The ICON Foundation celebrated the first day of 2022 by releasing its ICON Development Roadmap Update for December.

Indeed, the last month was a big one for ICON with the big upgrade to ICON 2.1, which included developments like IISS 3.1, bonded delegation, bond slashing, Fee 3.0 and Java SCORE.

December also witnessed “significant progress on BTP and Nexus integrations.”

Let’s review the latest developments in more detail.

  • IISS 3.1: ICON’s latest incentives scoring system improves the predictably of ICX issuances through targeted inflation pools, and boasts a lower inflation rate than ICON 1.0.
    • Banded Delegations: P-Reps must post 5% of their delegation as a bond to receive 100% of their reward. In fact, bonded delegation — NOT delegation — is the metric upon which a P-Rep’s ranking is based.
    • Slashing: If a P-Rep misses a network proposal vote, experiences major downtime or “misbehaves” in some other way, their bond gets slashed (i.e., ICX will be burned).
  • Fee 3.0: ICON’s updated fee policy includes an overall increase in runtime costs “to a level that is more appropriate,” not only generating more ICX transaction fees, but reducing the likelihood of spanning.
  • Java SCORE: ICON’s new smart contract execution environment runs in Java instead of Python. Java smart contracts require no audit prior to deployment, and Java SCORE lets a SCORE deploy another SCORE via SCORE Factory. The ICON Foundation warns, however, that it will be depreciating support for Python SCORE in the future.
  • BTP and Nexus: ICON migrated to the base token standard (IRC2, ERC20) for MoonRiver, allowing it to work directly with existing dApps on ICON and MoonRiver. The ICON Foundation also completed Binance Smart Chain integration on the Nexus portal, and has started integrating NEAR into Nexus.

Meanwhile, in January, the ICON Foundation will focus on activating ICON 2.2, “the last step in finalizing the transition from ICON 1.0 to ICON 2.0.” This will include, among other things, increasing the number of P-Reps from 22 to 25.