It’s been a little over a month since decentralization, and the ICON team is still hard at work coordinating with P-Reps, stabilizing the network and making significant progress on a number of projects, including the long anticipated BTP.
Here’s a brief overview of ICON’s roadmap update for the month of November, with a promising update in the first half of 2020.
Network Stabilization
As most will remember, the network was momentarily paused a few weeks back due to a leader node initializing bug. Thankfully, the ICON team and P-Reps worked through the night to resolve and troubleshoot the issue, eventually recovering the network at UTC 12:37:38, Nov 18th with block height 11,165,695. You can read more about this network hiccup in ICON’s Post-Mortem.
To stabilize the network, ICON is now working on 2 internal releases and 1 external release. It is expected that with Revision 8, the network will be fully stabilized. As a reminder, the 6% burn penalty which was initially slated for a November 29th launch has been postponed until the network is fully stabilized.
As explained in ICON’s Medium post, “Core developers continue to research enhancements for our P2P network and for database integration. We expect these enhancements to improve basic network performance substantially. We are also working to improve the ICON network by developing LFT2, an improved consensus algorithm to ensure higher liveness. We will provide more details on LFT2 in short order.”
Mobile Staking & ICON Tracker
ICONists can now enjoy mobile staking capabilities on the iOS version of the ICONex wallet. The Android version should soon be updated following a QA revision that ICON is working on resolving. An update should be expected in the coming weeks.
In addition, the ICON Tracker was given a sleek new look to improve user experience. A Network Proposals tab was also added so ICONists and P-Reps can keep track of proposals and their votes. By clicking on individual proposals, ICONists can see more details, such as the description of the proposal, the percentage of voters and token votes, as well as the full list of P-Reps who voted.
BTP
Last but not least, ICON is continuing efforts with BTP and is preparing its Proof of Concept (POC) of BTP version 0.5, with an expected launch in the coming weeks. More details will be shared once the team releases their design plans for BTP version 1.0. ICON hopes to commercialize this BTP technology (private to public interchain) by the first half of 2020 and is optimistic about the progress made thus far.
For full details on the technical/development updates, including stabilization updates on the ICON services and loopchain, refer to to their roadmap here.
