This is the second ICNHodler.com quarterly report and it'll follow the same format as the first with a quarter summary, an update on site progress, overview of site traffic and the plan for the quarter ahead.
Q2 Summary
In Q2, we saw the crypto market temporarily rally but ultimately decline slowly and fall slightly further in value than in Q1. Bouncing around in a narrow range with neither the bears or the bulls making much progress may be frustrating for many but looking at the bigger picture, it's a sign that we've reached a 'stable' level following the sharp decline from earlier in the year.
In Q2, ICONOMI announced their fiat gateway and the first fiat-to-crypto transaction took place on the platform. They also introduced TrueUSD (first stablecoin available for DAA managers) and another major achievement was an audit from Deloitte proving solvency. Whilst this was all very positive news it had virtually no impact on ICN price. However that's perhaps not a bad thing as CCP moved approximately 1.22m AE and 1.745m GNT to exchanges, presumably to sell some or all. If everything was indeed sold at the peak of AE and GNT's respective prices during Q2, this could result in approximately 2000+ ETH worth of buybacks in Q3. Combined with ICONOMI's new daily buyback policy (started July 1st), buying pressure could be quite significant in Q3 compared to recent quarters.
In order to help better explain what gives ICN value, we also put together this design towards the end of Q2:
New features / site updates
In my Q1 report, I listed three things that I wanted to do in Q2:
- Refactoring
- DAA comparisons with BTC / ETH
- Collaborative Documentation
I achieved 2/3 of those goals.
Refactoring
Although we didn't get an ICONOMI API, as I'd hoped for in Q2, I did manage to refactor a lot of things behind the scenes. We're pulling data and interacting with a lot of various APIs and pages from multiple sources - Etherscan, Coinmarketcap, CryptoCompare, Kraken and ICONOMI themselves to name a few. This data is generally crunched by cloud functions every few minutes through AWS Cloud Functions and the 'results' are saved to a database hosted by Google Firebase.
Up until recently, things have been functional but inefficient. For example tracking DAAs involved manually editing some of these functions to add the DAA name. Now, it's a case of adding a single name to a database, I don't have to edit / reupload / retest functions. I had hoped ICONOMI would make an API available in Q2 which would help a great deal in keeping things efficient and producing more reliable data but according to their recent development report, it will probably come along in Q3 - in which case I'll dive right in and should be able to make even more optimisations.
DAA Comparisons with BTC / ETH
Because ICONOMI don't have an API available, it leaves me in a chicken and egg situation. I could develop a feature comparing DAA prices to BTC / ETH prices but I'd need to manually pull DAA price history from somewhere. Only ICONOMI have that data (in a reliable format) and while I could probably find a way to extract it from each individual DAA page, it would burn a huge amount of my time, it would be ridiculously inefficient and it would inevitably be refactored anyway once an API comes along.. so I decided to postpone this feature for the time being however if we don't see an API in Q3, I'll probably roll out comparisons over a 30 day history as 30 day price data is something that's already available. In Q2, ICONOMI made pricing data available for all DAAs over all time, so we know the data is there, it's just a case of waiting for it to be exposed via an API.
Collaborative Documentation
This was the biggest change to ICN Hodler in Q2. I set up a Github repo containing files that anyone can edit and submit for review. If approved, the files on github update but they also update the wiki section on ICN Hodler: https://icnhodler.com/wiki
This means that anyone who wants to can update content on ICN Hodler and help to describe or document how certain ICONOMI related features / topics work. I've added most of the content to date and intend on adding more but there have been some really useful contributions from the community such as this page documenting all AMA questions and answers put together by 'RayQuin': https://icnhodler.com/wiki/Rocketchat-AMA-Archive 'justinformation22' has also made a number of valuable contributions.
Q2 Traffic
No spikes in Q2, unlike in Q1 when 1/3 of traffic came in a single day courtesy of reddit. This, combined with an overall slump in ICONOMI & crypto market interest resulted in a 76% reduction in users to the site in Q2.
- 1,451 users
- 10,816 sessions
- 37% returning visitors
- 85.55% bounce rate
Plans for Q3
ICONOMI Improvement Proposals
The first goal for Q3 is what I'm calling ICONOMI Improvement Proposals (IIPs): https://github.com/ICNHodler/IIPs This is basically a fancy way of documenting and organising ideas and ensuring that all ideas follow a standard format.
This is based on Ethereum 'EIPs' which offer the community the chance to propose ideas / solutions on how to improve the Ethereum platform. There have been several high profile EIPs such as EIP-999 which was a proposed solution on how to recover frozen funds from a Parity bug. When discussing improvements, you'll often hear the same ideas repeated by different people at different times... it can be frustrating trying to constantly explain why an idea was rejected / won't work or trying to find references to direct quotes or conversation from authoritative figures on the subject. IIPs will help to solve these problems and act as an important point of reference for the ICONOMI community when discussing various ideas.
Twitter & Google Trends Integration
Google Trend data is an interesting 'big picture' indicator of how popular / unpopular a search term is over a long period of time. Charted over time, you'll see that most cryptocurrency prices mirror search popularity and vice versa. I intend including charts on ICN Hodler for ICN initially but probably more cryptocurrencies in the future.
Twitter is an incredibly useful tool for getting news fast, in real time, straight from the horses mouth. DAA managers use it, ICONOMI use it, anyone that matters in the crypto space uses it. It's plagued by spam which makes searching for keywords unreliable / useless but over the past few weeks I've been building lists of trusted, whitelisted twitter accounts and I intend to integrate tweets from these accounts in to ICN Hodler.
Redesigned homepage
By the end of Q3, it'll have been almost a year since work first started on ICN Hodler. Back then, the ICONOMI subreddit was open to everyone and far more active both in user submission / comments and in moderator comments. This is why it formed a large part of the original homepage. Back then we also didn't have deposit / withdrawal data, AUM data and other data which has since become available. In Q3, I'll be re-evaluating what information should be on the homepage and how it should be arranged. We may not actually get to the stage of implementing it (especially if ICONOMI roll out an API which divert my attention), but I should have a solid idea of how it will work and will probably have started working towards it / preparing for it.
