ICON Newsletter #36 - ICONFi is Coming & Ecosystem Partnerships!

Greetings ICONists,

It’s been a busy two weeks since our last newsletter, and we have many exciting things to recap. First, we added five (5) new P-Reps to our network! We’re now at 137, and we expect this number to grow ahead of the ICON 2.0 release. Additionally to more P-Reps, we’re excited about adding relayer nodes to our architecture and for those to come online in 2021. Second, we announced a deeper collaboration with Band Protocol where we will be running validators on our respective network. Band has been a great partner thus far and is already used by several ICON Dapps. Lastly, we announced a new ICON grant update which we’re excited to launch in tandem with the CPS next month.

There is one thing to note on the new grant format that we would like to address. We’ve seen some confusion on the wording in the initial release that has led some to believe that the Foundation is no longer interested in or focused on community building, education content/materials, branding, marketing, and PR. That’s simply not the case. As always, we are continually looking for ways to improve the growth of our network, and we know those activities drive engagement with our platform and technology and ultimately act as a funnel for adding new stakeholders into our ecosystem. So yes, we will be putting resources into those efforts. We just won’t be accepting public-facing community-based applications for grants for these efforts (like we’ve done up until this point on the forum). We believe the CPS will catalyze these community-driven efforts.

We cover this and many more exciting developments on ICON below!

Thanks,

Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member

We are very excited to welcome Danal Fintech, a subsidiary of Danal, one of Korea’s largest payment companies, to our ecosystem. As part of this announcement, Danal Fintech will integrate $ICX into @payprotocol, its global payments, and remittance app. This will allow Paycoin’s 750,000+ users to pay in $ICX at any of Danal’s 60,000 merchant partners, including @7eleven, @kfc, and @dominos. Additionally, Danal Fintech will join the ICON ecosystem as a P-Rep!

ICON announced additional collaboration with Band Protocol to operate validator nodes on each other’s networks. With this deeper collaboration, we align ourselves with the long-term success of both of our ecosystems.

In addition to Danal Fintech and Band Protocol joining the ICON ecosystem as P-Reps, we also welcomed many others including Iconpool, Atomic Wallet, and POSTECH, Korea’s leading technology university!

We expect this trend to continue as we expand our growing ecosystem in Korea and abroad.

The current ICON Community Grant Program will transition to the Contribution Proposal System (CPS), a decentralized on-chain grant program collectively managed by the Public Representatives (“P-Reps”) of the ICON network. Therefore, we will no longer accept new proposals for the ICON Community Grant Program beginning December 1, 2020.

Under the new grant program, the following proposals are considered eligible:

NOTE: The new ICON Foundation Grant Program will complement the Contribution Proposal System (CPS) to continue funding projects that benefit the ICON Community.

Here is a sneak peak of the CPS which we expect to launch next month provided by Scott Smiley. Check it out below!

ICX Station announced that the ICON Vote revamp has been completed with the support of the Parrot 9 team and a community developer. ICON Vote went through the beta testing phase, collected feedback from community members, and is ready to be utilized by P-reps and community members of the ICON ecosystem for more active governance.

And here is an example of the newly revamped ICON Vote in action!

ICONFi launches a simple solution for staking ICON’s cryptocurrency, $ICX, and allows users to earn yields on other assets including BTC, ETH, and USDT.

ICONFi helps crypto newcomers grow their investments with a simple, secure, low-friction service. ICONFi’s features include one-click staking for rewards and automated claiming and re-staking.

We are all also anxiously awaiting the arrival of BalancedDAO, OMM, Iconpool and others! Check out Daeki Lee discussing the state of ICON’s Defi in the interview below. It’s definitely worth your time!

Additionally, for a general update on ICON, check out this latest live AMA with Min Kim! See below: