We continue with our series of posts looking at ICON’s appearances in Korea’s media landscape, initially focusing on features and interviews in Korea’s major dailies and websites operated by those dailies.

Building trust

ICONLOOP CEO JH Kim sat down with the business daily Herald Gyeongje for an interview that appeared in the April 23 edition of the paper.

Kim discussed the interchain, the connection that links one blockchain to another. He explained that he conceived of the interchain while working on a certification service for the securities industry. He found that though the Ethereum public blockchain was a very finished product, it wasn’t a great fit for enterprises, while enterprise blockchain solution couldn’t run applications designed for Ethereum or Bitcoin. The solution, he said, was interchain.

Kim told the Herald Gyeongje that ICON would launch its network linking the public ICON network with ICONLOOP’s private networks in the first half of the year and that the team was putting together a plan to link ICON with public blockchains such as Ethereum and EOS in the second half of the year.

Kim said interchain’s biggest advantage was its expandability: a connection that began in the financial industry, for instance, could extend to other sectors. Imagine, for instance, if you could use a financial network ID as an ID for Seoul Metropolitan Government’s blockchain network, or log into a financial service using your Seoul resident ID.

Kim cited interchain’s utility in the sharing economy, too. He said his team was developing a business model for the second half of the year that would let people use IDs for private financial blockchains on public blockchains used by ride sharing services. This, he said, could boost the credibility of the ride sharing industry.

Kim added that though ICONLOOP is entering only its fourth year, the startup went into the black last year.

No connections, no future

ICONLOOP CEO JH Kim sat down for an earlier interview with the business daily Maeil Gyeongje that appeared in the April 28 edition of the paper.

Kim talked interchain, noting how linking hereto isolated blockchains could popularize blockchain services and, in turn, popularize the industry as a whole.

Interestingly, Kim said he was disinterested in cryptocurrency when he first took an interest in blockchain. In fact, he joined the company now known as ICONLOOP because he’d heard they were developing enterprise blockchains, i.e., blockchain networks without cryptocurrencies.

Anyway, it’s a long interview, in the course of which the ICONLOOP CEO discussed the competitiveness of enterprise blockchains, the state of the blockchain ecosystem, the role of blockchain in smart cities and public administration, whether ICONLOOP would do an IPO (answer: it’s too early to consider it), the potential of Chain ID to bring tangible benefits, the project earning over KRW 10 billion in sales last year, and more.

AWS+ICONLOOP=BaaS for enterprise blockchain

ICONLOOP CTO Edward Ryu sat down in March with the business daily Maeil Gyeongje to discuss the addition of ICONLOOP’s blockchain technology to AWS in the form of the ICON Development Network.

In particular, he said the combo lets users create their own private blockchains without having to develop a separate backend. You just need to define the front end and the operational logic. This will help companies cut costs and technical burdens.

As for what sets ICONLOOP apart, Ryu said it was the company’s focus on customizing its private blockchain networks to the specific demands of its users.

Ryu also said, among other things, that ICON was working on the IISS with an eye to choosing in September the representatives who would play the role of interchain relayers, that the fee structures of existing blockchain networks were acting as barriers to the mass adoption of the technology, and that ICONLOOP was developing a key storage solution based on secret sharing.