The Republic of ICON (ICON Republic): Bridging the real world to the crypto world on the Loopchain
As more people are starting to explore other blockchains which allows for DApps to be built on, ICON may be the next big thing — it already is in South Korea at least. So what is ICON?
As a key member of ‘Blockchain Interoperability Alliance’, — an alliance backed by ICON (ICX), Aion (AION) and Wanchain (WAN), ICON shares a common goal to interconnect with isolated blockchain networks and develop global standards for inter-blockchain networks. Within this alliance, ICON aims to provide the interconnecting network in which different blockchains are able to communicate without the need for additional intermediaries.
Bridging Communities Across the Globe
ICON seeks to overcome current limitations of connecting communities between the real world and the crypto world. It allows individual entities to build their own independent blockchain / DApps on top of the ICON Network, and decide on the relevant parties they would like to connect with through a Loop Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm that allows for real-time transactions.
ICON aims to be a leader towards this blockchain revolution by connecting independent communities to create an environment where all of them in the ICON Republic can work in real time based on Smart Contracts.
Features of the ICON Network
The ICON Network highlights a few of its key features, mainly Consensus, SCORE (Smart Contract On Reliable Environment), Multi-Channel and a Tiered System. For brevity, highlights of these features includes:
- Consensus: A faster consensus with their own Loop Fault Tolerance implementation (an enhanced version of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance based algorithm).
- SCORE: Smart contracts being directly run in the node operation environment without a separate virtual machine (unlike Ethereum) — making it easily deployable and configurable.
- Multi-Channel: Independent channels to be created within the same blockchain network between themselves. This allows for privacy of Smart Contracts between parties, as the transaction data is off the main blockchain.
- Tiered System: The loopchain allows for different access privileges to be granted to different nodes with specific functions — audit / supervision for example. This would facilitate the different blockchains on the ICON Network.
A little deeper into the ICON Architecture
Diving deeper on understanding how community blockchains are connected between one another on the ICON Network, these communities are connected to an ICON Nexus via a Portal.
How I see this would be communities on the ICON Network connecting within their own circles — the ICON Nexus would be some sort of a group community. The ICON Republic, is the entire ICON ecosystem that various “nexuses” are on. The portal plays the role as a facilitator, which facilitates communication between the different blockchains.
Governance on ICON
ICON aims for a decentralised governance structure, where individual blockchains dictate its own governance. Within each Nexus comes different type of governance systems connecting to one another, where a standardised governance systems then comes into play, which is facilitated by the Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP).
How far has ICON come?
Despite ICON being seemingly new — and pretty much been shilled by countless crypto-icons (pun intended) in the recent few months, ICON Foundation has been continuously building new use cases of blockchain for quite some time now. They have entered capital markets, insurance, universities and healthcare in South Korea alone, and a number of DApps to be built on the ICON Network are expected to be conducting their ICOs this April. While ICON can be still considered in its infant stages, its future applications are clearly something worth following. Excitement awaits.
