On January 31st, 2018, the ICON team hosted their first ICON Annual Summit in Seoul, South Korea.

The invitation-only event aimed to bring together blockchain experts and influencers from across the globe for the purpose of promoting the team’s latest technical developments. In a post on Medium from December 2017, the team promised that the summit would mark the beginning of a new era for ICON.

The summit took place a week after the January 24th launch of the ICON Mainnet. In discussing blockchain, the term ‘Testnet’ refers to an open network where transactions do not have real value. A Testnet is often used by projects that are not yet ready for a full launch. A ‘Mainnet,’ on the other hand, refers to a traditional blockchain where transactions have an impact, similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

ICON’s Mainnet launch was a significant move for the team, and with a working product at hand, the team hoped to continue their momentum forward into this year’s summit.

“The mainnet launch is a giant step towards achieving our vision — Hyperconnect the World,” the team said, in a Medium post announcing the launch. “Clearly, this is exciting news for our team and community. However, we want to remind you that this is only the beginning, there is a lot more works to be done, and subsequent announcements will follow.”

ICON annual summit: the genesis

According to the ICON team, more than 300 people from all over the world were present for ICON’s first annual summit. On YouTube, live-stream footage of the event was viewed nearly 30,000 times (at the time of writing).

At the event, ICON developers presented many updates to their recent Mainnet launch. Included in the list of Mainnet updates was news of demos for the ICON Tracker and the ICON wallet, titled ICONex.

The team also unveiled their new project, ICONick, which seeks to replace the ‘long and complicated’ default wallet address commonly used to transfer digital currencies. With ICONick, users will be able to create their own unique wallet addresses. The team present “helloworld.icon” as an example of the type of wallet address users will be able to create. Users of the ICON wallet, ICONex, will be able to register one unique wallet address for free for one year, before presumably having to pay for the service.

ICON unveils partnerships

The summit also announced a partnership between ICON and Smilegate’s social gaming platform, Stove. While the name is not widely recognized in the Western world, Smilegate is extremely famous in Asia for developing CrossFire, an online first-person shooter that is one of the highest grossing games of all time. Smilegate reported $324 million USD in 2016 operating profits.

Additionally, with the launch of their new website, ICON listed several new partnerships, including investment firms, Pantera Capital, Kinetic Capital, and CM Crypto Capital.

Among others, ICON’s list of new partners also includes CoinDesk, Forbes, and Bloomberg.

ICON white paper

With the spotlight on them, the ICON team used recent press surrounding the summit as an opportunity to publish version 1.0 of their white paper. The white paper is viewable for the public in both English and Korean, and outlines how the ICON team aims to ensure their vision comes to fruition.

“We discuss actual use cases with dozens of reputable institutions that are already in the ICON Network,” the team state, in their publication. “This demonstrates our progress beyond the initial concept stage and validates our team’s strong execution ability; a major factor that differentiates ICON from the majority of blockchain projects today.”

Those interested can find a lot to digest in ICON’s white paper. The team expanded on their ‘Hyperconnect the World’ slogan as being an attempt to dismantle barriers in order to create a world where exchange transcends global boundaries.

“ICON aims to eradicate various boundaries that have been existed in the centralized system,” the team stated. “ICON brings the connection of humanities one step closer through real-time transactions beyond the boundary and infinite scalability that enables free collaborations.”

It’s worth noting that this sentiment is far from unique to the ICON project. Proponents of blockchain and digital currencies have long since praised the technology’s ability to enable the global exchange of goods and services. However, the team outline concrete examples in their vision, such as ‘stock investors in Korea trading Apple stocks in real-time with US stock investors.’

The road ahead

ICON’s annual summit also gave the community insight into the project’s roadmap for 2018. Roadmaps are particularly important for projects in the fintech world, where the relationship between value and supporting technology is highly correlative.

As an example, proponents consider the release of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap as a pivotal point in the platform’s trajectory.

The ICON roadmap for 2018 is as follows:

March, 2018: Token Swap, Mobile wallet

April, 2018 : IISS launch, ICO platform

2018. Q2 : ICX/ETH DEX, Public Channel

2018. Q3 : Governance Channel, IISS Improvement

2018. Q4 : SCORE Improvement

Towards the end of 2017, ICON reflected on their achievements throughout the year, claiming to have completed 100% of their 2017 roadmap.

In addition to the 2018 roadmap, ICON announced five decentralized apps (dApps) that the team will build on top of the ICON framework. They serve various purposes, with apps like TINK aiming to serve as a way for friends and family to give anonymous feedback to each other.

Conversely, the team also announced apps like Bluewhale, which purportedly aims to serve as a decentralized sharing economy for workers.

Ultimately, if ICON stays true to promises made at their aptly named ‘Genesis’ summit, the project could be the beginning of something big in the blockchain world.

Image credit: ICON

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