-month drawdown
−77%, from $8.98 (9 Nov 2025, Caffeine peak) to $2.02 (2 Aug 2026)
Liquidity
$41M traded in 24h, 2.5% of market cap; rank #63
Pattern
Every rally retraced within weeks: Caffeine (Nov, +200%), Mission 70 vote (Jan, $4.57), Cloud Engines preview (May, $3.62), September run to $3.44 and the 6 Oct high of $3.59
Launch-spike ATH Launch-spike ATH. The $700.65 high came on day one (10 May 2021) and price fell below $50 within a month, never to return. The framework uses the 2024 cycle high of about $20.9 as the reference instead.

Tokenomics

Supply
557.9M ICP (ic-api, 19 Oct), uncapped. Net +18.6M (+3.4%) over the last 12 months.
Minting
NNS voting rewards (stakers) and node-provider rewards. Inflation was 9.72% in Jan 2026.
Mission 70
Approved by NNS in 2026. Caps voting rewards and trims node rewards: 9.72% → 5.42% by Jan 2027 from supply cuts alone, ~2.92% target with higher burn.
Burning
ICP burned when converted to cycles, plus a planned 20% of Cloud Engine revenue used to buy back and burn ICP. 2.97M ICP burned all time. Mission 70 needs ~17× the Sept 2026 burn of 55.6k ICP.
Utility
Gas (cycles), governance staking with 6-month to 8-year locks, node payments.
Distribution
About two-thirds of the 2021 genesis supply went to the foundation, team and seed investors.

Bull case

Cloud Engines and Caffeine become real paying businesses, so cycle burn plus the 20% revenue buy-and-burn offsets minting; with Mission 70 ICP turns near-neutral in supply and the market re-rates a $1.6B network with unusual tech.

Bear case

Burn stays a fraction of minting, the 9.7% → 5% cut only slows dilution, and rallies keep fading as stakers and node providers sell rewards.

Watch before the next re-run

  • Cloud Engine coupon rollout, paying customers and revenue (feeds the 20% burn)
  • Monthly ICP burned vs minted (chart above, from ic-api): the Mission 70 scoreboard
  • Whether monthly minting keeps falling (0.83M in Sept) or rebounds (~1M in the first 19 days of Oct)
  • Caffeine active builders and paid apps
  • Actual inflation rate vs the 5.42% Jan 2027 milestone
  • Share of supply staked and neuron unlocks

Where to trade

Krakenlisted

ICP against EUR · USD

24h $1.61M · ±2% depth $1.11M

OKXlisted

ICP against EUR · USDT · USDC · TRY

24h $1.68M · ±2% depth $424.4k

Largest exchanges

Exchange24h vol±2% depth
BinanceICP/USDT$6.12M$616.5k
CoinbaseICP/USD$1.68M$872.1k
KrakenICP/USD$1.51M$1.11M
OKXICP/USDT$1.42M$424.4k
KuCoinICP/USDT$669.7k$184.4k

Deepest DEX pools

Pool24h vol±2% depth
ICPSwapICP/CKETH · Internet Computer$19.0k$982.6k
ICPSwapICP/USDC · Internet Computer$201.5k$35.2k
ICPSwapICP/VCHF · Internet Computer$68.9k$18.6k

Pool size (TVL), fee tier and fee APR are not in yet: they need DefiLlama, which this setup cannot reach so far. CL = concentrated liquidity (higher fees, more impermanent-loss risk).

On-chain share of all ICP volume: 1.5%.

As of 24 Oct 2026 · CoinGecko tickers (24h volume, ±2% depth). ±2% depth is the money it takes to move the price 2% either way: the real size of a market. Exchanges ranked by volume among well-known venues; pools by depth. Not investment advice.

Where to follow

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People on X
Code and governance
Data
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