We would first like to thank the wonderful ICON Community for supporting Metanyx over the years and wish everyone a Happy New Year 2023.
In 2021 Blockchains that benefited from hype of the market were mostly connected or compatible to 3 primary ecosystems that demonstrated Defi and NFTs to larger userbase, being Ethereum, Cosmos and Solana. There are other chains that could do this but without having Ethereum Network or a VC or Ponzi pumping the coins to get users interested many good protocols were sidelined.
In 2022 the truth came out of what was really going on beyond the scenes and the circular investments and leveraged positions collapsed , similar to what banking industry does to create new products to sell. Once the leverage unwound and liquidity failed as price plummeted true value was established, In traditional business none of these Blockchains really had much value as one would derive from the marketcap. Even today DAU for most DEX is 10k-20k on Ethereum, which is still so tiny its almost embaressing.
In 2023 and beyond chains need to provide real value , there are now hundreds of L1 floating about, you can easily deploy one yourself, There are many Cosmos chains, Geth is a download away and Parachains on Polkadot unlikely need more then 5-10 in the next decade plus all the EVM compatible chains being marketed as L2/L3 or scaling solution via sidechain. ICON needs to do something special and different , BTP could be that diffence and would bring liquidity to ICON from other ecosystems, but it has to be easy and marketed in a fresh way.
We have some thoughts we thoughts that hopefully community will gather around
SEO
ICON needs to establish itself in the industry, very basically this comes down to a mixture of Technical and Marketing, the most glaring issue for a Marketing is the fact the project is named something you will never get SEO working on by typing the name alone. For example Search for in Google
- ICON
- Cardano
- Ethereum
- Solana
The point is very simple, ICON can never establish SEO as #1 ranked as others do because the word āiconā in English is used for all reference to icons on a computer , the ICON blockchain is not something English speaker ever will consider unique compared to actual description of what an icon actually is. Cardano , Ethereum and Solana are all unique names, Solana actually was not the original projects name, dont be afraid of change.
BTP
The current strategy of BTP may very well be compelling as a way to transfer assets across multiple ecosystems, so long as technical hurdles are overcome and enough liquidity can be brought onto ICON it will provide a method for traders to arbitrage from multiple source chains, the value could grow if liquidity can be established. The usage has to be easy and you need to attract your target audience, in this case the value exists on primarly Ethereum in the form of Stables.
Web3js Metamask
Another major issue is establishing users on your network, nevermind maintaining your wallet software, users do not like having hundreds of addons or wallets. Metamask which supports Web3JS only brings the largest available userbase. The obvious factor is Address space, HXā¦vs 0x0 Ethereum .
Solution = Research possibility of creating API translator proxy to support all Web3jS calls , longer term write adapter with API directly into goloop
Or hardfork to migrated chain with Eth address formatting and supports Web3jS API calls natively to API
Token burn
The foundation still maintains many 10s or 100s of millions of ICX , many of these are effectively pointless to retain if network is unable to retain value due to loss of faith. The Foundation should disclose all holdings of ICX and propose reduction of Supply, sadly many investors are sitting in a loss for supporting ICON with price near all time lows. Token burns can be effective marketing but it would be better to do so over a 1-3 year timeframe to utilise.
Leadership
Clearly top down failure in many respects, but also many good initiatives and wins, just not as impactful as one would hope. A fresh team would be far better for everyone involved with existing taking a back seat/resign and promote more internal team and bring new leadership team in with new brand and idea to promote it.
VirtualMachine
JVM implemetnation of ICON virtual machine is certainly different the most, but so are others that exist, EVM is not necessarily best as WASM will eventually eat into it, most demonstrated by Coswasm implementations on some notable Cosmos chains that performed very well. It is more important to be able to support Metamask then to support EVM , but clearly if you could and do alreay run hetergenous VM execution you can explore more options from developers. Imagine ICON could support JVM , EVM and WASM based contracts. ICON does this currently for Python/Java and have seen other chains that support EVM and WASM execution, this allows many more developers to develop.
ICON 3.0
ICON 3.0 should be all the above
- Rebrand ICON to something new and relevant
- Burn some ICX nowā¦and over the year until rebrand
- Hardfork with redonomination of ICX to new ticker based on new brand
- Find some new faces to lead Foundation
- CPS fund based on vested tokens + stables
- Rollout BTP + Metamask support to major L1s with liquidity
- Dapps support Web3js / metamask
- Other VM execution like WASM or EVM
- Community owned DAO (fund DAO with emissions)
- Review tokenomics to make further improvements, still more can be done on emissions/block rewards and incentives to Dapp developers
This is meant as minimum of 18-24 months plan, some of these such as BTP are already being worked on but also consider how making fundamental changes protocol and ecosystem could set ICON on a new path. No point in doing next something in hurry with little impact, ICON needs something that will set it up for longer term success.
Metanyx Team