ICON: POSCO Incubator Uses ICONLOOP’S VisitMe Solution, Development Roadmap Update For June, Monthly Grant Recap, A Closer Look Into MyID By Multi.io Research, New Interview Series With ICON’s Founder Min Kim, ICON P-Reps News
Biweekly update 19th June — 3rd July
Hello, dear ICONists! We are here to share a recap of news and events that happened within the ICON ecosystem over the past two weeks. So let’s have a short overview beforehand! The ICONTROL Team has released a tool that makes it easy to donate with their donate button. ICON Community Developers Call #2 led by Daeki Lee represented a great initiative and participation from several P-Reps, that are trying to add value to the ICX ecosystem.
Next, in the recent ICON Grant recap, three new grantees were announced — 2 for community and marketing and 1 for DApp. One of them is the P-Rep team Reliant Node that is creating Marvelous Gifts Cards, which are ICON based gift cards meant to reach non-crypto users. Two other grants were given to Korean community management and Social Media Engagement and Growth Accelerator by ICONPLUS. Moreover, the progress on the Marvelous and Atomic Wallet was shared. Marvelous is 27% completed overall and 90% of the UX/UI and 15% of the API engineering work. Integration of ICON into Atomic Wallet is 80% done, ICX is added to all the platforms including Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and IOS. At the moment, they are working hard on the integration of ICX staking, and they’ve completed approximately 40% thus far.
Additionally, in case you’ve missed ICON recent crucial milestones, they are listed in the latest ICON Newsletter. Some key highlights include 100 million total network transactions since January 2018, nearly 2.5 years; approximately 54.5% of circulating supply staked vs. 38.4% at the end of 2019, about 13.9% annual staking reward. Another thing is that the main P-Reps lowered the global commission rate to ~17.5% down from ~17.9% last week. The recent report by ICONPLUS stated that Circulating Supply dropped due to ICX moved from locked supply most likely for the ICX P-Rep delegation Pilot Programme, Global Commission rate at its lowest ever and the ecosystem welcomed 2 more P-reps.
Furthermore, in the recent interview series, Flipsidecrypto talked to Min Kim, Founder of the ICON blockchain, about their recent release of a new transmission protocol that can connect different blockchains together.
Markus from ICON Hyperconnect had an ICON Meetup in Seoul with Korean P-Reps, Dapp teams & ICONists. Participants discussed the ICON Grant, Delegation Program & ways to expand the Korean ICON community. Importantly, VisitMe was used for entry! It’s also worth mentioning that POSCO, the first private entity to open a space of its own, is using ICONLOOP’s VisitMe contactless admission solution to control entry into the facility. Some 28 startups in biotechnology, materials, and AI are moving into the new six-floor accelerator space. This is another astonishing use-case for ICON.
Finally, the freshly updated roadmap was published. Based on community requests, they have worked on several features to enhance the ICON network’s governance experience. With the consideration of this feedback, they will soon add P-Rep private key dualizing, staking, and delegating functions in SCORE, multiple unstaking periods, and a capacity to increase the number of delegations from 10 to 100. Details of each feature can be found in the update.
Stay updated and see You in two weeks!
Development
Great initiative and participation from several P-Reps who are trying to add value to the $ICX ecosystem. Check ICON Community Developers Call General Agenda.
Check the introduction post and GitHub.
[Marvelous Report #1]
- 27% completed.
- completed 90% of the UX/UI and 15% of the API engineering work
[Atomic Wallet Report #1]
- Integration of ICON into Atomic Wallet is 80% complete
- Added ICX to all the platforms including Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and IOS
- At the moment they are working hard on the integration of ICX staking, and they’ve completed approximately 40% thus far
Awareness and social encounters
In case you’ve missed ICON recent crucial milestones, they are listed in this Newsletter.
Key Highlights:
- 100 million total network transactions since January 2018, nearly 2.5 years. They’ve averaged 142,000 daily transactions in the past week.
- ~54.5% of circulating supply staked vs. 38.4% at the end of 2019. ~13.9% annual staking reward
- Another +2.6% weekly growth in balanced wallets. Over 292,ooo wallets now have an ICX balance
- Main P-Reps lowered the global commission rate to ~17.5% down from ~17.9% last week
- Atomic Wallet integrates ICON $ICX and announces that staking is coming soon
- ICONation and ReliantNode teams collaborate to improve ICONSwap, the first DEX on ICON
- Sharpn team teases FutureICX is close to being launched by the end of this month
- ICONLOOP’s MyID Alliance grows to 65 members
- ICONLOOP unveils VisitMe electronic guestbook service that helps track down COVID19 infection
- Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) launches 2020 Blockchain Technology and Industry Policy Forum at ICONLOOP HQ
An interview with ICON’s founder on how the project is enabling cross-blockchain transfers, and what this means for the industry.
As more enterprises and large-scale corporations continue to realize that they cannot exist in complete exclusivity, interoperability (in terms of seamless information transfer and data exchange) via the use of blockchain tech has become an increasingly attractive option for not only streamlining internal processes but also reducing day-to-day operational costs. Flipsidecrypto talks to Min Kim, Founder of the ICON blockchain, about their recent release of a new transmission protocol that can connect different blockchains together.
Participants discussed the ICON Grant, Delegation Program & ways to expand the Korean ICON community. VisitMe was used for entry! ICX Station hosted.
Read the summing-up article by Daeki Lee. No spoilers, but he tweeted: “Verdict so far: Korea seems to be a much nicer place to live in than the U.S. in 2020 so far”
They talked about IISS 3.0, why this will be a groundbreaking development for the #ICON Network, the lowering of the $ICX i_rep, CPS, and more!
