ICON’s Institutional Backing

The origins of ICON begin with Yello Mobile, a Korean mobile-app company, launched in 2012.

Here is what Seoul Space wrote about Yello in 2017:

“Korea has always been dominated by conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. However, times are changing as more and more startups find success in Korea. One of the biggest success stories is Yello Mobile which is considered the Y-Combinator of Korea. Founded in 2012, Yello Mobile is a mobile business platform/VC firm operating in shopping, media content, marketing & advertising, travel, and O2O business. It has already more than 65 startups under their umbrella and the company is now worth over $4 billion. These startups help each other in regards to payments, resources, and shared costs.”

As a result of its multi-billion dollar valuation, Yello has been given the label of a “unicorn” startup (defined as a private company with a valuation over $1 billion), which puts it in the same class of companies such as AirBNB, SpaceX, Stripe, and others.

According to TechCrunch, “Yello Mobile has built its business around five categories of apps: Shopping, Media, AdTech, Travel, and Offline-to-online.”

As the business grew, Yello acquired a number of apps and other companies to grow their user base, but it’s unlikely you’ve heard of any of them (unless you live in Korea): “Many of the brands and apps run by Yello won’t be household names to the average reader in a market like the U.S. or Europe, but they have some decent traction in Korea, with one-third of the country’s population using one or another of Yello’s apps, as well as some growth in South-East Asia.”

As you can see from the image above, Yello is a sprawling company with ownership over a diverse set of other startups and businesses.

Around 2014, Yello decided to launch a spinoff entity called the Yello Financial Group, which Yello describes as “Korea’s leading accelerator for financial technology companies.”

In short, Yello perceived opportunity in the market for FinTech companies and launched an accelerator to participate in that market. Their efforts were successful almost immediately:

“In less than two years since founding, the company [Yello Financial Group] launched over 30 fintech products and onboarded dozens of marquee clients including AXA, SK Securities, and ING while using the Yello brand in partnership with Yello Mobile, an Asian mobile platform.” (Source)

In 2016, about two years after it’s founding (but about a year or so before the launch of ICON), Yello Financial Group changed its name to Dayli Financial Group (DFG). According to DAYLI Financial Group CEO Sean Shin, “Based on technologies, data, and the grit that we call the ‘DAYLI spirit’, it has been DAYLI Financial Group’s mission since the establishment to provide digital financial services that can enrich customers’ daily lives. The new naming will help clarify the corporate vision both internally and externally. We will do our best to ensure our customers can actually feel the DAYLI Life, with access to easier, faster, and ever-available digital financial services and practical benefits.” (Emphasis mine)

Dayli Financial Group, according to their website, has received more than $100 billion won (approx. $86,631,000) in investment funding, and has several hundred employees according to Crunchbase.

In 2017, Yello became the majority shareholder of DFG to further formalize their connection with the entity:

“Yellow Mobile recently announced that it has acquired 52.39% stake in Daily [sic] Financial Group, formerly the largest shareholder of Formation Group, for about 112.6 billion won (US$110M). The shareholders of the Daily Financial Group consisted of Yellow Mobile, foreign and domestic investors, and members of the Daily [sic] Financial Group. … YM now being the major shareholder of DFG enables YM to add Fintech and digital financial services to its business portfolio, creating synergies with its existing business, and strengthening its client offering in Korea and other regions.”

Still with me? To quickly summarize, one of Korea’s unicorn startups (valued at $4 billion), detecting opportunity in the FinTech sector, decided to launch (and now owns) a business operating as a startup accelerator focused on launching and growing companies in the FinTech sector.

Let’s focus a bit more on Dayli Financial Group.

Dayli Financial Group also has a subsidiary called Dayli Intelligence, which “is a financial intermediary specialist in financial technology and provides artificial intelligence and block chain solutions for financial innovation.” Dayli Intelligence began when several startups under the Dayli Financial Group joined together to “to offer AI services that could give ‘practical help’ to financial firms.”

In May of 2016, Dayli Intelligence launched a block chain professional enterprise called theloop (and if you’ve been following ICON for a while, this should ring a bell). The purpose of theloop was to develop private blockchain solutions for select clients of Dayli Intelligence (remember, this was before the ICON public chain, and the ICON project as we know it today, came into existence). In late 2018, following the launch of the ICON project, theloop was rebranded as ICONLOOP, ensuring a more clear association between theloop and ICON. As you read the rest of these articles, note that ICONLOOP refers to theloop as described here.

In addition to ICONLOOP, Dayli Intelligence has subsidiary, “DAVinci,” which is an artificial intelligence company geared toward providing AI services to certain clients.

