Greetings from the ICON Team,

We have listened to your feedback over the past several months regarding improving communication and we are continually looking for ways to address your concerns. In this blog post, we highlight some of the recent initiatives we have taken to improve communication efforts, including a new hire. Additionally, we address a few key questions weighing on sentiment and provide a new portal for addressing future community concerns.

New Head of Institutional Markets & Contributor Relations

We are excited to announce that we have recently hired Ricky Dodds as Head of Institutional Markets and Contributor Relations. In this role, Ricky will engage with our global audience and explore new markets for the ICON project. Ricky joins ICON with a wealth of experience in investment banking and equity research, and is extremely passionate about open financial systems and the potential impact of blockchain/DLT in traditional business environments. Most recently, Ricky was a Vice President in Equity Research at Deutsche Bank. In his previous role, he interfaced with investment professionals providing recommendations and insights into industry and company-specific trends. Also, he regularly communicated and consulted with C-suite personnel and investor relations teams to improve company presentation and perception among their respective investor communities. In total, Ricky has over eight years of experience in investment banking and equity research and will be a great asset as we continue to improve our communication strategy with early contributors.

“ICON is one of the few projects with actual enterprise relationships. Coming from a more traditional background, I know how hard it is to be vetted by these types of companies, particularly as a “start-up.” The barrier to entry is quite high. These types of relationships will allow ICON to prove out the value of the project with real-world use and move closer to the goal of hyper-connecting the world and I’m very excited to be a part of the journey.” — Ricky Dodds, Head of Institutional Markets & Contributor Relations

Building a Healthy Community

Many members of our community have expressed that they are discouraged to voice opinions in a hostile environment with too much profanity and threatening language towards other members. These types of posts and comments detract from the purpose of the group and steer the overall tone negatively all too often. We are going to be cleaning up some of this noise in our official and unofficial social media channels to build a healthier community. We will work with the admins to address these issues and provide suggestions moving forward.

Furthermore, we are currently outlining an F.A.Q portal to better address important questions from our community in a more timely manner. Ultimately, this tool will serve as a curated A.M.A. We plan to release details for this portal in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we ask that you send questions you would like addressed to hello@icon.foundation.

Below, we address the most pressing community concerns.

The Relationship between ICON and ICONLOOP

ICONLOOP is the company contractually obliged to build out the ICON public chain, and a leader in implementing private enterprise blockchain solutions.

The ICON Project was created to meet the demand for interchain and natural movement of the market from private ICONLOOP blockchain networks to the ICON public blockchain.

The ICON Council Members consider interoperability between private ICONLOOP networks to be the next critical step for the ICON public chain, and resources are being allocated accordingly to reflect this.

The ultimate goal is to connect Private ICONLOOP networks to ICON via the ICON Nexus in order to interoperate with each other and the public chain, and each of these transactions will require ICX for transaction fees.

CEO of ICONLOOP and ICON Council Member Jonghyup Kim stated, “Our team is and has been fully committed to contributing to the ICON project and servicing the ICON Foundation. We view every private network as a potential use case for the public ICON network and consider public chain integration in every private blockchain implementation of ICONLOOP. This is reflected in our consultation and interest from enterprise clients. Since the launch and increased global recognition of ICON, many enterprise clients have shown significant interest in public blockchains and how it can help expand the scope of their network. Currently, most, if not all of ICON’s development resources are dedicated to building out ICON’s public chain, and as ICONLOOP is built on the same blockchain engine, just a few additional developers are required for customization of private blockchain implementations.” ICON Foundation Council Member Junghoon Lee also stated, “Our primary focus is on research and development of ICON technology for interoperability between private ICONLOOP networks, and the general public chain. Due to our heavy focus on the public chain, we’ve had to be very selective with our ICONLOOP clients, and decided to work with just a select few.” A more detailed article on the context of how ICON will connect and scale private ICONLOOP networks in our existing projects will be released in the coming days.

Yellow Paper — Part 3

Designing a proper governance system and aligning incentives with all participating parties is essential to the success of a blockchain network. As the blockchain industry matures, we have the luxury of learning from the mistakes of others. Forcing out a governance system without enough thought has resulted in network forks, collusion, the concentration of power, and wealth accumulation to the few, rather than wealth dispersion to the many.

Bearing all of this in mind, we have been hard at work ironing out the details of the IISS paper. Currently, we are fine-tuning the weights of various metrics, considering attack vectors, and ensuring that the decentralized governance of the ICON Protocol does not fall into the hands of the few. But instead, is in the hands of those that contribute the most to the health of the network.

We expect to have the IISS paper finished by the end of 2018, however, will never choose timeliness over security and efficacy.

Circulating Supply

In recent weeks, the circulating supply of ICX grew from 400 million to roughly 473 million. Given our lack of immediate communication, this issue has unfortunately led to numerous speculative theories on what drove the increase. We apologize for this misstep and will clarify things here.

Firstly, the majority of unlocked ICX tokens were based on contractual vesting schedules of strategic partners and advisors and not in order to ‘market sell’ tokens by the ICON Foundation as some have suggested.

Secondly, the community should note that the ICON Foundation did not receive any ERC-20 ICX tokens. The 400 million ERC-20 ICX tokens sold in the token sale were distributed entirely to token sale contributors. The allocations of the team and other strategic partners’ tokens were not part of this ERC-20 allocation and were unlocked and distributed only as mainnet ICX tokens, which is why the circulating supply increased beyond the 400 million ERC-20 tokens.

Finally, vesting schedules that are contractual in nature will continue to increase the token supply over time. That said, we will address future increases in a more timely manner.

ICX Repurchase Program

We apologize for the delayed response in addressing this community concern. Over the past several weeks, we have consulted with legal advisors regarding our previously announced ICX repurchase program. Unfortunately, based on their advice, we cannot provide ongoing details given potential risks related to price manipulation, among other factors.

Thank you,

Hyperconnect the World

ICON Team

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ICON official community

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