ICON Newsletter #33 - Three Years And Going Strong!

Dear ICONists,

3Q 2020 is officially in the books. We’re extremely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve this quarter. Crypto is arguably one of the most brutally fast-paced, dynamic industries today. The volatility, unpredictability, and the monumental risks associated with cutting-edge technology and regulation are a few of the reasons why we truly appreciate everyone that is involved with the ICON project. The ICON public blockchain network continues to improve day by day, and everyone from our core team to the P-Reps and the community is what makes ICON a unique project.

As mentioned above and for a while now, more and more people have been staking $ICX every week. We believe this shows our community’s strong faith and support for the ICON network for the long term. In addition, we’re proud that the community is working together to spread votes more and more. The below chart shows the analysis by the Transcranial Solutions P-Rep team. We absolutely love this trend, but it’s not enough. WE NEED MORE VOTE SPREADING.

Yes, the ICON team along with other P-Reps are continuing to discuss solutions to the vote stagnancy problem. This is an extremely difficult challenge and we’re all working on it. In the meantime, we need our community to educate the importance of vote spreading to each other, so please help get the word around. Again, WE NEED MORE VOTE SPREADING.

ICON’s on-chain governance system is one of the best in our industry today. We continue to put a bulk of our resources into governance features and designs. With ICON 2.0 and our unique community, it’s going to be even better in the near future. We’ll continue to make improvements with governance because it’s what sustains, secures, and drives growth for the network in the long run. At ICON, we’re all about increasing the long-term value of our network.

After 3 years ($ICX token sale was at the end of Sep 2017, remember?), ICON is still here and alive. We’re still growing and improving. And the best is yet to come.

Keep Calm and Stake ICON,

Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member

At the end of every month, the ICON team publishes an update of our tech progress and roadmap. We encourage our community to read this update along with all previous updates. The ICON network has made significant progress this year and will continue to do so.

ICON 2.0: BATANG has been hands down the most important tech news for the ICON network. Although we’ve had multiple follow-ups on this news, we’ll continue to spread the word and answer questions because it’s that important of a topic. Our very own Ricky Dodds, Head of Strategy and Communications, shares his view on ICON 2.0 in his interview with E-Crypto News.

We knew this was coming sooner or later. Now it’s official. Sports betting is a multi-billion dollar industry and it continues to grow, especially with recent ease in regulation in the U.S. Remember to bet legally and responsibly.

ICX Station, iBriz, and Parrot9 P-Rep teams are at it again with another collaboration. This time, they are building Omm Finance, which stands for “Open Money Market”.

For more information, you can visit the website (https://omm.finance/) and read the Whitepaper.

Thanks to the collaboration of Reliant Node and ICONation P-Rep teams, ICONSwap has a new website and a new look. More digital assets are coming to the ICON network and we’re thankful to see continuous improvements to ICONSwap.

Check it out (https://iconswap.me/).

BalancedDAO (https://balanced.network/) is another DeFi project in the works built on the ICON network. Scott Smiley gives a great overview of this project at REIMAGINE 2020 Digital Conference.

A few weeks ago, ICONLOOP announced that their flagship product VisitMe hit 100,000 users. This week, they announced surpassing 200,000 users in 1,000 different sites.

On Twitter, Markus Jun from ICON Hyperconnect P-Rep team shares his experience using VisitMe app inside Korea’s Paul Bassett café. It’s worth checking out.

A few weeks ago, ICONLOOP and Shinhan Bank launched Korea’s first blockchain-based financial KYC Compliance Certification Service. We’re now starting to see Shinhan Bank push sign ups for this new service with a new marketing campaign. We hear unofficial numbers are already in the thousands.

Markus Jun from the ICON Hyperconnect P-Rep team is helping to spread the word on ICONLOOP’s formal partnership with the City of Pohang, POSCO (Korea’s largest steel manufacturer POSCO), and POSTECH University. We absolutely love how the ICON Hyperconnect team continues to go above and beyond and talk about the ICON ecosystem with the media in addition to all the self-generated contents - blogs, tweets, etc. Amazing effort!

ICONPLUS P-Rep team has put together a 1-pager summary on ICONLOOP’s partnership with Danal. We’re obviously super excited about this partnership and expect to see Danal participate in the ICON ecosystem in the future.