Blockmove has a plan. And that plan is MIGA:

“Blockmove is No. 1, because we will make ICON great again,” says Emmanouil Kontopoulos, one of Blockmove’s co-founders. “We are an excellent candidate because we have a tech and economic background, we can run a node, but also have a vision for ICON.”

The Brno, Czech Republic-based duo of Kontopoulos and Tomas Mazal believes ICON’s long-term growth can be achieved through utility and stakeholders having the right amount of utility. They plan to do this by educating community members, organizing local meetups and hackathons, onboarding talent and financially supporting activities to boost the network’s utility. 

“I think this is the right place and moment to get actually engaged,” says Mazal. “This moment will not happen again. After all the boom and bust, all that’s left in the community now is the core members. We want to apply our knowledge and experience to help ICON because if the core community can’t, probably nobody can.”

First chance to do something

Mazal and Kontopoulos share a partnership and friendship that dates back 12 years.

A graduate of Brno University of Technology and Nottingham Trent University, Mazal leverages his experience as CTO and CMO at several local startups to be Blockmove’s tech guy. Kontopoulos, a student at Panteion University in Athens with years of experience designing and developing networks and applications, handles web development and marketing.

Kontopoulos describes his partner as “the best DDoS defender the world has ever seen.” Mazal also follows ICON with a devotion bordering on the religious. “He should write the ICON documents,” says Kontopoulos. “Tomas is the biggest ICON fanboy there is.”

Mazal explains his enthusiasm. When he worked for another blockchain startup, an application based on Ethereum, one of their biggest problems was friction, getting people to buy and use tokens. ICON solves this problem with Fee 2.0. He says, “I think Fee 2.0 is a really great feature where people can actually use these DApps without knowing much about cryptocurrencies.”

Though Blockmove has been involved in ICON since the ICO, they’ve only recently begun engaging. Simply put, the time is right. “ICON has been very closed until now. Everything is extremely centralized,” says Kontopoulos. “All the initiative comes from the Foundation. So this the first chance that we get to actually do something.”

Everything goes back to ICON

Blockmove pledges itself to forming a nonprofit organization dedicated to fulfilling ICON’s vision. Kontopoulos says, “All the money we’re taking is going back to ICON one way or the other.”

Blockmove stresses the need for transparency, something that might require some better tools. Kontopoulos notes that though ICON’s current tracker represents an admirable attempt, it could do with more statistics. He thinks ICON could use better documentation, too. “We saw some PDF the other day to persuade developers,” he says. “I’ve never known a developer to read a PDF and go, ‘Ah, the PDF is so great!’ That’s never happened to anyone ever.”

Knowledge is power, as they say, and better statistics could lead to better policy, even in the lead-up to the P-Rep election. “We see on Reddit or Telegram that all those groups have 15,000 or 20,000 members, but very few have voted,” says Kontopoulos. “Why is that?”

After building some main developer tools, Blockmove wants to develop or promote the development of DApps. The team thinks gambling DApps might be the way to go. “Honestly, I think betting is the best right now,“ says Kontopoulos. “Look at EOS. Dice has like 1.5-2 million transactions a day and thousands of users.”

Even ICON’s experience seems to point in this direction.

“We want DApps to actually be used,” he says. “We are doing this to drive a conversation. How can we make ICON better? We’re now getting all the transactions, and we can see that 75% of all the transactions on the ICON network are on one DApp — ICONbet.”

“Yesterday, ICONbet had about 25 users who did 76,000 transactions, and that was like 75% of the network’s traffic,” he continues. “We think this is good data because we compared it with other networks, and betting DApps have been very popular, with a huge amount of transactions.”

Good for your pocket. And good for ICON.

Kontopoulos also points to ICON’s need for liquidity, for more exchanges. “What do we have now? We have like USD 10 million liquidity a day,” he says. “When the P-Reps start selling millions of ICX per year, all this liquidity won’t end up in wallets. It will end up on the market. So what we need is a bigger market so this won’t affect the price.”

Mazal points to the obvious benefits of high ICX prices. He says, “As far as money goes, it will be a lot more beneficial to us to see an all-time high again.”

Kontopoulos says Blockmove will work to boost the ICX value because this will help not only token holders, but also the network.

“We want the value to go up,” he says. “Right now the price is very low. We need a higher price, not for the community, but for the network to be sustainable and attract talent. We need more exchanges, we need all of that.”

“Vote for Blockmove,” he adds. “Vote for candidates that want this sort of thing. This is good for your pocket. And it’s good for ICON.”