Icon is a project from hailing from South Korea and it ran it's presale on September 20, 2017 and the public crowdsale on October 20, 2017. It had a hard cap of 75,000 ETH and they did not offer any kind of bonus structure to participants. The US, Singapore and China were not allowed to participate in the ICO and there were KYC or "know your customer requirements" to enforce that. The ICO sold 187.5 million tokens and managed to raise $45,000,000 in USD.
The ICO provided early investors an opportunity to purchase ICX as an ERC-20 tokens at a price of 1 ETH for 2,500 ICX. A total supply of 400,230,000 ICX tokens were made available at the time of ICO. 50% of this total amount was provided to the public during the initial token sale. The remaining half was distributed as follows:
An additional 400 million ICX tokens have yet to be minted meaning the total supply is 800,460,000. From the research I did it seems the remaining 400 million ICX will be stored in the Public Treasury and up to 20% of the total volume can be issued each year. The amount that’s released will be determined based on the consensus of ICON Republic. The team has stated that the other 400 million likely won’t be released until the mainnet launches, which happened recently.
I was really worried by this concept, until I learned the explanation to how the coins are being handled, apparently there is no single entity is responsible for the issuance of the remaining ICX. The ICON Foundation isn’t keeping them in a wallet to release at their discretion. They are held within a Reserve channel and the rate of release is algorithmically determined by a community defined protocol. It’s good to know that it’s being autonomously managed.
The ICON project is built on the thought process that the value of a blockchain is inherently related to the size and quality of the network it connects. ICON wants to “Hyperconnect the World” by “building one of the largest decentralized networks” or “loop”. This is a system that will link major players from financial, security, insurance, healthcare, educational, and commerce industries to a central point of convergence.
This is an innovative way to help blockchain interact and provide better experience to the user. Basically, the network allows a form of atomic cross chains between different blockchains to enable processing of real-time transactions.
A set of nodes which belongs to the same governance system. For example: Ethereum is a community and Bitcoin is another community.
These are the nodes within individuals communities that affect how the consensus is run. It is important to note ICON is an interchain platform so connecting blockchains will retain their respective consensus algorithms. C-Nodes are basically the nodes that belongs to each and every community. They make the consensus decisions of their respective blockchains.
The ICON Republic connects various communities with one another. It is a collection of independent blockchains that are participating voluntarily under the umbrella of ICON. It consists of the C-Reps and the citizen nodes.
C-Rep’s are representative of their respective communities and are elected, this is a transferable position. The C-rep is responsible for maintaining the LFT or loop fault tolerance consensus within the ICON republic. They are rewarded for their work for the republic with ICX tokens, this is similar to a DPOS system.
Citizen nodes are part of the ICON republic. It is possible to become a citizen node by creating dAPPs on the ICON loopchain, however, they won’t have any governance or voting powers.
The Nexus is a multi-channel blockchain which contains the lite versions of each and every community blockchain. The different blockchains connect to the nexus through portals also known as the previously mentioned C-Reps.
Consensus: “loopchain is a high-performance enterprise blockchain with Smart Contract features that can be customized according to operational needs and linked with other distributed ledger networks.”
ICON uses the Loopchain Fault Tolerance protocol or LFT. LFT settles messages from the network and achieves consensus by consolidating messages relayed between different participants or parties. When a transaction is broadcasted to the network, C-reps are the validating nodes which confirm the block is accurate. If the transaction is considered genuine, they will send a vote back to the rest of the C-Rep nodes and the new block will be added to the chain.
LFT runs similarly to a DPOS consensus system. The next logical question is, what is the ICON’s ROI? There are no exact numbers available as far as I could find. The ICON mainnet recently launched and they have yet to move the ICX tokens off the ethereum blockchain to their own, so at the moment there is no staking return.
However Some of the ways you earn ICX is through the IISS or (ICON Incentives Scoring System). They have an interesting take on incentivizing the ICON ecosystem. Most PoS or DPoS protocols you earn rewards by staking, but with ICX you get rewarded for actually using and making the network strong. So for an average investor, best way to earn ICX is via freezing ICX in DEX, using Dapps on ICX, and also via trading on DEX
This is cool in that you get rewarded for providing liquidity - which I think is the issue many DEX have right now - lack of liquidity). It's also interesting to note that while ETH has ZRX and NEO is going to have NEX to make DEX work on each protocol - ICX is doing it all as part of their protocol instead of doing another ICO and etc.
LoopChain is the means by which all the blockchains communicate has some important features I would like to touch on. LFT which I already went over,eEnables faster and more secure consensus without the possibility of forks within the system.
The mechanism by which smart contracts run on the network without the need of a separate Virtual Machine.
Enables the creation of multiple channel within the same Blockchain network. These channels have the capacity to execute request, consensus, and smart contracts.
Each and every transaction is validated through Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based authentication.
One of the core features of ICON is the ICON Wallet, which can transfer, settle, and exchange currencies in real time through a decentralized exchange (DEX). They also want to facilitate the future use of ICON built currencies, like how ethereum has erc-20 tokens.
Like most other blockchain-based platforms, ICON aims for decentralized governance. Each blockchain connects to the central platform called the Nexus and it holds its own governance. The Nexus facilitates discussions with an equal level of representation on behalf of each independent blockchain, functioning like an indirect democracy. With that in mind, Nexus also contains features that allow for parties to propose policies and cast votes.
They do have an active roadmap, I’ll leave the link in the description. They also have a very long list of partnerships.
On January 24th, 2018 ICON created the first genesis block and their mainnet went live.They stated they’re running tests and monitoring the network until the official opening of the mainnet for the general public.
On February 26th they released the PC version of ICONex as a web wallet that is a google chrome extension. They said we will see android and IOS wallets in the future.
Sometime this month they’re supposed to have the token swap where people can swap their erc-20 ICX to ICX tokens on the mainnet, and then the team will burn the erc-20 ones. There are also some ICOs coming down the pipeline in April/May.
One use case for ICON that caught my eye was its implementation into healthcare and insurance. The idea is essentially to automate as much of the health insurance system as possible, from customer signup to claims processing. Having your insurance information available on the blockchain to interact with your doctors. I work in healthcare and I know how cumbersome the current systems are. Some other potential uses for ICON include for e-commerce, banks, securities trading, and universities.
Currently ICON sits at #19 on CMC with the price $3.77 a coin. If you’re interested in buying it you can pick it up on a few places but the larger ones being Binance, HITBTC, and UPbit
For those interested in when the token swap from the ERC-20 to the mainnet is happening, I'll leave this quote from their most recent update on April 4, 2018:
When will the Token Swap begin?
The Token Swap feature in the ICONex wallet is currently ready. However the Token Swap schedule through the exchanges are still being adjusted.
We are postponing the Token Swap so that both Token Swap processes can be started at the same time.
The exchanges currently do not support mainnet ICX to be traded. If the Token Swap process using the ICONex wallet is opened before the exchanges support mainnet ICX coins, it could lead to unintentional trouble or financial loss where you cannot sell the mainnet ICX coins in the exchanges.
(Once the Token Swap is made, the mainnet ICX coins cannot be swapped back to ERC20 ICX tokens)
To protect users from any unintentional trouble or financial loss, we have made additional developments so that the ICONex Token Swap feature will be enabled aligned with the exchange’s status of supporting mainnet ICX coins. (You are free to check the feature, but the actual Token Swap does not happen at the moment.)
The Token Swap will last for three months. The exact starting date will be announced once the exchanges are ready to trade mainnet ICX coins. We will be continuously sending notifications through our SNS channels and email. You can swap your ERC20 ICX tokens to mainnet ICX coins anytime during the Token Swap period.
source
As a platform and a decentralized exchange they have some good competitors in the space such as Ethereum, Bancor, and EOS. That being said they’re also trying to do things a little bit differently than say like ethereum. I read on reddit that it seems the dev communication with the community isn’t so great and could definitely use some improvement. Also the fact that they launched on ethereum but plan to move to their own blockchain could be a little confusing for a new comer.
ICON is a seriously ambitious project that is aiming to take platform styled cryptos to another level. It will be interesting to see how the release of the public main net and the wallet effects prices. I’m also interested to see how they chisel out a place for themselves in order to accomplish all their goals. All in all I think their concept is strong and they’ve been meeting all of their roadmap deadlines.
Important/Social links:
Medium: https://medium.com/helloiconworld
Roadmap: https://icon.foundation/contents/projects?lang=en
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/helloicon/
Website: https://icon.foundation/?lang=en
White Paper:
Token Tracker:
LFT Explained: http://icon.support/icon-dpos-delegated-proof-of-stack-incentive-explained/
ICON FAQS: https://icon.foundation/contents/support/faq?lang=en
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