Project Update: Icon (ICON) the Decentralized Network of Blockchain Communities

Project Update: Icon (ICON) the Decentralized Network of Blockchain Communities

Basics

The goal of ICON is to allow entities and individuals from multiple different sectors (banks, insurance, hospitals and universities) to exchange value and information on one single platform.

The ecosystem will be called ICON Republic and it will be hosting all the individual communities which will be connected with eachother. It has some similarities to Ethereum but will have in built token swap system.

ICON ran an ICO which finished in September 2017 where they raised over $42.5 million. They are based in South Korea and concenrate on that market.

Tokens and usage

The platform will basically be a giant web of communities that will be talking and exchanging value with eachother through transactions and running decentralised applications.

In the end, the ultimate goal is to create for everyone the benefits of custom smart contract solutions, while preserving the advantages that come with a common currency.

ICX will be token used to support the ecosystem for example as the transfer of value between the interconnected blockchains.

On top of that the transaction fees on the network will be paid in ICX with the nodes being able to withdraw their ICX gained from fees.

Recent News

Strategic partnership with the Japanese blockchain consulting firm ‘LayerX’. This aims to vitalize the ICON developer community in Japan as well as ensure the integrity of the ICON Network through a code audit alliance.

They have also annouced “Tribe Accelerator (TRIBE)”, a collaborative program among ICON Foundation and TRIVE Ventures as well as PwC Singapore’s Venture Hub aiming to s to find and nurture later-stage blockchain companies across Asia

They have also annouced the ‘ICON Development Network’, which will allow developers to easily run a private instance of the ICON Blockchain Network through Amazon Web Services the on-demand cloud computing platforms

Roadmap

The roadmap doesn't give timelines but is very detailed since it's showing milesones that are being worked on.

The important upcoming milestones are:

enabling the use of DApps on sidechains
scalability solution based on parallel processing
decentralized identification service
decentralized key management service
DEX smart contract for trading between tokens
enabling secret vote environment in public blockchain
providing platform for security token offering
providing reliable stable coin solution

Availability and price

Listed on several major exchanges with:
Binance (45% of volume)
Coineal (23%)
OOOBTC (10%)
DragonEX (10%)
also on Bithumb, Upbit, Rfinex, Cointiger and more
Overall volume around 5.5M

Current price as of 27th of December is around $0.23 with ICX being ranked on 42nd place in terms of the market capitalisation and market cap of around $108M.

473M tokens are in circulation out of 800M so there will be new tokens in circulation - something to consider

ICON has been very disappointing this year with price significantly decreasing when compared to fiat/BTC. A lot altcoins did badly but ICON actually did worse than most of them. 12.64 is the ATH which indicates -98% price decrease when compared to the current valuation.

How is it doing?

ICON mainnet is working and regularly updated which has proven that the project is aiming to deliver the promises. They have 136 team members - very significant for a blockchain project.

They are members of the Blockchain Interoperability Alliance together with Aion and Wanchain with the shared goal of promoting interconnectivity between the isolated blockchain networks.

The price decreased significantly this year and the current valuation is actually very reasonable when we look at the potential.

While there is a lot of competition it seems like ICON does appear to be a very interesting and promising option.