By this point, you’re likely familiar with the origins of ICONLOOP and the role it plays in the overall ICON ecosystem. In case you need a reminder, here is what I wrote in Chapter 3 of this series:

As you know by now, ICONLOOP — formerly theloop — is the blockchain company established by Dayli Intelligence to provide private blockchain implementation for companies and clients who see value in having their own private blockchain. Ultimately, it’s the goal of the ICON project to provide the public blockchain that allows multiple private blockchains built by ICONLOOP to interact with each other. While it’s an organization separate from ICON, they are reliant upon each other. The more entities using ICONLOOP, the better for ICON, and vice versa.

Let’s also take a look at the summary of the relationship between ICONLOOP and ICON that was published by the ICON Foundation itself:

ICONLOOP is the company behind ICON, and has secured 100+ business partnerships with the largest companies in Korea since the beginning of 2018. These include Samsung, LINE, SK Planet and Smilegate. It also includes ICONLOOP being selected as the blockchain operator for the Seoul Standard Blockchain Platform, commissioned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which resulted in recent demonstrations of several ICON led government projects. These include ICON’s Decentralized Identity, Voting, and Payments. However, many of ICON’s projects have been led by ICONLOOP and its private networks, thus, many have asked how ICON & ICX will connect the private ICONLOOP networks. The short answer is : ICONLOOP private networks with strong use cases on the public chain have been carefully selected with the eventual goal of connecting with the ICON network via the ICON Nexus and every transaction will require ICX for transaction fees.

For a certain amount of time, it wasn’t entirely clear that ICONLOOP projects would necessarily connect with the ICON public chain; many assumed this was the case, but until ICON clarified this relationship (as they did above), this assumption was mostly speculation.

It’s clear that ICONLOOP has been successful as a standalone company. Simply looking at their lists of partnerships among major industries, including the government, shows that there is an appetite for the development of blockchain networks at a private level, and that ICONLOOP had the ability to get it done. Here is the first entry from theloop’s blog, back all the way in January 2017:

The Daily Financial Group, which is leading financial innovation through FinTech, has been conducting research and development on the block chain since its inception. As a result, it is necessary to have a block chain engine optimized for various customization and scale-up financial services for financial institutions. Since then, we have established Loopchain, a company specializing in the development of block chains, and have developed loopchain, a high-performance private blockchain solution that can be immediately applied to financial services.

This was the impetus for establishing theloop — based on their work investigating and researching potential use-cases for blockchain, they discovered there was a strong use-case for a customizable blockchain engine for financial institutions.

It’s no surprise then, that the initial wave of theloop partnerships was with financial institutions.

Of course, as time went on, more use cases were identified, leading to partnerships with educational institutions, the insurance industry, and business services.

Much like ICONLOOP’s initial foray into blockchain technology itself, the decision to develop the ICON public chain was also driven not by a hunch, but research, investigation, and a demand for it from their partners and clients. Here is a critical quote from Min Kim, speaking at the interoperability panel at AIONEX in May of 2018:

‘Chain ID (is a project) in which 25 securities firms decided to share and create a blockchain just for these firms. However, we also have blockchains in the healthcare side, university side, and we’re in the process of linking these blockchains together. There are other consortiums that are very interested in using the ID data that are stored in the 25 securities firms blockchain. This is not something that… we thought of, it is a natural progression to where things are going. As a company we are pretty much delivering on what the market is demanding at this point.’

That last sentence is the most critical — ICON was created as a response to the demands of the market. Rather than taking an “if we build it, they will come” approach, they instead were delivering something that these entities said they would use if it was available.

That all being said, it won’t all happen tomorrow. Many of ICONLOOP’s clients are still in the beginning stages of adopting their own blockchain technology, and are even further away from being poised to connect to the public chain. As much as we like to believe blockchain is quickly taking over the world, that isn’t the case. And that’s OK — the internet didn’t take over from Day 1, and blockchain shouldn’t be any different. Here is Ricky Dodd’s explaining this in a Reddit AMA:

First, I would say that the vision hasn’t necessarily changed. But I would say perhaps the scope has tweaked. Originally, the plan was like you said. Onboard all of ICONLOOPs enterprise customers, and connect them to the public Nexus and have freely flowing data across the network, powered by ICX. That’s still the vision, but I think we’re early (Bottom of the 1st, Top of 2nd… early… to use a baseball analogy) and enterprise adoption of public blockchain solutions will take some time and patience.

Regardless of the timeline of reaching true interoperability, we should still get excited when ICONLOOP announces a new partnership. That’s because the inherent value of ICON comes from the value of its network — and not network in a technical sense (although that’s important), but from a relationship and usage sense.

Ultimately, the role ICONLOOP plays is a critically important one; it helps generate the network effect — by helping build private blockchain networks — that the ICON public chain will require to ensure it’s long-term value (and growth).

Without any participants on the ICON network, it’s ultimately worthless — with nobody to connect with, why would there need to be a connection? ICONLOOP plays the role of ensuring those network participants will be there; first, by seeking them out and working with them; and second, by helping them onboard to the ICON public chain.