The ICON Foundation is serious about interoperability and BTP, ICON’s blockchain interoperability technology.
And it’s putting money where it’s mouth is. A lot of it.
The ICON Foundation announced Friday the launch of a 200 million ICX (roughly USD 200 million) Interoperability Incentive Program.
One of the largest incentive funds ever to appear in the blockchain space and the first ever dedicated to interoperability, the program will incentivize both the ICON community and the communities of ICON’s partner networks to fuel the adoption of BTP.
More specifically, 40 percent of the fund will go to incentivizing the use of existing products that utilize BTP. According to the ICON Foundation, this can include “integration of BTP technology for backend bridging, front-end adoption of bridging solutions on protocol application interfaces and integration with bridging aggregator solutions.”
The ICON Foundation expects ICON Nexus, the first product built using BTP technology, to be the first recipient.
The other 60 percent of the fund will incentivize the development of new products, integrations and tools around BTP, including DEX aggregators, yield aggregators and structured products such as cross-chain options contracts, as well as hackathons, developer conferences, high-quality developer education and documentation to attract new developers.
The 200 million ICX tokens — to be distributed over a period of five years — will largely be funded by the ICX reserve allocation raised during the original token sale in 2017
In its announcement Friday, the ICON Foundation said, “The goal of our incentive program is not to compete for external liquidity or fragment existing development communities, but rather we envision our incentive program as a collaboration opportunity with multiple different ecosystems to connect with each other seamlessly, create cross-chain communication opportunities for our communities, solve complex problems that interoperability will inevitably introduce and build high-quality use cases that were previously unattainable.”
ICON founder Min Kim said, “We’ve come a long way to build such security into our decentralized interoperability solution, which was the main goal of the ICON Project from the very beginning. We’re very confident in BTP’s value to the world, and we’re excited to be working with our community, and many others, to finally put everything we have into BTP through this incentive program.”
To apply for participation in the interoperability incentive program, the ICON Foundation asks you to fill out this form.
