ICON Newsletter #22 - Interoperability is HERE!!!

Greetings ICONists,

As you may already know, last week was one of the most important weeks for the ICON project. We finally released our interoperability technology, BTP 1.0, a key piece of technology for our ecosystem and one of the major milestones from our whitepaper. This technology will allow ICON to fulfill its goal of hyperconnecting the world and bridging private and public chain ecosystems.

Last week, we also hosted the P-Rep Governance Meeting #4 to discuss the Contribution Proposal Paper, the P-Rep Commission Rate, and IISS Implementation. It was a great turnout and conversation and we encourage the community to check out the discussion!

We also released our May grant update report highlighting Liquid ICX and Simplex! Both were approved this month! We also provide periodic reporting for other grant recipients.

Lastly, we launched the application process for the June P-Rep Delegation Pilot Program. Remember with this program, the ICON Foundation will use a portion of its ICX treasury to delegate to teams we believe are contributing to the network in areas such as development, marketing, and community building. If this sounds like you, please be sure to apply by June 1st! And we released our May roadmap update including new feature requests from the community!

As you can see by the many items accomplished this week, the team is hard at work. Let’s keep the momentum going.

Thanks,

Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member

The ICON Network, since its inception, has set out on a mission to “hyperconnect the world”. This catchphrase refers to the feature “interoperability”, and the technology to enable this feature is called Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP).

To realize blockchain’s full potential, we want distinct protocols to have compatible ways to interact and communicate with each other, and the ability to interoperate at the protocol level.

With BTP, now we have that ability.

In addition to our BTP blog post, we also released a technical demonstration. Check it out here!

One of the major questions we received is how $ICX will be used in connecting private chains.

In our blog post we highlighted a practical example enabling data exchanges between ICONLOOP powered enterprise partners, such as the MyID application.

In this example, registered personal DID (Decentralized ID) data in the MyID application is verified on the public ICON Network, which then allows its owner to exchange messages to a public or private network that is interlinked via BTP, without having to resubmit their DID document and public key to each chain.

Ricky Dodds further explained this interaction in an interview with ICONPLUS reporter, Layah Heilpern. See below:

BTP has broad use case application and we look forward to exploring innovative solutions throughout public and private chains!

On Friday of last week, Min Kim, Foundation Council Member, hosted the 4th P-Rep Governance meeting discussing:

It was a great discussion. And some interesting ideas came out of it! Particularly, Game of Proposals! Be sure to check it out.

It was another busy month for grant applications and we’ve approved 2 grants thus far; 1 for infrastructure and 1 DApp. If we approve any more in the coming days, we’ll be sure to provide more details on any we miss in next month’s update.

Check out more details here!

Based on community requests, we started to work on several features to enhance our governance experience. Based on this feedback, we will be adding P-Rep private key dualizing, staking and delegating functions in SCORE, multiple unstaking periods, and a function to increase the number of delegations from 10 to 100.

We also updated the ICON tracker and ICONex. Check out the latest developments below: