Samsung Nexledger Wins Seoul Metropolitan Government - Potential Impacts for ICON?

There has been a lot of debates surrounding Samsung's latest news coverage Samsung SDS wins blockchain project from Seoul Metropolitan Govt, people are worried and concerned with a conglomerate like Samsung entering the space and that it'll potentially eclipse ICON's efforts and becomes the sole dominant player in South Korea. Today I'm going to dive into the details and explain their differences and how the two can co-exist in the market.

Let's first take a quick look at what Nexledger is, its core implementations and the solutions its trying to bring.

ICON vs Nexledger

Blockchain Platform

Nexledger's goal is to build an easy and secure system with high performance and detailed management monitoring features with its blockchain platform, designed and developed for enterprise.

ICON is creating a massive scale ecosystem, allowing different blockchains connecting to one another through their protocol. It is a superchain that can interconnect every possible blockchain in the world.

So the difference is quite clear, their goals were never the same.

Consensus Algorithms

Nexledger is a permission-based blockchain model that is composed of trusted participants. The architecture has been designed to block potential access from unspecified nodes whose trust is not guaranteed. Nexledger optimizes mining algorithm for efficient block-mining cycle and permissioned mining.

This is an hybrid POW solution commonly found in private enterprise blockchains, where building consensus and validating blocks are in the hands of approved actors, let's just call it DPOW.

ICON is based on a DPOS model (Delegated Proof of Stake) with its own LFT consensus algorithm, blocked aren't mined but rather they're forged by delegates. For details on ICON's DPOS, please check my earlier article ICON DPOS (Delegated Proof Of Stack), Incentive Explained.

Ecosystem

Due to Nexledger being designed with private enterprise in mind, it naturally lacks some utility features that public blockchains require, most notably a native coin to pay for transaction fees and being a currency of its blockchain/DEX.

Let's take a look at one of the solutions Nexledger is providing, digital payments.

Nexledger Digital Payment: Blockchain-integrated solution that can supplement credit and debit cards for customer payments.

ICON: Native ICX that can be used as an utility token for payments and transaction fees, also as an intermediate currency for cross-chain DEX transfers and swaps.

Market Dominance

Let's break this into two parts

1)Market dominance in terms of adoption

For now at least, Samsung seems to be focused primarily in South Korea, while ICON has been targeting global market since day one. So even if Nexledger somehow transforms into this superchain, with the ability to interconnect every possible blockchains, we needn't be too worried. If there's no room for two giants in South Korea, there's definitely room globally. But how I see this is that in the foreseeable future, Nexledger will be targeting private sector by sector, starting with government initiatives such as administrative work for city's welfare, public safety and transportation etc.. forming consortium in every sector. Meanwhile ICON has been targeting private sectors (contractual relationship) such as universities/hospitals/security firms etc, currently working with 5 consortium and they don't overlap with Nexledger's partners.

2)Market dominance in terms of market capitalization

As far as I can tell, this is really what people care about. Ie. Will ICX be worth less if Samsung enters the space, the obvious answer to this is no. For now there hasn't been any plans to go ICO for Nexleger, if ever, so its a blockchain solution provider, its not really in 'cryptocurrency'.

Full details of Nexledger can be found here Samsung SDS Nexledger White Paper

TL;DR

Samsung's Nexledger is an enterprise blockchain solution, while ICON is an interchain for both public and private blockchains. Nexledger has no ICO so its impact to ICX price will be minimal.