Monday, January 13, 2020

[Issue #1] ICON Newsletter: Our Fast-Growing Ecosystem

Dear ICONists, Welcome to the year 2020! The crypto winter has been unbearably harsh for many blockch
[Issue #1] ICON Newsletter: Our Fast-Growing Ecosystem
By ICON Newsletter • Issue #1 • View online
Dear ICONists,
Welcome to the year 2020! The crypto winter has been unbearably harsh for many blockchain projects. Yet, the ICON ecosystem continues to grow and accelerate by the day. 
Key Highlights
  • The number of wallets with an ICX balance have shown average weekly growth of 5% post-decentralization, a significant increase from 0.75% pre-decentralization.
  • ICON network continues to strengthen with over 80 validators ("P-reps") and ~40% of circulating ICX supply staked providing approximately 19% annualized interest.
  • ICX is now listed on 31 exchanges and wallets, most recently adding U.S. Exchanges Kraken and Binance U.S. which include USD/ICX pairs for the first time. 
  • Enterprise adoption and community contributors are increasing (details below).
  • AND FINALLY… Interoperability, the last piece of the puzzle that glues our ambitious vision together, is underway as we have published BTP v0.5 PoC paper on Github.
We believe ICON is now truly becoming a global grassroots movement beyond South Korea. Please continue to follow our journey as we have so much more to share with you this year.
Thank you,
Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council

Refocusing on Enterprise Adoption
ICONLOOP's goal has always been to bring enterprise adoption to the ICON Ecosystem. After the launch of our fully decentralized network in October, we began refocusing on this goal and made meaningful progress.
#BROOF v1.0 Official Launch
Last year, we ran a project for Seoul Metropolitan Government that appointed members of its 'Blockchain Governance Team' using ICON's Public Blockchain. This project evolved into #BROOF (broof.io) with the goal of servicing various industry sectors. This year, one of Korea's top universities, Postech, will begin using #BROOF to issue graduate diplomas. Saramin, Korea's largest HR recruiting company, will begin using #BROOF to verify and issue work certificates. More enterprise case studies to come.
CENgold Launch
Today, Korean citizens can easily download an app to purchase tokenized GOLD, which is powered by ICON's private blockchain technology. CENgold is backed by Korea Gold Exchange, the largest gold exchange in Korea by volume. You can view the product demo video below (sorry, Korean only).
Korea Gold Exchange desires to connect CENgold to ICON's public blockchain. But, there are regulatory hurdles to overcome, in which we are are working hard resolve.
CENgold Service Introduction
CENgold Service Introduction
My-ID Alliance now has 44 partners
Almost 2 years ago, we introduced Chain ID, a blockchain-based joint authentication service, which was to be used by a dozen securities firms in Korea. Since then, we have brought in more partners and renamed the project as 'My-ID'.
My-ID's goal is to ensure authenticity of a person's digital identity when using real-world services. My-ID is a unique opportunity where it received special approval from Korea's Financial Services Commission (FSC) blocking any competitors. And with the National Assembly of Korea recently passing 3 bills intended to ease regulations on the use of personal information, all major regulatory roadblocks have been removed.
My-ID is scheduled to officially launch in the 2nd quarter of 2020. We plan to integrate My-ID to the public blockchain in the future and allow DApps in our ecosystem to have a seamless user onboarding experience.
Rising number of Community Contributors
Most importantly, we're proud to be witnessing a growing number of community contributors who are not only building new tools (view at ICON Community website), but even onboarding reputable organizations like World Vision into the ICON ecosystem.
ICON DAO - P-Rep Candidate
@Lucky8Steven Our mvp launches in the first half of the year with worldvision being one of our first users to onboard. Our aim is to make it easy for all traditional organizations or businesses to use blockchain features. We believe decentralized orgs are the future.
6:53 AM - 10 Jan 2020
ICON DAO team is led by renowned entrepreneurs and investors behind The Ventures in Korea. Prior to The Ventures, the team founded Viki.com, one of the top video streaming websites in the world, which was acquired by Rakuten, a Japan-based online retail giant. We're excited to have such high caliber team a part of the ICON ecosystem.
ICON ecosystem is growing globally. We have more evangelists around the world knocking on doors than ever before.
UNBLOCK (ICX GROWTH INCUBATOR) PRep for ICON
Our trip to Taipei has been a great success so far! We have met with many great people, and there is so much interest in the ICON blockchain and its applications here in Taiwan. Stay tuned for more to come! Our work in Japan + Taiwan will yield great future for IconπŸš€ πŸš€ πŸš€ $icx
11:45 PM - 11 Jan 2020
In Case You Missed It
ICON Development Roadmap Update — December 2019
Network Proposal For Increased Stability
ICON Community Grant Program
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Centrality Monthly Update — December 2019

