The last icon (ICX) made the headlines, it was up to the ICO bubble when it was in competition with Tron and Filecoin to buy Bittorrent in a high -level auction war.
The icon, formerly announced as “Korean Ethereum”, culminated at the beginning of 2018, but had trouble retaining relevance in the middle of fierce competition and a changing story.
From now on, Icon is back in the news, because he recently announced that it was renamed in Sodax and migrated all its infrastructure of its own layer 1 to Sonic, an EVM compatible network focused on high -speed and low cost transactions.
Sonic himself is the product of a brand change, passing by the Fantom name in 2024.
In an interview with Coindesk, the founder of Icon, Min Kim, explained the logic behind the passage of the execution of an independent blockchain to effectively outsource this part of the operation to the infrastructure of layer 1 of Sonic.
“In 2017, we had to build our own layer 1 because there was no other infrastructure available,” said Kim. “Today, buying and maintaining your own Layer-1 property no longer makes sense, because there are cheaper and better available options.”
According to Kim, the Sonic outsourcing infrastructure allows its team to rationalize spending and sharpen their strategic concentration on DEFI products.
“This considerably reduces our operating expenses of millions of dollars,” Kim told Coindesk. “There is less inflation for our tokens, and all of this has a financial meaning.”
It is not so different from the world of manufacturing. Foxconn and Taiwan semiconductors are $ 1 billion companies because companies like Apple and Nvidia do not have their own factories.
Likewise, the icon no longer needs to bear the fixed costs and the high risks associated with the execution of an entire blockchain.
“Maintaining a decentralized network with validators from around the world is a huge company,” said Kim. “We have eight years of experience in our own layer 1. It is tedious, expensive and very stressful. Externalization in Sonic allows us to focus on innovation and delivery of products that people really want. ”
Kim has also highlighted the advantages of risk reduction, noting that the icon’s DEFI layer can remain not affected by infrastructure problems in Sonic, creating a precious risk separation.
“There are deadlines,” he said. “If Sonic is hacked, it is obviously bad, but it is not directly from our fault. Sonic focuses solely on the safety and infrastructure of Validator, so that we and other DEFI manufacturers focus on creating applications closer to end users.”
The strategy comes as the icon seeks to reinvent itself in the middle of the influence of the diminished market. Once a cryptocurrency of the first 20, the ICON ICX token has crushed almost 99% of its peaks of all time at the end of 2018, and has not been recovered since, according to Coingecko data, while investors have moved to platforms better able to capitalize on the increase in DEFI and NFT.
“The layer 1 infrastructure simply does not make sense for most projects,” said Kim. “Many have underestimated the effort, the capital expenses involved. There have been erroneous bonus investors placed on layer 1 projects, thinking that an ecosystem is naturally building. But it is expensive and rarely durable.”
Now renamed Sodax and focused on transversal liquidity products, the project migrates the ICX tokens to a new token, SODA. While the tokens of Sonic and Sodax remain distinct, Kim pointed out that the monetization mechanisms of Sonic costs will channel the transaction costs to soda holders.
“Sonic allows 90% of the transaction costs to return to soda token holders,” said Kim, highlighting the economic incentive of their strategic pivot.
When asked if this outsourcing model represents a broader trend, Kim predicted that many projects currently carrying out the layer-1 will probably reconsider as the market cycles change.
“Ethereum and Solana are great examples because they are fully focused on validators and network security,” he said. “We are at the forefront of the reversal of the launching trend of your own layer-1. It is simply not viable for most long-term projects.”
While the era of premium evaluations for layers of layer 1 owners ends, more projects, said Kim, will simply focus on the product and not on the infrastructure with an icon – now Sodax – opening the way on this subject.
“We go back to the basics, reduce our costs,” rationalize operations and double what we originally wanted to do: put financial products directly in people’s hands. “
