ICON Foundation:

ICONLOOP is the company contractually obliged to build out the ICON public chain, and a leader in implementing private enterprise blockchain solutions. The ICON Project was created to meet the demand for interchain and natural movement of the market from private ICONLOOP blockchain networks to the ICON public blockchain. The ICON Council Members consider interoperability between private ICONLOOP networks to be the next critical step for the ICON public chain, and resources are being allocated accordingly to reflect this. The ultimate goal is to connect Private ICONLOOP networks to ICON via the ICON Nexus in order to interoperate with each other and the public chain, and each of these transactions will require ICX for transaction fees.

This is a great response to all the FUD that’s been going around lately. ICON has been very transparent with their plans since the beginning, and the overall strategy is very simple to understand. At its core, ICON is a blockchain project centered around interoperability. By definition, an interoperability layer requires other systems to interface and exchange information with. Without third parties to connect, ICON’s most important use case is rendered useless.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a water piping company. Would you start putting pipes in the ground before making business deals with a water source, water purification facility, and more? No. The value of the the ICON network is derived from the potential use cases that connectivity can bring. This is why the team is so focused on building out private solutions for businesses and institutions that have expressed interested in communicating on a public chain when the time comes. Expecting ICON to blindly build the pipes before establishing a use case and demand for the pipes makes zero sense.

In recent weeks, the circulating supply of ICX grew from 400 million to roughly 473 million. Given our lack of immediate communication, this issue has unfortunately led to numerous speculative theories on what drove the increase. We apologize for this misstep and will clarify things here. Firstly, the majority of unlocked ICX tokens were based on contractual vesting schedules of strategic partners and advisors and not in order to ‘market sell’ tokens by the ICON Foundation as some have suggested.

From the looks of it, this was a major catalyst for the recent FUD, so I’m glad ICON has clarified this. The recent increase in circulating supply was due to a scheduled release of tokens for early strategic investors. There’s no evidence that it was dumped at market price.