- Galaxy Score™ 75/100 (bullish)
- AltRank™ 7/2,041 (strong)
- 167,628 social posts (6M) +244.6%
- 448 avg. social contributors/day (6M) +311%
Upcoming events
- June 19th, 2020 — August 19th, 2020 — A Call to Developers: Build on ICON. Hyperconnect the world. ($20,000 Prizes). They’re currently at 140 participants. Build De-Fi, Utility, NFT & Gaming.
Finance
- Key network stats:
- Circulating Supply dropped due to ICX moved from locked supply most likely for the $ICX P-Rep delegation Pilot Programme;
- Global Commission rate at its lowest ever;
- This week welcomes 2 more P-reps;
Roadmap
Below is the projected timeline for the release:
- 07/14: Release the update to Pagoda, Yeouido
- 07/20: Release update to exchanges
- 07/27: Release update to Mainnet
They will also update ICONex Chrome, ICONex Mobile, and ICON Tracker to support the new features.
[Update details]
Based on community requests, they have worked on several features to enhance the governance experience of the ICON network. Based on this feedback, they will soon add P-Rep private key dualizing, staking, and delegating functions in SCORE, multiple unstaking periods, and a function to increase the number of delegations from 10 to 100. Details of each feature can be found below.
[P-Rep Private Key Dualizing function]
- Allows P-Reps to register an additional key, the key used to produce and validate a block, to the ICON Network.
- Currently, when an ICONist tries to register as a P-Rep, the ICONist’s key will automatically be registered as a key for the node, and the keystore has to be put into the docker.
- With this update, ICONist can register a separate additional key for P-Rep nodes when they try to register as a P-Rep.
- The ICONist public address will be used to participate in governance, receive reward, and only the node key you have registered are included in the docker.
- Therefore, the ICONist’s public key does not enter the docker, but only the key of the node enters the docker. It can be understood that the owner of the node and the key for node operation are separated.
[Staking and delegating function in SCORE]
- Allows SCORE to stake and delegate directly to P-Reps.
- Since ICON Network has a block reward for voting, if a SCORE can vote to a P-Rep, the SCORE also can receive a reward and distribute it to the ICONists who deposited ICX to the contract.
[Multiple Unstaking Periods]
- Allows ICONists and SCOREs to have separate schedules for unstaking.
- Currently, an ICONist can only submit one unstaking request to the network. With this update, ICONist will be able to submit several unstaking requests (up to 1000).
[Extension of the number of delegation slots]
- Allows an ICONist to vote up to 100 P-Reps.
[Additional developments during the month]
They continued to make progress on additional IRC token standards for the ICON network. They hope to release more information on these standards in the coming weeks.
Partnerships and team members
They’ve approved 3 grants thus far in June; 2 for community and marketing and 1 for DApp.
- Marvelous Gift Cards — P-Rep team Reliant Node is creating Marvelous Gifts Cards which are ICON based gift cards meant to reach non-crypto users. In addition to supporting $ICX, Marvelous will also support IRC2 based tokens, enabling ICON dApps who have a utility token (ICONbet, Velic etc) to create gift cards and engage their existing communities, and also expand to new members.
- Korean community management — Community member SimSulKim and team will manage the following Korean communities: www.ICONkr.com, KakaoTalk, Korean Telegram Group, CoinPan, Naver Blog. In addition to community management, the team will translate English materials for the Korean media channels. And as part of the approval, the Foundation set two KPIs: at least one meetup per month at the ICON office, growth of page views of the website, targeting 15% growth month to month
- Social Media Engagement and Growth Accelerator — ICONPLUS is going to run a social media engagement and growth accelerator program. Here are the things they are focused on: outreach within the crypto community to grow market share, educate the masses and the less familiar members with the ICON project and slowly on-board them through fact sharing, engage different communities within the crypto sphere, aim to spend a portion of the budget on outreach out of the crypto community to test this market space, help to understand potential to further optimize the campaign in the future.
The new release includes the Balanced functional specifications and the first interactive prototype — Try the Balanced prototype.
What’s next for Balanced?
For Q3, the roadmap deliverables are to launch several proofs of concept on the Testnet:
- sICX
- mining Balance Tokens
- minting ICD
They’ll also use Q3 to test the prototype with users, improve the design based on those tests, and start building production-worthy front end code.
South Korean steelmaker POSCO opened a new incubator space at TIPS TOWN in Seoul. Founded by the Ministry of Startups and SMEs in 2015, the TIPS program nurtures innovative technology by bringing together promising startups with successful venture founders as incubators. The ministry and Seoul’s Gangnam District Office operate five spaces at the program’s home in Seoul’s Yeoksam-ro neighborhood. POSCO is the first private entity to open a space of its own. Some 28 startups in the field of biotech, materials and AI are moving into the new six-floor accelerator space.
Best of all — at least as far as holders of ICX are concerned — is that POSCO is using ICONLOOP’s VisitMe contactless admission solution to control entry into the facility.
So chalk up another use case for ICON’s public chain.
Fintech Innovation Fund: K-Growth
SI: Danal Holdings, Kiwoom Investment
FI: KClavis Investment, TS Investment, KoreaAsset, Pathfinder H
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). 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.
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).
Registered personal DID (Decentralized ID) data in the MyID application is verified on the public ICON Network, which then allows its owner to exchange messages to a public or private network that is interlinked via BTP, without having to resubmit their DID document and public key to each chain.
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.
MyID will launch soon & huge companies already joined the alliance
Subscribe for the launch via the link.
Other
ICON P-Reps News
Top-10 P-reps
The freshest biweekly development update on Citadel P-Rep, come around and see what we made so far!
- POS Bakerz (Stakin)
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.
