ICON (ICX) REVIEW - Hyper-connecting South Korea

SUMMARY

• Website: https://icon.foundation/
• Whitepaper: http://docs.icon.foundation/ICON-Whitepaper-EN-Draft.pdf
• Hardcap: 150,000 ETH / 400,230,000 ICX (Contributors own 50%)
• Price: 2500 ICX = 1 ETH
• ICO market cap: = ~$43.5 Million (ETH price of $290)
• Bonus structure: None
• Sold out on pre-sale 20/09/17 in 6 hours, 30 ETH max individual cap.
• KYC/Whitelist: Yes
• Tokens release date: 20/09/17, tradeable after KYC (estimated in December 2017).

OVERVIEW

ICON aims to hyper-connect Korea by connecting all the activities in Korea through it's own blockchain. Any blockchain network can integrate with ICON to establish connections between different ledgers and perform inter-ledger asset/information transfers. This will allow hospitals, banks, government departments and other institutions to interact, eliminating any unnecessary third-party intermediaries and will significantly reduce the fees.

On a global scale, ICON aims to eradicate the various boundaries that exists in centralized systems. "Imagine stock investors in Korea trading Apple stocks in real time with US stock investors, or medical researchers at Korean university hospitals obtaining permission to work with diabetes patients' data from Sydney and London."

TOKEN UTILITY

ICX will be the currency for the ICON network. Similar to Ethereum, ICX can be used to generate smart contracts and generate other tokens within ICON. The network effect is present for ICX tokens.

ARCHITECTURE

• Consensus -Accommodates diverse consensus structure by allowing such groups or nodes to freely determine the number of votes.
• Smart Contract- SCORE is a feature that allows contracts to run directly in the node without a Virtual Machine and is easily deployable for various applications.
• Multi Channel - allows independent channels to be created within the same blockchain network and execute request, consensus, and Smart Contracts.
• Delgated proof of stake (DPOS) -Communities are incentivise to adopt the ICON network.

More details can be found in the whitepaper (Page 22)

FUNDAMENTALS

The South Korean market for crypto-currencies are growing exponentially and also home of the biggest crypto-currency exchange worldwide, Bithumb. ICON is already a highly anticipated project in South Korea and have gained huge media attention. This means that we expect a huge demand by the Koreans and followed by Western investors.

ICON is developed by a Korean company called TheLoop, which is formed between DAYLI and 3 other Korean universities. Some notable facts about TheLoop & DAYLI:

• The Loop leads thelargest blockchain consortium in Korea.
• Have well established partnerships with large Korean industries including, Coinone (2nd largest Korean crypto exchange), Samsung insurance, Kyobo life insurance and many more view full list here.
• More than 120 Employees working on ICON alone. Source: Interview with Kim
• ICON has a very strong team of veteran advisors, including the well-known Don Tapscott and Jason best. View the full list here.

We believe that because of these huge corporate partnerships and development team, ICON has the first movers advantage and will be the largest blockchain to be adopted in South Korea. We expect ICON to be heavily adopted by corporations and government bodies, and may very well live up to the "Ethereum of Korea".

ICON is also ahead in development than majority of their competitors as ICON is already being tested by universities, insurance and hospitals all around South Korea. Furthermore, the mainnet, wallet and DEX (decentralized exchange) is expected to be released in Q4 2017.

We also like the no bonus ICO structure of ~ $43.5 million, which is a very modest amount for such an ambitious project. We believe that there will be a lot of unmet demand and the hard-cap will be reached during the pre-sale.

VERDICT

ICON aims to allow interoperability between independent blockchains, starting with South Korea. We believe ICON is already very well ahead in development have the backing of very strong partnerships, a large foundation, team and the ability to execute. Depending on the enterprise adoption rate, we expect ICON to be above the 1 Billion+ market-cap in 2018.

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