Review on ICON by Fanuel PORPORTY
ICON wants to hyperconnect blockchains with each other through smart contracts.
ICON is a South Korean blockchain that started raising funds to expand its development in September 2017. However, the project has already been in development for over 2 years. ICX was created by Dayli Financial Group, a group that holds, among other things, the Korean exchange Coinone. We also nickname ICON, the Korean Ethereum.
The project wants to "hyperconnect" the world by creating one of the largest decentralized networks in the world. To do this, the ICON team is building a huge platform that will allow multiple blockchains to interact with each other through smart contracts. Existing in parallel with what the developers call ICON Republic, these different communities will connect with each other using the loopchain technology developed in-house. The goal of ICX is to connect actors from finance, security, insurance, health, education, commerce, etc. into a single network.
Using its loopchain platform, ICX connects an ecosystem of blockchain communities through its ICON Republic. As the name suggests, the functions of the ICON Republic are to govern a federation of other independent blockchains. The ICON Republic can be considered as the European Union and each European state as an ICON community. The communities are linked to the republic through representatives (community representatives or C-Reps) who connect to the Nexus: the blockchain of loopchain type which is located at the level of the ICON Republic. C-Reps interact with the Nexus and therefore by extension with other communities across the ICON Republic. Blockchains that use ICON can exchange their currencies using the project's internal decentralized exchange platform (DEX). Taken individually, each ICON community is an individual blockchain or a protocol with its own governance system. While the "Community Nodes (C-Nodes)" constitute the infrastructure of each community. C-Nodes are responsible for the governance and maintenance of their respective blockchain communities. Each community acts according to its own rules and its own consensus algorithm. This means that ICON itself has no control over community members who can do what they want. Community representatives (C-Reps) act as elected officials for their respective communities. Each community chooses its own representative and each C-Reps is responsible for issues related to governance, such as verification of transactions and other activities within the ICON Republic. Like the delegates in a DPoS system (see the Ark project), C-Reps are rewarded for their work by receiving ICX tokens.
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Pros
- The project is supported by the South Korean government
- The development team is probably the largest in activity today. In addition, they are still looking to recruit sizes in each of the areas in which they operate.
- Many partnerships are already concluded and some already operational
- Governance and the protocol as a whole are well thought out
- The system of communities, C-Reps, Republic, voting, etc. is original and innovative
- The token has a real use and is important to operate various crucial points of the ICON Republic
- A blockchain tries to unify all the others by linking together different blockchains each evolving in a specific domain
- The token was during the ICO an ERC-20 token. Now it is a token with its own blockchain
Cons
- The project is complex to understand for a beginner. It is probably one of the most complicated to master in the world of cryptocurrencies
- They had several delays compared to the dates set to reach the objectives set out in their white paper
