ICONLOOP's latest interview with Edaily is out.
ICONLOOP's latest interview with Edaily has been published.
It covers a wide sweep — from how ICONLOOP has grown so far to what the company has planned for the second half of the year.
Since 2016, ICONLOOP has built a blockchain R&D center and kept developing blockchain technology, building capability across public chains, private chains, DApp services and more.
On the back of that growth — from the blockchain framework PARAMETA to HAVAH, the interchain entertainment platform — take a look through the article at where ICONLOOP is heading.
NFTs combined with games — we will make a big blockchain push in the second half
ICONLOOP CEO JH Kim said as much when he met Edaily on June 30 at his office in Jung-gu, Seoul: "We will make the HAVAH project a success in the second half of this year, and next year we will raise a Series B round to take it to full commercialization." ICONLOOP is a first-generation Korean blockchain company whose engineering depth has made it competitive in areas such as decentralized identity (DID) services.
It began in 2016 as an in-house venture at Daily Financial Group under the name theloop, and changed its name to ICONLOOP in 2018. After launching the world's first blockchain joint certification service in 2017 and becoming the first company in the blockchain industry to receive a commendation from the Minister of Science and ICT in 2018, it went on to deliver blockchain services with the Korea Customs Service, Seoul Metropolitan Government, Jeju Province, POSTECH, Shinhan Bank, NH NongHyup Bank and Kyobo Life Insurance. President Yoon Suk-yeol visited ICONLOOP last December, while he was still a candidate.
Kim laid out a vision of opening up new territory through the HAVAH project, where games and NFTs trade freely. Today there are still "trading walls" around NFTs. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, for instance, can only be exchanged on the Ethereum chain, and Meta Kongz NFTs only on the Klaytn chain. Trading across the two chains is not possible.
July 3, 2022 — Edaily, reporter Hoongil Choi
"Through the HAVAH platform, we will make NFT trading across multiple chains completely free," is how Kim describes the plan. Getting there depends on "cross-chain" and "interchain" technology — the technology that links one chain to another without opening the door to security incidents. "We developed our interchain technology ourselves," Kim explained, "and then we put games on top of it so people can play to their heart's content on HAVAH." For that, ICONLOOP is working with the Korean game studio Twobyte.
He drew a clear line, though, against rose-tinted NFT hype and "play to earn" (P2E) games. "The NFT fever has cooled, and games built around making money have hit obvious limits," he said. "We will show ICONLOOP's value through technology that goes beyond the limits of a single chain, and get back to what made NFTs and games fun in the first place." Rather than offering rosy forecasts, the plan is to demonstrate service competitiveness through solid engineering.
On the Luna-Terra collapse, he said the cause was "an unsustainable service, and governance that was opaque and run arbitrarily," adding that "there is nothing wrong with blockchain technology or its philosophy." He also said that "grow blockchain but block coins" is "as contradictory a policy as saying grow news but do not do video," and expressed the hope that "under the Yoon administration the Financial Services Commission's regulatory sandbox becomes active so blockchain companies can put out innovative services freely."
July 3, 2022 — Edaily, reporter Hoongil Choi
"It is going to take a lot of time for the virtual asset business to come inside the regulated system," he said. "ICONLOOP is still working out its revenue model even now, but we will prove our value through the HAVAH project in the second half of this year and keep taking on the challenge." He added, with emphasis: "ICONLOOP is the only company in Korea that built both the ICON project, which once reached a market cap in the trillions of KRW, and the blockchain engine for LINE, the Japanese subsidiary of Naver (035420) used by more than 100 million people. We will carry on as a company that is serious about blockchain technology."
July 3, 2022 — Edaily, reporter Hoongil Choi
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Life Meets Blockchain, ICONLOOP