How ICON will connect & scale Private ICONLOOP Networks
ICONLOOP is the company behind ICON, and has secured 100+ business partnerships with the largest companies in Korea since the beginning of 2018.
These include Samsung, LINE, SK Planet and Smilegate.
It also includes ICONLOOP being selected as the blockchain operator for the Seoul Standard Blockchain Platform, commissioned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which resulted in recent demonstrations of several ICON led government projects. These include ICON’s Decentralized Identity, Voting, and Payments.
However, many of ICON’s projects have been led by ICONLOOP and its private networks, thus, many have asked how ICON & ICX will connect the private ICONLOOP networks.
The short answer is : ICONLOOP private networks with strong use cases on the public chain have been carefully selected with the eventual goal of connecting with the ICON network via the ICON Nexus and every transaction will require ICX for transaction fees.
The Relationship between ICONLOOP and ICON
The entire ICON project was created to meet the demand, and natural movement of the market from private ICONLOOP projects to the ICON public blockchain. The ICON Council Members consider interoperability between private ICONLOOP networks and the public ICON network to be the next critical step for the ICON public chain.
CEO of ICONLOOP Jonghyup Kim stated,
“Our team is and has been fully committed to contributing to the ICON project and servicing the ICON Foundation. We view every private network as a potential use case for the public ICON network and consider public chain integration in every private blockchain implementation of ICONLOOP. This is reflected in our consultation and interest from enterprise clients. Since the launch and increased global recognition of ICON, many enterprise clients have shown significant interest in public blockchains and how it can help expand the scope of their network.
Currently, most, if not all of ICON’s development resources are dedicated to building out ICON’s public chain, and as ICONLOOP is built on the same blockchain engine, just a few additional developers are required for customization of private blockchain implementations.”
Private ICONLOOP networks are safer options for many corporations due to the regulatory uncertainties surrounding public blockchains. Many companies in Korea are interested in blockchain and issuing digital assets on the blockchain, but have chosen to initially work with ICONLOOP in implementing private solutions with plans to move on to the public blockchain once regulatory uncertainty settles.
Another aspect of private blockchains are that they allow companies to test out and realize the cost benefits of blockchain before moving on to to the public chain to expand their network.
How will private ICONLOOP networks interoperate with the public network ICON?
CHAIN ID (Data transfer)
CHAIN ID is the world’s first blockchain based joint authentication system developed using ICONLOOP’s blockchain engine ‘loopchain’, and is being used and validated by Korea’s largest Capital Markets Consortium led by KOFIA and ICONLOOP. Currently, Korea’s leading financial firms (Capital Markets Consortium) are the authenticators of the CHAIN ID Network.
KYC and AML procedures in the Capital Markets are some of the most rigorous. This means that any ID authentication done on the CHAIN ID (Capital Markets) network would more than qualify for any other ID authentication elsewhere.
Leading financial institutions in the Capital Markets Consortium had an option to choose between ICON’s CHAIN ID, and the nationally used Certified Authentication Certificates, but many have opted to use CHAIN ID for the cost efficiency and ease of use it provided.
Samsung Electronics has also pledged to incorporate CHAIN ID into Samsung Pass, Samsung’s default identity authentication system, found on each Samsung phone.
ICON is currently working to bring ICONLOOP’s CHAIN ID to the public ICON blockchain and this interoperability will allow anyone in any network to gain access to CHAIN ID. Personal identity is at the core of every interaction we make, regardless of industry. This means that to enable a seamless user experience of identity authentication, the CHAIN ID network needs to be connected via the ICON Nexus and the Blockchain Transmission Protocol, using ICX for fees to:
- Private ICONLOOP networks of all the relevant industries.
This has been a strong demand in many ICONLOOP’s consortiums for a while as many were interested in the cost efficiency and ease of use of CHAIN ID. - Public ICON network.
Using ICON’s interoperability feature, Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP), any user on other public blockchain protocols such as Ethereum will also be able to connect to and use CHAIN ID.
Currency swaps between private and public networks (Value transfer)
The idea behind private blockchains are that although they aren’t decentralized, they are more trustworthy than single databases. Private-permissioned blockchains have advantages of being more scalable and private, but they also have the limitation of being unable to transfer value outside of their network.
This reflects actual usage. Imagine a coin called X-Coin, that runs on the private ICONLOOP network, used by gaming companies of a gaming consortium.
It’s conceivable to think that this coin could be used by different companies within the consortium that are part of the private, permissioned network, but it’s hard to imagine why any entity/individual outside of the network would trust that the ledger would be settled in a fair way as:
- They aren’t participating in consensus
- The network isn’t transparent.
This would mean that X-Coins will be a great, cost-efficient, settlement currency for gaming companies, but not for those outside the network.
This is where private to public currency swaps (vice versa) come into play.
X-Coins that run on private ICONLOOP networks would be swapped directly for cryptocurrencies on the ICON public network. This immediately expands the utility scope of X-Coins beyond the gaming network while maintaining the privacy of X-Coins transactions within it.
While this example involved X-Coins which are theoretical, there are several assets that have been issued on the private chain by ICONLOOP, some of which are waiting for regulatory uncertainty to clear before issuing assets on the public chain.
These are just some of the examples of how ICONLOOP plans to connect with the ICON. As mentioned, our current main focus is to continue development of the interoperability technology, and are currently working on implementations for many of our projects such as CHAIN ID. We believe that many of ICONLOOP’s projects will provide use cases of interoperability between private and public networks, and we look forward to this next step in hyper-connecting the world.
Thank you,
Hyperconnect the World
ICON Team
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