ICON (ICX) announces Forbes and Bloomberg as Partners

Today has been an exciting day for ICON (ICX) holders because of the most recent Annual Summit where topics like the release of the main net and 2018’s roadmap were on the table. On top of this, ICON Foundation announced during the Annual Summit that both Forbes and Bloomberg would be partners of this venture.

This represents a huge breakthrough for ICON since both Forbes and Bloomberg are leaders in the financial advisory department and it will probably bring a lot more visibility for this project. These announcements come at an almost perfect timing since a lot of FUD is currently surrounding the possibility of ICON never leaving Korea in terms of adoption.

Image 1 – ICON’s website including Forbes and Bloomberg – Source: https://icon.foundation/contents/team/partners?lang=en

Forbes and Bloomberg show us that the geographical barriers will not be an issue for ICON (ICX) because these entities give the project international visibility. How these partnerships will work is still uncertain but it sure gives a lot of confidence for the people who are invested in ICON.

One of the key features for ICON is the concept of LoopChain where the concept of each entity having its own blockchain creates the “hyper-connectivity” they advertise. The ICON protocol would be what would connect all of these blockchains to each other.

Planned Incentives for ICON (ICX)

The guidelines for the issuance of any ICX, and also the ones that get consumed in transaction fees, is to redirect these tokens to so called “Public Treasury”. This account is the one that allegedly will be engaging in the Incentive program and will be distributing these tokens.

And how will this distribution happen?

In the case for the newly issued ICX’s and for the deferred tokens as well, the distribution will be based on something called IISS (ICON Incentives Scoring System). This score is an indicator that is released by the network once every 1 296 000 blocks, which takes approximately one month, and it is generated so it can then shape the guidelines for the issuance of new tokens in the future.

As for the tokens gathered from the transaction fees, those ICX will be redirected towards the ones that contributed for them directly. This form of incentive plan that shapes around the IISS, is calculated through a formula that can be consulted in their Whitepaper.

Even though the IISS is currently only a calculus based on previous data they plan to migrate this decision to an Artificial Intelligence algorithm.

The concept of LoopChain

A lot of the most recent crypto projects already have a similar way of doing this like Ark (ARK) and Lisk (LSK) with the DPoS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake) where the validators or nodes are democratically chosen through voting. Yet, the loopchain concept is not meant for confirming transactions only, it is meant to be link between different databases that are heterogeneously governed.

The ability of having anyone create a blockchain-based database is extremely beneficial if you figure out a way in which these databases communicate with each other almost instantly and don’t suffer from any compatibility issues. This is ICON (ICX) goal, and they (people behind it) have already been working towards this vision through other cryptocurrency projects before, such as U-Coin, a token made specially for University students in Korea that has already been implemented in some Universities.

This token allows students to have their own currency which they can spend at various locations like cafeteria, vending machines and other school services. In addition, this U-Coin has also the feature of compatibility with other school systems meaning that a student could spend his tokens in an University where he isn’t enrolled.

Market Analysis

For the past week the ICON (ICX) price went up reversing the market trend, but many people were in it just for the hype train so they could get their small percentages in the form of trading. This led to the dump that happened today although the announcements are indeed exciting.

Now that the value of ICON (ICX) was proven outside Korea, with the addition of Bloomberg and Forbes, we can more easily see that this project still has tremendous space to grow. I see it going for the top 10 coins in market cap before 2019.