Announcements have been aplenty from ICON. This week saw the back-to-back announcements of two major MOUs with SK Holdings C&C and SK Planet. Both companies, which are under the SK Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Korea, have agreed to cooperate and develop blockchain business models with ICON.

SK Holdings C&C is the de facto holding company of SK Group and specializes in IT services, including banking, finance, telecommunications, government and many more. The MOU with ICONLOOP aims to develop blockchain for the financial services industry by building tailored service models for insurance companies, broker dealers, banks and other financial firms, with a particular focus on helping smaller companies.  

“With the MOU, we expect the blockchain platform of ICONLOOP to spread to not only domestic but global financial institutions based on SK Holdings C&C’s knowledge of financial industries and its excellent technical capabilities,” said JH Kim, the CEO of the ICONLOOP.

SK Planet is the marketing and management company of SK Group, most notably in charge of SK Energy’s OK Cashbag, Korea’s #1 loyalty program with 37 million users, and Syrup, Korea’s #1 digital wallet with 15 million users. With this agreement in place, ICON hopes to transform the digital marketing framework using blockchain technology and enhance both online and offline customer experiences.

JM Park, the Head of Marketing Platform division at SK Planet, said, “SK Planet will work with ICON to derive synergies in various fields so that we can offer differentiated benefits to our customers.”

We are excited at the many prospects of creating real-life blockchain use cases. Stay tuned for additional insights on all things ICON and its ecosystem.

This week’s news in the ICON Republic

weBloc forms a partnership with blockchain accelerator Deblock to expand the ‘weBloc Alliance’ in the blockchain advertising ecosystem.

The MainNet has been released, making ICON’s SCORE (Smart Contract on Reliable Environment) to be fully operational.

ICON signs a MOU with Cosmochain, a beauty community DApp service, enabling the DApp to build on ICON’s platform.

ICON releases its Yellow Paper, which outlines main operational polices and further contributes to ICON’s path towards decentralization.

Airbloc’s parent company, ab180, was selected to partake in KB Kookmin Card’s ‘Future Nine’ program, which enables the discovery, incubation and nurturing of promising tech companies.