The ICON Foundation has launched a series of feature articles focusing on the myriad personalities that make up the ICON community.

Through interviews that appear on the ICON Foundation’s Medium page, the “People of ICON” series introduces blockchain specialists in fields such as business strategy, service planning, technology development and corporate culture. The series aims to ease the delivery of ICON’s internal updates and to open a new way for the project team to stay connected with the community.

The inaugural interview of the series featured the team of “Without Doubt,” a project that provides real-time ranking data of search items from the likes of Google and Korean search engine giant Naver. As you can gather from its name, the project emphasizes transparency, levering blockchain technology to present unfiltered search engine data, reducing the risk of data manipulation. The service runs on ICON’s public network and uses ICON Tracker to ensure transparency and credibility.

ICON Tracker is a block explorer that displays all transaction records on the ICON network.

“Whether true or not, the possibility of data manipulation on search engines commonly used in our daily lives has been a constant issue,” said Jungho Lee, the project’s team leader. “The ‘Without Doubt’ service was planned to provide all data without filtration by utilizing the non-volatility and irreversibility factors of blockchain technology. Although the service cannot prevent the act of manipulation directly, we expect to indirectly prevent the possibility of manipulation.”

The team joined ICON in 2018, when they were information security and multimedia students at Baekseok University. The team participated in the Cultivating Innovative Youth Talents 2018 initiative, a program organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT and Korea Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion to bolster Korea’s technological competitiveness and promote youth employment by training talented young people in skills and technologies required by the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

ICONLOOP, ICON’s primary technology partner and maker of the blockchain that powers the network, took part in the program by offering an internship program providing students with 1,000 hours of intensive training.

In addition to all the free coffee available in ICON’s lounge, the “Without Doubt” team enjoyed their initial encounter with ICON’s development environment. They were particularly pleased with the availability of well-organized development materials. Taeyang Lee, the project’s front-end developer, said, “I hope ICON’s developer portal, the Developer Relations team’s Facebook page and YouTube channel would gain more popularity among blockchain developers!”

Read the interview with the “Without Doubt” team in its entirety here.