ICON Case Study

Founded in 2017 by the ICON Foundation, ICON is a next generation blockchain protocol with smart contract functionality and interoperability. It is the largest and most well-known public blockchain project from South Korea with a vision of helping to hyperconnect the world, allowing businesses and communities to share their services in a transparent way and bringing global communities closer together.

Over the past 5 years, there has been an unprecedented number of new blockchain projects and technologies entering the space, all with their own capabilities and propositions. The ICON Project’s plan is to build a decentralized network allowing independent blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries. 

The Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) is ICON’s interoperability solution that will bring their ultimate vision of becoming a blockchain of blockchains to fruition. The BTP (Blockchain Transmission Protocol) is a standard that renders heterogeneous blockchains interoperable, including blockchains that entail completely different consensus models and algorithms. These separate operating blockchains can securely anchor transactions through a universal standard as a trustless settlement layer.

By the end of 2021, ICON’s goal was to grow the BTP Ecosystem larger than any other interoperability solution currently available on the market; not only in the number of blockchain integrations but also in the number of tangible use cases. 

However, as the number of different public blockchain protocols continued to expand rapidly, the technical challenges associated with connecting as many of these blockchain protocols as possible became apparent.

In order to achieve the desired breadth of the BTP Ecosystem, ICON realised that they required significant expertise to help them realise their vision of integrating with more protocols than any other interoperability network. 

ICON approached Web3 Labs in 2020 to discuss their widespread network interoperability ambitions. The ICON team were impressed with Web3 Labs’ significant contributions to a number of different blockchain protocols and their developer library Web3j.

In April 2021, Web3 Labs joined ICON’s Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) Working Group to facilitate the connection of the ICON Network to the Binance Smart Chain

Web3 Labs’ deep expertise in blockchain protocol development ensured that we were able to both drive the core protocol implementation and provide the plumbing to talk to leading blockchain networks, including Binance’s Smart Chain platform.

The end result is that users of ICON have the ability to safely transfer tokens from one public blockchain network to another, which is nontrivial given how much value is at stake on these public blockchain networks.

Web3 Labs is a blockchain technology company that works with large organisations to deliver applications that improve trust and authenticity of data and assets.

Clients that have taken advantage of our Strategy and Delivery Services include Microsoft, J.P. Morgan and Vodafone. 

We also work with leading blockchain companies and protocols to develop their ecosystems and platforms. Organisations Web3 Labs has worked with include ConsenSys, R3, the Open Application Network, the Ethereum Foundation and ICON.

Our products include the widely used blockchain developer library Web3j and the leading blockchain analytics platform, the Chainlens Blockchain Explorer.