ICON (ICX) Monthly Report September 2020
The past 30 days had a focus on the MyID launch announcement.
Driven by the MyID launch and the forward momentum of DeFi related announcements in the former 30 days, ICX traded at a peak of $0.73 on August 22nd.
Since then the price of ICX has retraced to $0.45 (the same value it has been trading 30 days ago when we released our former report), now trading at around $0.50 again.
Let’s take a deeper look at what has been happening around the project.
Recent News
Bridge
ICX Station has announced its latest incubator project Bridge, a blockchain-secured payment service, for a Q3 2020 launch.
Bridge’s core services include fiat-backed stablecoins, fiat on-ramp, fiat off-ramp, and private key management.
Bridge’s purpose essentially is to create a seamless user experience for non-crypto users to interact with ICON applications hiding all blockchain interactions to the end-user. A wallet will be tied to the user’s email address.
Bridge will offer an SDK to ICON developers for simple integration of the Bridge widget into their application.
NEOPLY
There is a new P-Rep that skyrocketed into the top 10 P-Reps out of nowhere, NEOPLY.
NEOPLY is an investment arm of Neowiz, a KOSDAQ-listed gaming company in Korea.
NEOPLY initially self-staked 10M ICX (more than $50M at that point in time).
According to their announcement NEOPLY’s goal for Q4 2020 is to “Activate the ICON community through the NEOPLY channel”.
Contribution Proposal System
The ICON Foundation had put out a Request For Proposal to the community on July 24 to develop the Contribution Proposal System, a community-driven fund to incentivize ecosystem projects.
On August 31, the Foundation announced that the iBriz team will be leading this project.
MyID Launch & Integration
We have been patiently waiting, and the launch had been slightly delayed, but now it’s finally here with a big bang.
The ICONLOOP team announced three major MyID integrations.
- A partnership with the Jeju Island government to track and monitor COVID-19 cases for the 15 million annual visitors.
- A partnership with Shinhan Bank to launch the first blockchain-based financial KYC compliance certification service in South Korea. This digital ID will allow users to seamlessly open accounts across financial institutions with one MyID login.
Both integrations will require users to download the Zzeung mobile app and verify their identity using a Korean telecom service.
Most importantly, the ICON Newsletter announced both services will use the ICX token!
Network Highlights
Transaction Volume
Over the past 30 days, daily transactions have been relatively continuously hovering above the 100k mark with just four days falling slightly short of the mentioned mark.
The average transaction volume has been about 113k transactions per day.
The main driver regarding transactions on the ICON network has been ICONbet for a while now with three of their four dApps (DAOlette, DAOdice, and DAOblackjack) covering about 61% of all daily transactions.
That is about 20.6M ICX transaction volume ($10.8M USD worth of transactions) brought to the network just by ICONbet in the last 30 days (date of posting this article: September 14, 2020). A relative decrease of 10%.
dApps
There are no changes in the top 5 regarding network transactions. Besides the 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, and FutureICX, a trading-related price prediction game.
ICON Governance has had the highest number of interacting wallets of any dApp on the ICON network by a huge margin with about 8.89k interacting wallets, followed by ICONbet with 455 and ICONSwap with 252 interacting wallets.
Token Metrics
Total and Circulating Supply
The total supply is 856,079,679 ICX.
290,974,171 ICX is being held in “Internally Controlled Addresses” and are not counted towards circulating supply.
In the last 30 days, 4,309,144 ICX has been minted by reward inflation (I-Score distribution).
From August 14 to September 13 the percentage of the network staked went from 37.93% to 39.23% and the percentage of delegated votes went from 34.73% to 36.34%. This is a consistent increase in staking and delegation and simply caused by a compounding effect.
In other words, 4,185,357 ICX have been minted, but about 3-times the amount (12,777,639 ICX) has been staked to the network, clearly showing the demand for ICX outpacing supply.
Token Holders
There has been two tx totaling 5.5M ICX out of the third biggest token holder’s wallet (Binance).
- 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.
- hx9f0c84a113881f0617172df6fc61a8278eb540f5–33,053,054.3224 ICX — 5,500,000 ICX have been moved to hxc4193cda4a75526bf50896ec242d6713bb6b02a3.
Address (1) is being controlled by the ICON Foundation. Address (2) and (3) are both Binance cold storage.
Bull vs Bear
Bull
The MyID platform can continue to gain further adoption from large financial institutions in South Korea. The use of MyID as a KYC solution for the second largest bank in South Korea can create a chain reaction for other key players to see the benefit of blockchain technology in KYC services. New partnerships and their added exposure of the Icon blockchain to the traditional finance world can bring on new buyers of the ICX token that see its future benefits from the increased adoption.
Based on these facts users may remain very bullish on the upcoming developments.
Bear
The current narratives fueling growth in the cryptocurrency markets are open finance applications and blockchain interoperability. The ICON blockchain does not currently have any applications with significant traction in either of these use cases. ICON can therefore lose market share to the newer recently launched blockchains that are being heavily marketed as the next open finance platform and interoperability solution.
Users may remain cautious about holding their ICX and new blockchain users may also overlook the ICON network due to the lack of progress in the current popular narratives.
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
Hackathon
The 2-month online hackathon ICON Hyperhack that began registrations and submissions on June 19th and will close submissions on September 14th. Until then, applications around Decentralized Finance, Utility, and NFT & Gaming will be built for $20,000 prize money and a potential $50,000 grant.
Grants
Six grants to build dApps on top of ICON have been approved in August by the ICON Foundation.
1. STIN
STIN is an Austrian distiller of premium gin and an NFC hardware supplier, that wants to establish an application combining the capabilities of NFC-technology with ICON’s blockchain technology. Block42 will equip 1,000 bottles of a limited edition gin with special crypto enabled NFC chips.
2. Stash
Stash is a rewards program enabling consumers to earn ICX when shopping online. Once they earn the ICX, they can then spend it using their Stash issued ICON debit card.
3. Staking Lossless Lottery
Lossless Lottery is a staking lottery dApp inspired by the concept of PoolTogether. But rather than using lending as in PoolTogether’s concept, the Staking team is going to apply this use case to the staking mechanism inside the ICON blockchain.
The initial launch is already aimed to be by the end of this month or early October.
4. OpenDevICON Continuing Development
The main mission of the OpenDevICON project is to provide a resource and reference hub for ICON developers. By continuing development the team will work on the Jupyter Notebook, SCORE library, video tutorials, demo dApps, and marketing in a 3-month project.
5. Bridge
We have already touched base on Bridge earlier in this article. A grant has been approved by the Foundation for PARROT9 to put additional resources into the project.
6. FutureICX 2.0
We have touched base on future ICX in our former report. A grant has been approved for four additional trading games and a trading challenge.
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.
