Icon (ICX) had a terrible 2018 with miserable on-chain activity. Team releases new roadmap with no clear deadlines which is a big red flag
Icon was one of the most hyped projects entering this year with huge expectations pinned to the “korean Ethereum”. The whole year was marked with strong bear grip of the crypto market, squeezing out the joy, motivation but also money out of both altcoin team projects and their supporters. Icon was worth $12 at one point back in February 2018 before a prolonged nosedive took it all the way down to the current $0.26 per token. That is a 97% drop, one of the largest price losses in the whole market.
The team behind the project also went through turbulence as the community lost patience with their poor communication skills and perceived lack of delivery on their promises. They did, however, react in proper manner to this dissatisfaction of their supporters by starting with regular updates on both technological and business updates around the project.
Very low activity on the ICX chain
One of the proxies that show if there is any actual value being transferred on certain blockchain is number of on-chain transactions and the number of active addresses. ICX has miserable activity on their chain: in the last 24 hours there were only 32 transactions with only 29 active addresses. For comparison, EOS had 4 million transactions, ETH around 600k in the same period.
This goes to show that ICX is not used by anyone at the moment, the low token price should be even lower if it would depend solely on the fundamentals. However, that is not the case with any cryptocurrency as the main price driving force is pure speculation on exchanges.
The ICON Project aims to build a decentralized network that allows independent blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries.
The team’s goal is to accelerate the scalability and unification of what ICON perceives to be a somewhat fragmented, divided blockchain space via a tangible protocol with secondary, intangible community-building effects. It also aims to remove the barriers between centralized services by opening walled financial to each other and under-served demographics.
Icon conducted an ICO in October 2017 in which half of total ICX supply was sold to the public. The total supply created is 800,460,000 ICX, with 400,230,000 sold to the public and circulating. Regarding release of the other 50% of total supply, the Icon website states: “Issuances of new ICXs will be determined through annual C-Rep consultation.”
- ICON releases an updated roadmap
After a period of relative inactivity, ICON has once again started churning out updates and new information about their current and future endeavors. And what better way is there to teach the public about these than to release an updated roadmap.
The roadmap was published today and is expected to bring increased transparency and ease some of the concerns the community had regarding the future of the project. However, the thing is currently somewhat riddled with typos and bad English which definitely won’t help improve the public perception of this project.
This entire roadmap is divided into three sections: blockchain technology, governance and services based on ICON.
Blockchain technology section describes several areas that will have work done on them:
- loopchain (p-Rep/citizen nodes, websockets in citizen, synchronization system, ICON RPC server, sync abort recovery, transaction hash/signature management, block versioning/generator rotation, a logger and SSL support)
- ICON Service (JSON-RPC API, ICX manager, prevalidator, SCORE package validator)
- T-Bears (CLI based SCORE development environments that will let you test your smart contract locally in an emulated environment)
- Interchain-BTP (Interchain PoC for ICON-Private Chain, Interchain PoC for ICON-Public Chain, Interchain SDK for public/private chain etc.)
- Parallel Processing (a scalability solution for the project’s chain)
Regarding governance, ICON wants to utilize the SCORE infrastructure to perform its on-chain governance. Built-in governance SCORE, support runtime configuration, whitelist of package are just some of the features mentioned here. There are some updates about on-chain elections, IISS (feature that measures and distributes ICX incentives), as well as transaction fees.
Other roadmap points include desktop/mobile ICONex wallet, an ICONest platform for ICX-based ICOs that don’t require coding, ICON blockchain tracker, a wallet app for the Ledger Nano S, SCORE updates, SDK databases for Java/Python/iOS, a decentralized identification/key management service, stablecoin solution, as well as ICX-based DEX’s and even security token offerings on ICON platform.
This is a really ambitious roadmap, one that will require significant effort to complete. It’s worth noting that many of the deadlines in ICON’s previous roadmap were never completed so one wonders how true they will stay to this new one. This isn’t an issue for now as there are no clear deadlines when anything named here is supposed to be ready. Only clear date is the next roadmap update which is scheduled for January 31st of 2019. This is a big red flag as it shows no accountability and readiness to bear responsibility for the promised work. Crafting solid roadmaps is easy – delivering on them is hard.
Check out the complete roadmap here.
Absolute garbage. Writer has left out everything about the major billboards of ICON all over this country. He has left out how here in Korea we are big on vending food machines and that they are every few feet in every city and all use icx. He has left out how blockchain phone by Samsung coming out soon is using icx mainet with Samsung pay. He has left out how every single person here uses LINE and are all buying icon and he’s forgotten to mention that icon does between 6 million and 30 million dollars in trade tokens every single day . He also forgets to say all this has been achieved in 12 months and that they are working many projects with the government. In fact this person doesn’t even say that all ideas and projects the government want to look into, which is everything now, all goes to icon first to discuss. He also doesn’t mention anything about how the parent company is a household name. He just is angry that he invested in a company that doesn’t use Western internet and doesn’t speak English and government doesn’t allow Twitter or many other social media websites and he expects a Korean company to reply to questions on Twitter in English when it does nothing for their Korean company. This Korean company never advertised or asked westerners to invest. They did that because of hype and now they moan that they don’t communicate. If they actually learnt Korean and used our websites and our social media and walked around our cities and read our newspapers and magazines they would see that icon is very busy. The people at icon I give a lot of praise to for not talking in westerners Twitter about all the Korean social media activity and chats they hold in Korean because then the westerners would send their abuse through our websites when they don’t even know anything that’s going on. All they know is the little English articles they release now and then to shut them up. Why would a westerners put money into a Korean company? Why don’t they stick with Samsung instead if they want everything in English. Why don’t they invest in our other thousands of companies ? Why only icon? Maybe it’s because an American Korean on YouTube told his followers about it and did some interviews and they invested just from that. Without ever stepping foot in Korea. Do these people even know the name of the Providence that Icon has offices in or the names of the Korean social media websites that has thousands of people using icx? I don’t thin so
Oh, poor Remy…
“..in the last 24 hours there were only 32 transactions..” nuff said.