ICON (ICX) Monthly Report October 2020
The past 30 days have been all about the “ICON 2.0: Batang” announcement.
Driven by early leaks about ICON 2.0 found on GitHub, the price of ICX has been climbing up from just short of $0.40 on September 6 to up to $0.54 by September 15.
Since then the price of ICX has retraced to below $0.40 again, now trading at around $0.38 again.
Let’s take a deeper look at what has been happening around the project.
Recent News
ICON 2.0: Batang
The ICON Foundation announced ICON 2.0: Batang, a new blockchain software architecture based on Go.
The most noteworthy element of ICON 2.0 is indeed the fact that the codebase is being moved from Python (ICON 1.0) to Go.
Smart contracts on ICON (SCOREs) can now be written in Java instead of Python. Java SCOREs can be interoperable with the existing Python SCOREs through inter-SCORE calls.
The Goloop core modules have been completed, and implementations for enterprise use-cases have already begun. Some of ICONLOOP’s enterprise clients including Seoul Metropolitan Government are also preparing to use the new blockchain engine.
ICON 2.0 aims to have a simpler economic design by dividing inflation into predefined categories (P-Reps, Relayers, Contribution Proposal Fund, Voters).
Milestones (that are subject to change) are to release the alpha version of the ICON 2.0 implemented Goloop by Feb 2021 and to complete all data migration work by June 2021.
The ICON 2.0 testnet Gangnam is aimed to launch at the end of October 2020.
Read the ICON Foundation’s announcement of ICON 2.0: Batang here.
ZenSports
Zensports, a sports betting platform built on the ICON blockchain will now accept ICX token deposits. Players that wish to participate in any of the platform sports betting games can now use ICX to place their bets.
Omm Finance
Omm (Open Money Market) is a decentralized peer-to-contract money market protocol. The project is a collaborative effort between ICX Station, iBriz, and Parrot9.
Omm will have its own protocol token, the OMM token (IRC-2 standard).
The protocol will consist of two primary market participants: Borrowers and Lenders. Lenders can deposit their idle assets to earn interest from the borrowers’ collateralized loans.
The mainnet launch is aimed for Q1 2021 and to be executed in two steps: 1) guarded mainnet launch, introducing OMM token mining and deposits, 2) the full mainnet launch introducing borrowing.
Network Highlights
Transaction Volume
Over the past 30 days, daily transactions have been relatively continuously hovering above the 100k mark with just three days falling slightly short of the mentioned mark.
The average transaction volume has been about 125k transactions per day.
The main driver of transactions on the ICON network has been ICONbet (as usual) with three of their four dApps (DAOlette, DAOdice, and DAOblackjack) covering about 48% of all daily transactions.
That is about 28.42M ICX transaction volume ($11.92M USD worth of transactions) brought to the network just by ICONbet in the last 30 days (date of posting this article: October 23, 2020). A relative increase of 38%.
dApps
We can see one newcomer in the top 5 of dApps with the most transaction volume: IwinCrypto Casino, a casino with 180+ games. The casino creates an ICON blockchain transaction whenever a bet is made.
Besides the IwinCrypto and the formerly mentioned ICONbet, the list is completed by ICONSwap, an open-source service to trade IRC2 tokens against each other, ICONLOOP’s #broof, a certificate issuance service, and K-pop community platform Stayge.
ICON Governance has had the highest number of interacting wallets of any dApp on the ICON network by a huge margin with about 7.78k interacting wallets, followed by ICONbet with 446 and ICONSwap with 233 interacting wallets.
Token Metrics
Total and Circulating Supply
ICON Block Explorer — October 23, 2020
The total supply is 861,530,685 ICX with 290,689,379 ICX being held in “Internally Controlled Addresses” and are not counted towards circulating supply.
In the last 30 days, 4,321,387 ICX has been minted by reward inflation (I-Score distribution).
From September 21 to October 22 the percentage of the network staked went from 39.4% to 40.2% and the percentage of delegated votes went from 36.6% to 36.8%. This is a consistent increase in staking and delegation and simply caused by a compounding effect.
In other words, 4,321,387 ICX have been minted, but about twice the amount (8,287,963 ICX) has been staked to the network, showing the demand for ICX is still outpacing supply.
Token Holders
We can see a new address in the top 3 token holders list with more than 500 incoming transactions in the last 30 days.
- hxcd6f04b2a5184715ca89e523b6c823ceef2f9c3d — 128,073,500.44 ICX — no tx has been done outside the initial wallet setup on March 8, 2018.
- hx1729b35b690d51e9944b2e94075acff986ea0675 –100,000,000 ICX — last tx 53,553,054.33 ICX out on April 2, 2020.
- hx562dc1e2c7897432c298115bc7fbcc3b9d5df294–22,241,444.749 ICX — more than 500 tx (mostly incoming) in the last 30 days
Address (1) is being controlled by the ICON Foundation.
Address (2) is being controlled by Binance (cold storage).
Address (3) is being controlled by Upbit (cold storage).
Bull vs Bear
Bull
ICON’s latest development roadmap includes a major technical overhaul of the complete blockchain architecture to modernize it with new technology based on the popular Go programming language.
These new changes are meant to make ICON 2.0 faster, more stable, and scalable and puts it on par with the newer blockchains that have been recently launched this year.
ICON is also ahead of many other blockchains in their dApp development and especially with many DeFi products that will soon be coming online later this year.
These latest developments put ICON on track to capture new users and value for the next expected altcoin bullrun.
Bear
The layer 1 blockchain landscape has gotten extremely competitive in the last 12 months with major blockchains like Polkadot launching, Cosmos IBC upgrade, and countless other smaller caps like Solana and Avalanche super-scaling capabilities coming online.
All of these new blockchains compete for the same attention from users, developers, and new investors that affect the market cap of those that are unable to draw enough of it to their projects.
Therefore the ICON 2.0 launch can be drowned in the crowded blockchain ecosystem and not generate enough new interest in the project to justify a higher market cap.
The opinions expressed during the Bull vs Bear series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of Multi.io and its employees. The goal is to present a view from both sides of the market.
Upcoming News & Events
IISS 3.1
The basic concept of IISS 3.1 to divide inflation into a few different predefined categories was already mentioned earlier in this article. More details regarding IISS 3.1 will be shared by the Foundation in an upcoming blog post and discussed on the ICON Community Forum.
Gangnam Testnet
The ICON 2.0 testnet Gangnam is already aimed to launch at the end of October 2020.
Grants
Only one grant has been approved last month by the ICON Foundation, Iconrepublic.
www.iconrepublic.org will be a “one-stop solution” hosting educational and introductory content for all those who want to learn and understand the ICON ecosystem.
Information & Data Sources
ICON Newsletter — The official Newsletter by the ICON Foundation.
dApp.com — dApp ranking on the ICON network.
ICON Community Dashboard — Dashboard providing network statistics and metrics.
ICON Community Forum — ICON’s official discussion forum.
ICON Block Explorer — Block explorer built by the ICON Foundation.
