When ICONLOOP Chief Technology Officer Edward Ryu joined the ICON family four months ago, the network was looking to scale up and needed people to make it happen. Ryu thought it was a good opportunity, too.

“I was interested in blockchain , and I thought it would be a good opportunity,” he recalls. “I thought there would be a lot of things to do in blockchain , that it was a new technology, that it would be exciting.”

He was right about there being a lot of things to do. As ICONLOOP’s CTO, Ryu leads and coordinates a very busy development team hard at work growing and strengthening the musculature powering the ICON network. He also plays a public role in explaining and promoting blockchain to potential clients.

He’s a problem solver at heart, though.

“Personally, I like the process of fixing problems when they occur.”

A bigger gap

The veteran developer helms ICONLOOP’s technical operations as blockchain begins to emerge from its infancy. Because the technology is so new, Ryu sees a chasm between the platform and its users. “The technology is in its base stage,” he says. “There aren’t yet many services that customers can use. I think this is why blockchain isn’t that widespread yet.”

This contrasts with his previous experience working with other platforms. “Compared to other platforms I built on such as Android or Java, the gap between the platform and user is much larger in blockchain ,” he says. “Because the platform just started.”

As the ICON Foundation’s main technology partner, responsible for building the blockchain engine that powers ICON’s public network, ICONLOOP is striving to bridge the gap by helping build out the platform. As part of this process, Ryu took part in drawing ICON’s most recent roadmap. “Everything is currently fixed around electing the P-Reps,” he explains, referring to the recently commenced campaign to select the main nodes that will run ICON’s decentralized network.

Drawing a roadmap is no easy task, especially for a project with a lot of moving parts. Conditions change on a daily basis. This is why many blockchain projects – ICON included – don’t even bother making their detailed-but-very-much-subject-to-change internal timetables public. “We only post a timetable for important milestones,” says Ryu. “For the details, we have an internal timetable, but we don’t make it public.”

White hats

Ryu’s ministerial portfolio, so to speak, includes making sure the internal machinery of ICON operates smoothly. This means finding vulnerabilities before bad actors find them for you.

Fortunately, Ryu and his team don’t have to do this alone. “Everything is open source,” he says. “It’s an invitation for anyone to see the code and help us if there seems to be a problem so we can fix it.”

To wit, the ICON Foundation announced last year a bug bounty program with HackerOne, a global cybersecurity network of more than 100,000 registered hackers and a list of clients that includes the Pentagon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Starbucks and GM. Under the program, external researchers – i.e., white hat hackers – can earn rewards for discovering vulnerabilities and reporting them to ICON.

“They find the weaknesses that we hadn’t thought of,” says Ryu. “We’ve been working with HackerOne for about three months, and they’ve reported about 14 vulnerabilities.”