Dec 25, 2019
ICON: NHN Payco as an alliance partner, VELIC Grant Campaign for the ICON community and ICONPay for WooCommerce
Biweekly update 11th December — 25th December
NHN Payco, the financial platform of one of Korea’s largest internet companies, has joined ICONLOOP’s MyID Alliance. A core subsidiary of NHN, the Korean internet giant engaged in a variety of cloud, fintech, entertainment, and advertising businesses, NHN Payco offers a wide range of financial services such as mobile payments, money transfers, loyalty points, big-data-driven credit ratings, advertising, and mobile security solutions. NHN Payco joins the MyID Alliance as a “growth partner,” i.e., partners that are adopting my-ID’s blockchain ID service into actual services.
VELIC officially announced the initiation of its grant campaign to support various ICON projects. VELIC’s objective in this campaign is to promote the development of useful D-Apps & services which aim to benefit the ICON ecosystem as a whole. As such, VELIC will be accepting submissions for various ICON projects and provide support to further their cause.
ICONPay for WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, allows users to pay and merchants to accept ICX CryptoCurrency on their online store. Over 3 million onlines are powered by WooCommerce and growing everyday. Receive payments from anyone in the world quickly and easily.
More to follow!
Development
A reporter recently got a hands-on experience with ICONLOOP’s blockchain-based certification service Broof.
As the Iconist has reported, Broof’s user base has been expanding with several training programs adopting the service to issue forgery-proof certificates of completion.
The reporter, Huh Joon of the Korean-language blockchain news site The Block Post, attended the three-month Postech Blockchain CEO Course.
At the graduation ceremony on Dec. 4, he received a certificate issued by Broof.
You don’t have to register to Broof to receive a certificate. Huh received his certificate via a link sent through the popular KakaoTalk messenger. Just click the link, and voila, there’s the certificate of completion.
Easy peasy.
Just as easy — and peasy, presumably — was issuing a certificate. Just click the issue button after registering at the Broof homepage. You’ll have to enter the name of the issuing institution and the name of the certificate and register the name and email of the recipient.
Several certificate formats are available — just choose the one you want, hit the issue button and out comes a certificate.
To protect personal information, users have the ability to show their certificates only to people they want to show it to. Moreover, ICONLOOP has opened its API to partner institutions and companies so that they can use Broof however they like without having to issue certificates through the Broof homepage.
ICONLOOP plans eventually to open the API to everyone.
In addition to certificates for graduation, passing or completion, you can also issue certificates of participation in events such as conferences.
ICONLOOP is currently preparing an update of Broof for release in January or February.
The service’s interface — currently optimized for Broof’s partner companies — will get a complete facelift to make it easier for individuals to use. Private information protection will be bolstered, too.
ICON P-Reps News
ICONPay for WooCommerce
ICONPay for WooCommerce allows users to pay and merchants to accept ICX CryptoCurrency on their online store. ICONPay performs real time transactions without an intermediate gateway. The speed of the ICON blockchain makes it possible to use ICX for real time commerce unlike first and second generation blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum which have confirmation times ranging from a couple minutes to hours depending on network usage.
ICON blocks are produced every 2 seconds and become irreversible in less than 15 seconds making it a viable option for daily commerce. ICONPay uses CoinMarketCap API to convert the local currency into the ICX equivalent.
Check out the demonstration video here and don’t forget to visit Metanyx official website to learn more about the team and their major developments!
VELIC would like to officially announce the initiation of its grant campaign to support various ICON projects. VELIC’s objective in this campaign is to promote the development of useful D-Apps & services which aim to benefit the ICON ecosystem as a whole. As such, VELIC will be accepting submissions for various ICON projects and provide support to further their cause.
No updates
Paradigm Fund has issued new reports on the following cryptonetworks:
- CARDANO: 2020 Roadmap
- KOMODO: A Platform-Wide Update Activation
- State of Stake #10
- Crypto Regulation Digest 2nd December — 16th December
- AMBROSUS: AMB-NET Sidechain Scalability Implementation, AmberEx 3.2.5. Release
- ENIGMA: November Development Update, Collaboration with Chainlink and Implementation of the EEA Off-Chain Trusted Compute
- COSMOS: Hub 3 upgrade is here, The Launch of CosmWasm, Terra successfully launched Columbus 3 mainnet, Binance added support for ATOM staking, Lunie (Beta) is on iOS and Android
- AETERNITY: The Middleware, The Fire Editor to Replace The Playground, Tokens Library Tool, AE Ventures To Invest In Four New Blockchain Startups, LABITCONF
- POLKADOT: PolkaWorld Interview House to feature guest speakers and A look at Web 3.0 with Polkadot
- THETA: Channel on Playstation 4 launches tomorrow, Crypto^^Nation and Oddgems AMAs with Wes Levitt, Live network statistics
- BEAM: Double Doppler 4.1.6978, Upcoming Halving, A Paper On Confidential Assets On Mimblewimble, New Listings
- TEZOS: A Year In Review, 1,338 Developers Trained in 2019, Tezos in Top-10, Improved Reward Formula, Ledger Live, Introducing LabNet
- IOST: Partnership with FoundGame, DOS Network and Constant
- ORBS: Upcoming Round III of Orbs Rewards Distribution, A Blockchain Solution To Government Welfare Fraud, Podcast with Tal Kol
- CHAINLINK: P2P Validator as a node operator and The Synthetix-Chainlink integratio
- ETHEREUM: Muir Glacier happening on Jan 1. @AragonProject Court pre-activation begins Jan 7. @TornadoCash v2 released. @SablierHQ is live on mainnet. @KyberNetwork rethinks token model
No updates
Social encounters
Korea’s top financial watchdog is moving to create a legal framework to support decentralized identification (DID) and biometric identification services.
