Lack of On-chain Activity on ICON

[Aaron]

While we are on the verge of enabling the TAP/ICX liquidity pool on ICONPool, we are thinking deeply about the issue of lack of token economy and on-chain activity.

Lack of on-chain transactions has been a huge problem for the growth of ICON as a public chain, understandably due to hard to achieve network effect and staking among other factors.

What does the ICON community think about this, how can we increase the token economy, ecosystem activity, and overall network effect on ICON public chain?

Also, we would like to hear from fellow ICONists what we at ICONPool P-rep can do to help in the cause.

[Brandon_FBM]

Personally I think people aren’t managing expectations properly.

We know there is a lot in the pipe for ICON. Between all of the projects coming online in the next couple months (Balanced DAO, Omm Finance, ICON FI, Stash and more), and everything we know is in the works with MYID, as well as various other initiatives from players like Seoul Metro, Busan and now MyData initiatives, there is a lot to look forward too. Visitme, Broof and Zzeung are consistently increasing adoption too.

Frankly speaking: the ICON network is functionally only a little over a year old. Yes, the name and the “network” have been around since late 2017/early 2018, but there wasn’t anything to actually integrate, implement and adopt until it was properly decentralized October 2019.

In the last 13 months or so, we have seen a tremendous amount of adoption and work that will undoubtedly increase transactions and network effect, so as a long time community member and P-Rep, I have absolutely -zero- concern about the “transaction volume” concern people keep talking about.

Also, as an interesting side note, ICON transactions are higher in volume then most leading projects right now, regardless of the “source”. So it’s kind of baffling to me this is an issue at all. I think, sadly, this has just become another scape goat for lagging price performance rather then a real contributor like some are thinking.

As far as helping the cause. I think building meaningful applications, tools and resources for/on ICX. The more interest we can drive in usecases, especially those that abstract the “cryptocurrency” side of things, the better!

[BennyOptions_LL]

Just to echo what @Brandon_FBM said, I think many of the efforts necessary to increase this number are already underway, but more is obviously better.

Ideally we can have more P-Reps/developer groups teaming up to build products that directly generate transactions and/or have their own token. We need sustainable businesses built on ICON, ideally with a token model to add more trading activity on-chain.

For anybody looking for ideas, I recommend checking out what has been successful on other networks and innovating on it. This space is so new, there is a lot of room for innovation.

[Primo]

As @Brandon_FBM and @BennyOptions_LL greatly said things are being done to increase ecosystem activities that will only be accelerated with the CPS which is right around the corner.

I want to stress out that yes Transactions volume is very important for the token economics as it will help ICX become deflationnary
But I don’t think all the efforts should be transaction oriented, quality dapps and foundational building blocks to flourish different ecosystem verticals should be the priority even if they do not generate high transaction volumes

It should be about building what is necessary and useful for ecosystem growth and iconists.

I also want to add what I like the most in this network is collaboration to build between P reps
So this collaboration spirit should continue to persist.
Specific things I would personally like to see on Icon defi as Iconpool is defi focus:
-Icondefi analytics site such as defipulse
-Navigating tool such as zapperfi
-Insurance for the defi protocols

[Aaron]

Thanks for answering, while we agree that ICON is still a new ecosystem, we shouldn’t sell ourselves short.

It is a technically superior platform and we should push for more healthy discussions around how we can improve the ecosystem adoption with more tokens and more interesting use cases of the chain.

For ICONPool all we could come up with is Liquidity pools for one pair (TAP/ICX). Probably this is the time to acknowledge this as a barrier for mass adoption.

There are some great projects in the pipeline, no denying that OMM, Balanced, LICX, and our own Iconpool.io. That’s 4 upcoming projects I am looking forward to but what’s wrong with asking for more, dapps which interests people in taking more actions (ie transactions).

@Primo transaction volume is not just for making ICX deflationary, it is an aggregator for the network effect.
More activities => More dapp volumes => more spread across the ecosystem => more devs coming to build on ICON => more dapps. Similarly, more tokens help start the network effect, and token based projects incentivize developers to keep improving even when the dapp doesn’t have an alternate revenue model.