DECEMBER


CEO Aaron McDonald shares key developments over the past month. To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality's ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality's Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook

Monthly Update December

2019 has been a massive year for Centrality! We kicked it off by launching the Developer Portal, delivering the vision in our whitepaper and completing the Rooster spur stage of our Roadmap. We showcased how to build a DApp on CENNZnet live on stage at Japan Blockchain Conference, exhibited at Singapore Fintech Festival and got talented teams using our tools to build DApps at AngelHack hackathon and CENNZ-ed learning weekend.

Learning weekend

Time has flown by and Christmas is already here. Our team is now UNwinding after a massive year so we can be refreshed and ready to tackle 2020.

There are two weeks to go in the Centrality Reward Programme and so far there are 570 Million CENNZ in the staking contract and a total of more than 12 Million CPAY earned. Once the reward programme finishes we will have exciting news about limited edition merch that only CPAY token holders can buy via the Sylo app. We will be making the announcements about the merch soon.

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What lies ahead in 2020?

Next year is promising to be huge for Centrality. The biggest milestone we've been working towards is the main net launch and move to public staking. Our token holders will be able to stake their tokens into the network and start earning real block rewards. We will achieve the first DApp with over 1 million active users next year and launch more than 5 partnerships with fortune 500 companies. Let the good times UNfold!

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Sylo

Since releasing in global app stores in September, the Sylo Smart Wallet App has already hit a significant milestone, having officially surpassed 100,000 downloads! With users now spread across more than 40 countries around the world and growing every day, it's a hugely exciting time for everyone at Sylo and in the wider Centrality family.

Sylo app

The swift pace is set to continue for Sylo, with multi-language support due to arrive in the app by the end of 2019, and much-anticipated Bitcoin integration in the wallet to be released into the live production app in January (Nerds note: BTC is currently available for testing in development mode within the app if you know how to enable that!).

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CarbonClick

CarbonClick Chief Product Officer, Jan Czaplicki was awarded the 2019 global "Innovator of the Year" by Michael Page. For those of us lucky enough to work alongside Jan, this comes as no surprise. His dedication to the environment and work ethic is inspirational. His innovation is transforming the way individuals can offset what they can't reduce from their carbon footprint.

CarbonClick - Innovator of the Year

Because collaborations between changemakers will be the key to solving the climate crisis, CarbonClick have announced that their carbon offsetting system is free for charities and non-profit organisations! If you know a charity who could benefit, please pass the word on.

Finally, the team will be expanding CarbonClick solution to international markets and will launch a sales and partnerships exercise in the USA in March 2020. This will coincide with celebrating the first of their really big projects/clients going live here in New Zealand.

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OnFinality

Blockchain as a Service. Create, use and participate in public or private blockchain networks in the cloud.

This month we gave our brand a refresh and launched our new website in English, Chinese and Japanese! You can check it out here. Through our new site, it's easy to determine whether OnFinality is the right blockchain solution for you. We have plans to suit developers, businesses or large enterprises.

Our team have been busy improving our product and our first customer, TrackBack, have fully integrated OnFinality into their consortium chain. Read all about why TrackBack incorporated OnFinality into their solution here.