According to the Korean-language news site PAXNet News, the FInancial Services Commission (FSC) announced on Dec. 4 a strategy to “scale up” fintech services to accelerate financial innovation.
As part of the strategy, the FSC will promote the use of the My Payment app and create a legal system for the use of new identification technologies such as DID and biometric identification.
A government official said the strategy focuses on support, adding that as fintech is exposed to cybersecurity risks, authorities are looking for ways to minimize that risk while activating the new technologies.
DID allows individuals direct control over their identification and information data. It requires companies to use blockchain technology to decentralize and maintain verification data in order to prevent forgery or alteration of ID or certification information. After a real name has been confirmed, the user’s unique information is stored on the blockchain.
Individuals can store their original ID information — including their name, date of birth, address, and public certificates — on their smartphone to use when needed.
Since individuals can use DIDs — or biometric IDs, for that matter — in multiple places, the technology should make it easier to use financial services and promote the expansion of non-face-to-face services by simplifying procedures and reducing costs.
Currently, there are three major initiatives to commercialize DID in Korea, including of course the MyID Alliance led by ICONLOOP and several banks and securities firms.
An FSC official said though a legal basis for DID already exists using regulatory exemptions for blockchain-based IDs, the government would identify risks to financial security and complete the groundwork to bring DID into the institutional fold within the first half of next year.
As part of this, the government will consider plans to support the activation of technology.
To complete the groundwork, the FSC plans to put together a task force composed of blockchain and finance experts and begin research to carry out feasibility studies.
The official said the research would consider the unique characteristics of other industries and financial sectors, adding that even after new ID technologies such as DID come into use, authorities would continue improving the system by amending and supplementing laws and ordinances pertaining to digital financial transactions to ensure financial stability.
By securing including into the FSC’s Innovative Financial Services and Regulations Sandbox earlier this year, ICONLOOP’s “my-ID” solution may have served as a catalyst for a government move that could mark the start of blockchain’s mass adoption.
Finance
Roadmap
Partnerships and team members
The Korean-language edition of CoinTelegraph reports that the financial platform of one of Korea’s largest internet companies has joined ICONLOOP’s MyID Alliance.
The MyID Alliance confirmed Tuesday that NHN Payco had joined the initiative as an alliance partner.
A core subsidiary of NHN, the Korean internet giant engaged in a variety of cloud, fintech, entertainment, and advertising businesses, NHN Payco offers a wide range of financial services such as mobile payments, money transfers, loyalty points, big-data-driven credit ratings, advertising, and mobile security solutions.
NHN Payco joins the MyID Alliance as a “growth partner,” i.e., partners that are adopting my-ID’s blockchain ID service into actual services.
Other “growth partners” include travel service Yanolja, car rental platform Carplat and e-commerce platform Cafe24.
NHN Payco has not decided how it will implement MyID into its services, however.
CoinTelegraph notes that NHN has been making other blockchain moves, too.
In particular, NHN’s popular music streaming service Bugs has adopted local blockchain project Terra’s payment service CHAI.
If NHN Payco adopts blockchain technology, other NHN businesses may do so too, including the company’s lucrative game business.
Rumors
No updates
Social media metrics
The charts above illustrate a slight decline in the number of Telegram and Twitter followers. In general, the ICON foundation experiences an average level of social activity.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of ICON Reddit subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook likes. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
Official channels of P-Reps:
RHIZOME (ICON P-Rep Candidate. Focused on creating and marketing content about the ICON ecosystem).
Insight ICON (Insight’s Distributed Consensus Lab is building automated node deployments, advanced analysis techniques, and distributed applications for the ICON Blockchain)
POS Bakerz (a blockchain infrastructure service and node operator for different Proof-of-Stake blockchains).
block42 Blockchain Company (Unlocking blockchain technology for organizations).
Blockchain@Berkeley (focus on education, R&D, and consulting)
Gilga Capital (Blockchain Venture Capital and Accelerator)
Chainode Capital (Blockchain consultancy and validator services)
