Can’t hit a deadline to save their lives?

A common refrain is that ICON fails to deliver on deadlines. Even commenters praising the project say the team “suck[s] at keeping up with [its] deadlines.” In particular, critics point out that the company has failed to complete a DEX or publish the third part of its Yellow Paper, namely, the section explaining the ICON Incentives Scoring System, or IISS.

The criticism is not completely without merit. Some of the items on ICON’s 2018 roadmap, announced during January’s ICON Annual Summit, were delayed. Others, like the DEX, have yet to materialize. You can’t fault ICX holders for asking what’s up.

Still, roadmaps are but rough guidelines, and as they say, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. This especially applies to a sector as new, as uncharted as blockchain, an industry where flexibility is a sine qua non. The inking of major deals with the likes of Samsung and Naver LINE forced the ICON team to reassign personnel and resources. Delays to roadmap items were inevitable.

Could ICON have communicated its reprioritization better? You bet. But it does seem more than a little unfair to lambast the company for building partnerships with major Korean corporations and government organizations, the kinds of partnerships that are critical to the long-term success of the project, both the B2B side and the public side. As former Deblock head of research Markus Jun argued on Reddit:

“That’s not to say that roadmap delays are fine. Ideally ICON would have had both roadmap adherence and these significant projects/partnerships or at least better communication with regards to delays, and this is something the team is aware of and is working on. However, when ultimately considering long term value, a joint venture with LINE, a leading social messenger service in Asia, seems to me, indefinitely more useful to ICON’s mass adoption and legitimacy than a DEX being released 3 months earlier, especially since ICON’s former technical director is the CEO of this particular joint venture.”

You could also credit ICON – or cut it some slack, at least – for trying to be innovative. They could have been just another Ethereum fork, but no, they chose to built their blockchain from scratch. They’re building an entirely new consensus algorithm. And as ICON’s partnerships with major corporate and governmental players – or its third quarter achievements – suggest, those efforts are yielding far more than vaporware BS. They are producing, or will soon produce, actual real-world use cases. Delays in hitting roadmap milestones seem like a small price to pay for that.

Knowing who you’re talking to

In the wake of the crypto market tanking, complaints, rants, accusations and general discontent were probably inevitable. Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody bitches about missed milestones when skyrocketing token prices are creating millionaires overnight.

Still, the ICON team could have helped itself a bit more. Though there were certain things that ICON could not say for business or legal reasons (for instance, how the partnership with Samsung or LINE would affect the price of ICX or the details of the token buyback), the team could have been more proactive in explaining to the community why it was reorganizing its priorities and how ICONLOOP’s business blockchain projects would eventually benefit the ICON ecosystem as a whole. Sure, traditional venture capital investors would have understood what was going on, but coin holders aren’t traditional capital investors. You need to hold their hand a bit more, to moderate their expectations while demonstrating to them that you’re in it for the long run.

Ironically, ICON’s communication problems are, in some measure, a product of the project’s success. In just a single year, the ICON team grew from 30 members to about 140, many of the new additions poached from elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, this has led to growing pains, especially on the messaging side. Many of these kinks will be worked out over time, or at least had better be with the bear market making communication more important than ever.