Finally, OnFinality can now run validator nodes for Kusama! This is a huge milestone for the team and enables us to scale quickly as more validator nodes are required on the platform.

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PLUG

In 2019 we rebuilt PLUG from the ground up using the fast, type-safe Rust language, on top of the Substrate framework. But, not only that, we've added some more powerful enhancements, and are now a core contributor to Substrate.

Staying true to the PLUG vision, we built our own generic assets module, which provides the backbone of the multi-currency economy provided by PLUG. We built an attestation module, providing a simple way for identity claims and verification to be managed on-chain, and we rethought the blockchain permissions model from first principles. PLUG now provides support for world-first cryptographic proofs of delegation, Centrality's patented technology, Doughnut. Allowing users to authorise permissions on-chain between people or apps.

Next year PLUG will go 1.0! It's all about stability and smart contracts. We're building out pipelines and tooling to assess network stability, ready for a stable 1.0.0 release. On top of that, we have been developing a dex exchange called CENNZX to facilitate easy exchanges on our first network, CENNZnet. When we launch in 2020, you'll be able to pay fees in any generic asset using the exchange CENNZX, and we are in the process of architecting and patenting the Generation 4 blockchain technology.

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Aider

Two of the best-known brands in the country, Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) and Vodafone New Zealand, announced Aider, along with four other innovative New Zealand technology startups, has been selected to join the prestigious Vodafone xone Partner Series accelerator. The programme will help Aider refine their offering while increasing the strength of its business partnerships."

To stay up-to-date on the progress of our technology, follow us on

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New (bitcoin) options

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January 13, 2019
GROWING OPTIONS: Chicago exchange CME Group has finally opened its highly-anticipated bitcoin options for trading, offering competition to existing providers like ICE’s Bakkt and options venue Deribit. CME first offered cash-settled bitcoin futures in December 2017. Full story

COINBASE SETTLES: Coinbase settled a class action suit brought by users of the defunct crypto exchange Cryptsy for $962,500. According to court documents, Cryptsy CEO Paul Vernon allegedly used Coinbase to launder millions of dollars in user funds over a multi-year period. Full story

PIRATE STOPPER? Dish Network, a large U.S. television provider, filed for a patent for a new "anti-piracy management system" that will use blockchain to enable content creators to track how their work is being used. Full story

BACKED BY GIANTS: Lightnet, the company behind the Stellar-based Velo Protocol, raised $31.2 million in a Series A round led by a number of Asian business conglomerates. The Bangkok-based company aims to disrupt the Asian remittance market, worth an estimated $150 billion. Full story

LOW LEVERAGE: Japan's top financial regulator plans to reduce risk by mandating a maximum leverage of two times the deposit for crypto margin traders. The Financial Services Agency will impose the rule in a revision to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act expected in spring, Japan Times sources said. Full story


HEADED TO DAVOS? CoinDesk is sending a team of journalists to scrutinize the goings-on of the global elite as they descend on Switzerland for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. It will be Davos, but through a lens of crypto and blockchain. Our daily dispatches will tell you what sessions you should attend, what you missed yesterday (or last night) and prep you for what people are talking about on the Promenade today. The CoinDesk Confidential newsletter will run for five days only, so be sure to sign up now. Subscribe here

LONG-TERM BREAKOUT? Bitcoin's six-month downtrend looks to have ended with last week's double-digit price gain. The breakout opened doors for a rally to October highs above $10,000. A stronger move to levels above the 2019 high of $13,880 cannot be ruled out ahead of May's halving, as historical data shows bitcoin tends to hit cyclical tops before the miner reward reduction. Full story

CYPHERPUNK STORIES: Is bitcoin now like the early days of the internet? CoinDesk's Leigh Cuen sits down with cypherpunk and early bitcoin contributor Zooko Wilcox to break down the analogy between crypto and the advent of the internet on the latest Let's Talk Bitcoin! Listen in

WHO WON #CRYPTOTWITTER
 

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