There have been a lot of opinions about ICON and its ecosystem over the past year. But they say numbers don’t lie, so here are some important ones from the ICON Republic in 2018. Some are pretty… others, not so much.

0 Decentralized Exchanges Launched

An early version of ICON’s 2018 Roadmap included an ICX/ETH DEX in Q2. That never materialized, presumably because their resources were getting shifted around as a result of their many partnerships. Even so, many in the ICON community have been asking questions about their adherence to their original roadmap. The team has now released an updated version that reveals what stage each item is in.

$0.221889

The price of ICX at the time of publication is a steep contrast from its all time high (ATH) of $13.165, which was reached in January of this year. That makes the difference 98.31%. To be fair, many coins have dropped more than 90% since their ATH because of market conditions.

1 Major Rebranding

In August, we saw theloop change its name to ICONLOOP to put both projects under one cohesive brand. While ICONLOOP designs private blockchain networks for institutional and government clients, ICON focuses on the DApp and public blockchain infrastructure. With the new name, the crypto community is able to immediately recognize that they are somehow related.

3 Yellow Papers

ICON released the Yellow Papers for Governance, Transaction Fees and IISS. The highly anticipated Yellow Paper Part 3 was made public this month, but its release also came with a lot of confusion as it was highly detailed and included formulas for different kinds of rewards. Though the paper itself and its thoroughness was welcomed, not all could understand it, which is why we shared our takeaways.

4 ICX_Station Launchpads

 In August, ICON launched their global accelerator program with the first one being in San Francisco. Since then, we have seen three other locations pop up: Seoul, Tokyo, and most recently, Singapore. The goal of these launchpads is to help lead the future of blockchain-based businesses running on the ICON Protocol.

8 Demo days

 ICON began hosting regular demo days called “New Kids on the Block(chain)” in April, with the intent of them being monthly. The teams that presented at these events not only gained exposure and advice from ICONLOOP CEO JH Kim, #Hashed CEO Simon Kim and other experts in the blockchain space, some were awarded ICX. We reported on the last demo day back in October and November’s Hackathon.

18% Jump in Circulation

The community saw a sharp spike in ICX Circulation in October. The tracker showed the circulating supply going from 400 million ICX to 473 million ICX seemingly overnight. The Iconist uncovered that the increase was from tokens being distributed to three separate groups.

22 Partnerships

This number includes MOUs and Strategic Partnerships with ICON, ICONLOOP and ICX_Station. The ICON Foundation got friendly with many different companies in 2018. Some of the notable partnerships include the joint venture between ICON and LINE to build Unchain and the collaboration with TRIVE Ventures and PwC Singapore’s Venture Hub to start Singapore’s first government-backed accelerator, TRIBE. Other big joint ventures include that with Kyobo Life Insurance, SK Holdings and Amazon Web Services.

96% Token Swap Rate

Okay, this number may change soon as ICON just closed their extended token swap on December 26th, but 96% was the swap rate when ICON’s official token swap for the ERC20 ICX Token closed in late October. Since then, ICON reopened the swap, and we will hopefully hear the final, FINAL rate soon.

$5,000,000 Buyback

In August, ICON Foundation announced its first ICX repurchase program that authorized the foundation to repurchase up to $5 million of currently circulating ICX. After that initial announcement, the team shared no words on their progress. Erik Cornelius explained the probable reason for their silence.

…

Yes, many coins in the cryptocurrency market lost value this year, but ICX’s drop was objectively substantial. At the same time, we cannot forget that ICON has made incredible strides in terms of future blockchain adoption by working with the Korean government and managing to grow their team during a time of massive downsizing in the industry.