If our list of “Dayli’s” wasn’t long enough, in 2018, a subsidiary of Dayli Financial Group, AIGS System, changed its name to “Dayli Blockchain:”

“The company plans to create synergies with the Daily Financial Group, which owns a cryptographic exchange coin source and a block chain specialist, Daily Intelligence, and a public block chain icon ( ICON ). The Daily Financial Group is also a subsidiary of Yellow Mobile.”

According to a recent press release put forth by Dayli Blockchain:

“Dayli Blockchain is a smart city solution company that provides urban information systems, including transportation, security and control, and financial transactions. With many years of experience in smart city construction and infrastructure technology, the company is working on a wide range of smart city projects, and is conducting blockchain technological development and investment with an aim to build new kinds of smart cities that incorporate blockchain technology.”

Let’s stop here for a moment. In case this has been as confusing for you as it had initially been for me, I am going to reiterate this with a more practical example:

Let’s envision an imaginary tech company. We’ll call them Acme Technology.

Acme Technology is a successful startup. They have more than 1,000 employees and millions in revenue every year, perhaps even hundreds of millions. They’re valued at $4 billion. Their apps are profitable, but, like any company, they hope to make more money. So they begin exploring markets where they believe opportunity lies.

They decide they ultimately have the resources and abilities to provide services to blossoming companies in the emerging “financial technology” (FinTech) sector. They believe that they can make money by providing specialized technology services to these companies, investing in these companies, or even outright purchasing them if the opportunity makes sense. This new entity is called Acme Group.

Acme Group has a number of subsidiaries that provide even more specific technical services. One subsidiary is “an expert in natural language processing,” another is “specialized in financial data analysis and machine learning technology,” and another “provides a variety of large data-driven predictive analytics and modeling services, including credit rating, anomaly detection, and CRM, ” and another one — let’s call it AcmeLOOP, “specializes in block chains and provides optimized solutions for each area, from financial services to healthcare to non-financial services such as IoT.”

Each of the more than a dozen subsidiaries has multiple clients, meaning the Acme Technology umbrella potentially contains hundreds of companies they have established direct business relations with.

Not only does their subsidiary AcmeLOOP have the financial and institutional support of a multi-billion dollar entity, but they also have access to hundreds of relationships among businesses within their sector.

Obviously, AcmeLOOP is a stand-in for ICONLOOP.

I want to focus on ICONLOOP for a moment, because it ultimately serves as the key bridge connecting Yello Mobile’s sprawling network and the ICON blockchain project.

So what exactly does ICONLOOP do?

Here is where I will callback to my initial example of the student who visited the hospital from Chapter 1. Staying consistent with this example, the hospital, the insurance company, and the school all likely need a company to help them build their private blockchain system. That’s the service that ICONLOOP is already providing to companies (and has been for a while), most likely those that have had relationships with Yello Mobile and the Dayli Financial Group.

During the 2017 crypto mania, a number of ICOs, projects, and tokens were launched. Most did a great job of presenting projects that had seemingly impressive teams, polished websites, well-written whitepapers, and a conceivable use case for each project.

Over time, a number of these projects have washed out. It turns out many of those teams with “serial entrepreneurs,” “corporate marketers,” and other seemingly impressive titles were simply a group of individuals who thought they had what it took to launch a blockchain enterprise, but clearly didn’t. Either they didn’t have a firm grasp of their market and industry, they didn’t understand the technology, they didn’t have the relationships, or they didn’t actually have a use-case. Sometimes it was a combination of all the above.

That’s not the case with Yello, the Dayli’s, and ICONLOOP. They have an understanding of their industry and market, because they’ve already successfully thrived within it. They understand the technology, since they’ve been working on blockchain technology for several years. They have the relationships, since they’re part of a larger ecosystem with hundreds of relationships established.

Again, this can all get confusing. Here’s a simple way to think about it. If a company is associated — either as a subsidiary or client — with either: a) Yello Mobile, b) Dayli Financial Group, c) DaVinci, d) Dayli Blockchain, or e) ICONLOOP, it is a reasonable assumption that the company — if they are using blockchain — will be looking to utilize a public blockchain to maximize the utility of their own private blockchain.

But are those companies actually using blockchain technology? What about the lack of use case(s) referenced above that proved fatal for other projects?

Here is a quote from Min Kim, speaking at the interoperability panel at AIONEX in May 2018:

“…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.” (Emphasis mine)

The blockchain projects the ICON ecosystem is tackling, especially interoperability, were as a result of the existing business partnerships, relationships, and subsidiaries of Dayli and others pointing out that a blockchain solution would be a valued improvement over the current status quo as it relates to respective sectors.

This isn’t a handful of entrepreneurs with minimal tech experience trying to launch a project. This is a set of large business institutions getting behind a public blockchain project, with identified use cases, and the resources needed to carry it forward over a sustained period of time.