A Closer Look Into MyID
There has been a lot of buzz in the ICON community around ICONLOOP lately. In this article, we will dive into ICONLOOP’s various projects and their ties to the ICON public blockchain.
First of all, let’s get clear on the terminology
ICONLOOP is a private for-profit organization incorporated in South Korea. They develop blockchain solutions for enterprises. ICONLOOP currently has over 100 employees dedicated to growing adoption of blockchain technology in South Korea.
The ICON Foundation is a non-profit foundation incorporated in Switzerland. The ICON Foundation is the managing entity of the public blockchain referred to as the ICON Network or just ICON.
The ICON Foundation contracts other companies such as ICONLOOP and P-Reps to build and maintain the core blockchain technology, infrastructure, and tools to grow the ICON Network.
The ICON Network has been built by ICONLOOP as a contractor to the ICON Foundation. The ICON Foundation currently holds ~35% of all ICX. This number continues to drop as ICON gives out grants to their community members and chooses not to stake all their tokens to promote decentralization.
ICONLOOP is not only a contractor to the ICON Foundation but also builds dApps on its own, such as MyID, #broof and VisitMe. ICONLOOP has a for-profit entity in Korea that just raised capital from some of Korea’s most prestigious funds working on products that use the network.
To understand how these apps (MyID, #broof, VisitMe) built by a contractor (ICONLOOP) to a non-profit organization (ICON Foundation) maintaining the network being powered by an asset trading on Multi (ICX) all ties together, let’s take a quick look at the flagship dApps built by ICONLOOP.
ICONLOOP’s other flagships, #broof, a certificate issuance service, and VistMe, a visitor management app that uses DID (ICON Decentralized Identifier) both already run on top of the ICON public blockchain. MyID is still in its early stages, and the first implementation will be on a private consortium chain (still using the same tech architecture as the public chain for easy interoperability). Let’s do a deeper dive into MyID.
What is MyID?
Simply put, MyID is an application to store your digital identity on the blockchain so you won’t have to re-verify it in multiple instances repeatedly (i.e. when opening a bank account with one entity and signing up for insurance with another entity).
Which brings us to the next point. All these entities need to have a common denominator to access the mentioned digital identity, the same blockchain.
As of today, there are 68 entities (such as Bithumb, Binance.kr, Samsung, Saramin) in various industries such as commercial banks, security firms, e-commerce companies, and manufacturing companies forming the so-called “MyID Alliance”.
These entities will be trialing MyID first in a closed beta.
The first step is for issuer entities (the banks) to begin issuing MyIDs to open bank accounts. The second step will be the verification process as alliance members integrate with MyID.
The roadmap of MyID can be found on their website, though the commercialized service has seen a delay in launch likely because of COVID19.
But again, what has this to do with the ICON public chain?
The ICON Foundation made a strong case themselves for MyID tapping into the public chain when releasing their paper for the BTP (Blockchain Transmission Protocol).
In this case, there would be a relayer sitting between MyID and the ICON Network. It would connect to the public chain via BTP. BTP is a set of smart contracts that are deployed on chains that want to be connected then the relayer watches both contracts awaiting instructions (transferring data between chains). BTP contracts would be deployed on the MyID private chain and on the ICON public chain. Then both chains can interact.
Summary
ICONLOOP is leading some of the most promising projects in the industry to potentially lead to enterprise adoption.
ICONLOOP products and their relationships with enterprises and government in Korea create an easier path toward the adoption of ICON’s technology.
A case has been made for the ICON network to interact with the MyID application and other ICONLOOP applications.
We are patiently waiting for the first commercialized service based on MyID to launch. Hopefully without any further delays.
