The reward of patience
Welcome to this week’s edition of the RHIZOME Wire!
Patience is rewarded
To anyone who has been following ICON — or crypto in general — on various social media channels, there’s a clear sense of growing excitement — not just because the overall crypto market cap has been gradually rising, but also due to some sort of impending announcement and/or launch relating to my-ID.
For instance, this twitter engagement with Ricky Dodds only helped fuel the speculative fire about what was to come:
Meanwhile, sensing the growing momentum around price and the crypto community as a whole, Min also chimed in:
This tweet not only reminded the community that it’s not necessarily ICONLOOP or ICON calling all the shots — it’s the end client — but also shined light on the fact that Min understands the way that news can potentially move markets and prices.
This leads me to a bit of a counteractive way of looking at ICON’s development over the past few years.
The bear market malaise
One of the most frustrating parts of the bear market — beside the never-ending red candles — is the fact that positive news essentially does nothing to the price. It became a running meme among the ICON community that whenever the important news would drop, so would, inevitably, the price of ICX.
ICON certainly wasn’t alone in this fact. Bitcoin endured months of good news about institutional adoption and accumulation, but generally stayed within the same price range, far from hitting previous ATHs. Hundreds of other projects that had made significant strides in their development were also essentially stagnant when it came to price.
That, ultimately, is the nature of bear markets; every rally is essentially immediately sold off.
Despite this fact, it still led to a number of people hoping that ICON would announce major news in the midst of the bear market in order to get the price out of a rut; if only the right news was released, we’d be on the way to all-time-highs again!
This leaked into frustration at the ICON team for not delivering a product sooner; however, in a somewhat ironic way, this may not have been as impactful for the long-term price of the project. Even if the news was tremendous, it would have been washed away by the bear market blood, and likely forgotten about by the time positive sentiment returned.
However, we may be at a turning point where positive news once again does make a difference (and where bad news means nothing). If this theory is correct, then it’s ultimately a blessing that it took as long as it did for ICON to truly “launch” in a manner that was consistent with the original vision laid out in 2017.
News from ICON World
ICON Weekly #3 – IRC-3 and IRC-16 Token Standards and ICON Mainnet Update
Spl3en of ICONation shares a useful tool for developers
Markus of ICON Hyperconnect is looking for a full stack tech lead
Revision 9 proposal has passed
To understand further the changes made, read RHIZOME team lead, Brian Li’s weekly update.
A new community translation DApp has been created and submitted for ICON Hyperhack
Scott Smiley shares some thoughts on DeFi
Blockchain Industry News
Four of the Top Five South Korean Banks to Offer Crypto Services - Cointelegraph
South Korea’s Woori and Shinhan banks have just announced their intention to introduce “crypto-asset services”. That means that four of the country’s top five banks, holding a combined value of more than $1.2 trillion in assets, are now poised to introduce crypto services.
YAM's Market Cap Falls From $60M to Zero in 35 Minutes - CoinDesk
A last-minute attempt to save the protocol ultimately failed and co-founder Brock Elmore pronounced the project dead at 08:01 UTC.
Yam's market cap went to zero moments later.
Barstool's Dave Portnoy Hosts Winklevoss Twins For BTC Talk - Cointelegraph
After briefing Portnoy on the basics, the twins guided the Twitter trader through a few purchases on Gemini, using the $250,000 he statedly sent to the exchange before their arrival. The trio even discussed Chainlink (LINK) after Portnoy inquired about the asset.
Leverage is a Helluva Drug - Coinshares
In terms of size, as of August 13, there is nearly $5B of crypto collateral “locked” in DeFi as reported by DeFiPulse.com, of which roughly 1/3 is in Maker, the original crypto-collateralized lending protocol, and the remainder is spread across newcomers like Compound, Balancer, Aave, and others.
Exclusive: Anchorage Is Again Blurring The Lines Between Bitcoin, Crypto And Wall Street - Forbes
After the San Francisco-based company began offering crypto-backed loans without the digital assets having to leave Anchorage's care in June, Anchorage has now teamed up with security token platform Tokensoft to allow investors to buy and hand custody of the tokens directly to Anchorage—bringing the cryptocurrency market further into line with Wall Street.