Should you (or anyone) buy ICON?
That’s the question Emma Newbery asks — and then attempts to answer — at “The Ascent,” the ratings and review site of financial and investing advice company The Motley Fool.”
We’ll just start with her conclusion:
“Ultimately, interoperability is crucial for crypto, and is an area to pay attention to. ICON has some key partnerships, and is certainly a contender. But it’s hard to know if it can gain ground and establish itself as the best interoperability solution.”
Fair enough.
So, let’s look at what The Motley Crew liked about ICON:
- Interoperability matters.
- ICON says it won’t need Polkadot-esque parachains to achieve interoperability, and that it can work with any smart contract blockchain (through BTP).
- Speaking of Polkadot, ICON and Polkadot are working together to help developers build cross-chain applications.
- In contrast to many other blockchain projects, ICON has real-world use cases — and this makes it worth investigating in and of itself.
- It is already “linking up various entities including banks, securities firms, insurance companies, hospitals, and universities.”
- “ICON’s digital ID platform, MyID, allows users to manage their IDs from their phones with over 80 organizations in South Korea.”
- OK, we should probably note that 1) MyID is an ICONLOOP project, not an ICON project per se, though the MyID-based mobile app Zzeung does partially use ICON’s public chain, and 2) only a handful of those 80 organizations have actually implemented MyID.
- I think it would also be fair to say that ICONLOOP has been the one doing most of the “linking up” with banks, securities firms, hospitals and the like. That distinction can sometimes get blurred, and I’ll predict that it will get even blurrier as ICONLOOP focuses more on digital assets, especially if the new South Korean government fully embraces crypto (as it’s expected to).
- ICON is soon expected to take some big steps forward in its technological development (read: BTP).
And here’s what they didn’t like:
- Economic and geopolitical factors have hit cryptocurrency prices hard
- Cryptocurrencies are “high-risk and unpredictable assets, and we could be in for a prolonged period of price stagnation or even further drops.”
- ICON did not regain its all-time high of 2018 during the latest crypto boom, and didn’t perform as well as its competitors.
- ICON isn’t as well known as Cosmos or Polkadot, and has a much smaller market cap.
These are fair words of caution.
Still, I do believe that the way BTP goes about achieving interoperability is innovative enough to give ICON a boost, especially once we move out of the interim “ICON Bridge” phase. BTP’s partners alone should be enough to spark significant interest in the crypto space: Binance Smart Chain, NEAR Protocol, Harmony, Algorand, Polkadot, Moonbeam… nuff said.
Then there’s the political angle. In South Korea’s recent presidential election, the voters elected a relatively pro-crypto candidate who is promising to bring crypto further into the mainstream. ICONLOOP certainly expects good things to happen in the Korean blockchain industry in 2022, and the company is already refocusing on virtual assets. Korea’s major corporations seemingly believe this year will be good for crypto, too. All of this bodes well for ICON.
