Internet Computer Investment Calculator
What would buying ICP have been worth? Pick a plan and a start date and this replays it against real daily Internet Computer closes.
What ICP actually did, in the data this page replays
Measured from the 1,952 daily closes this page replays — 11 May 2021 to 13 September 2026, from Binance. Figures are bounded by that window, not by the asset’s whole life.
| History available | 5 years and 4 months (from Binance) |
|---|---|
| Bought on the first day, held to the last | 0.007× — a loss of 99.3% |
| Highest close in this window | $364.01 on 11 May 2021 |
| Where it sits against that high | 99.3% below |
| Deepest fall | −99.4%, 11 May 2021 → 1 August 2026 |
| Time to get back to that peak | still below it |
| Separate falls of 50% or more | 1 |
| Days spent more than 20% below a previous peak | 99.8% |
| Best calendar year | 2023: +230.4% |
| Worst calendar year | 2022: -84.6% |
| Annualised volatility | 109.6% |
ICP year by year
First close to last close each year. 2021 and 2026 are partial — the data starts mid-2021 and 2026 is still running.
| Year | Change | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | -93.3% | partial year |
| 2022 | -84.6% | worst full year |
| 2023 | +230.4% | best full year |
| 2024 | -23.6% | |
| 2025 | -72.9% | |
| 2026 | -9.4% | partial year |
The part the calculator does not show you
Internet Computer has a particular shape in this data: its highest close is the very first one we hold, on 11 May 2021, and the 99.4% fall from it is not an event inside the series — it is the series. Any start date you pick above sits somewhere on that decline, which is why almost every plan you can configure here comes back negative. That is not a flaw in the backtest. It is what buying and holding ICP over this window did.
109.6% annualised volatility is ordinary for a major crypto asset and still several times a stock index. All ICP calculators →
Frequently asked questions
＋Would buying ICP on the first day of this data and holding have made money?
No. Held across the whole window the position ended at 0.007× — a loss of 99.3%. That is worth stating plainly because "hold long enough and it recovers" is the usual advice, and over the 5 years and 4 months we hold for ICP it did not happen.
＋What is the worst ICP has fallen?
99.4% in this data, from 11 May 2021 down to 1 August 2026 — 5 years and 3 months of falling. It has not returned to that peak since, so anyone who bought at the top is still waiting. Bear in mind our ICP series starts in 2021; a deeper fall before that date would not appear here.
＋How much time does ICP spend below its previous high?
99.8% of all days in this window sat more than 20% below a previous peak. Put another way, for most of the time you would have owned it, the screen showed a number lower than one you had already seen — which is the part of a backtest's headline return that the headline never conveys.
＋What were ICP's best and worst years?
2023 was the best at +230.4%, and 2022 the worst at -84.6%. The gap between those two is the reason a single average annual return is a poor description of this asset: almost nobody experiences the average, they experience one of the two extremes depending on when they bought.
＋Is 5 years and 4 months of data enough to trust this backtest?
Reasonably. 5 years and 4 months spans roughly one full cycle for ICP — enough for the drawdown figure to mean something, not enough to call it a pattern. The assets here with a decade or more behind them support firmer conclusions.
What to keep in mind for ICP
ICP fell more than 95% from its first-day price and remains sensitive to unlock schedules and to NNS governance decisions.
Users of ICP apps generally pay nothing, because the canister covers computation from its cycle balance — a genuinely different model from paying gas per action.
A backtest is one path that already happened. It shows what this plan produced through the exact sequence of prices ICP went through — not what a similar plan will produce through a sequence nobody has seen yet.