ICON Foundation has released its development roadmap update for January.
It was a busy month for the network, with developments regarding ICON 2.0 and BTP.
In particular, the Foundation strove to improve the way it communicates its monthly development updates to provide transparent roadmaps to the ICON community.
ICON 2.0
A number of changes are coming to the ICON 2.0 Mainnet, including:
- Increasing the main P-Rep count from 22 to 25
- Funding the Contribution Proposal System (CPS) via ICX inflation, in accordance with IISS 3.1
- Implementing the penalty for missing a Network Proposal vote
The changes have progressed through the testnets and await the completion of testing before they go live on the Mainnet.
You can see the full list of changes here, as well as track the upgrade progress.
The upgrades are particularly significant in that once they go live, ICON’s internal resources will shift from ICON 2.0 to the development of the Blockchain Transmission Protocol, or BTP.
BTP
Speaking of the BTP, ICON will be releasing a detailed BTP roadmap “in the near future,” akin to ICE/SNOW’s released roadmap.
ICON got a lot done with BTP in January, including:
- Deployment of BTP Nexus to testnet and addition of ERC20 token standard for Moonriver integration to Nexus
- Deployment of BTP smart contracts to ICON Berlin and Moonriver Moonbase testnets
- End-to-end testing token transfers between ICON and Moonriver on testnet
However, developers also ran into some “unexpected challenged” in January, namely:
- The Verifier contract generates “extremely high gas consumption.”
- Issues with the Bazel tool have delayed the deployment of BTP smart contracts on NEAR testnet and impacted NEAR integration to Nexus portal.
- Unanticipated issues with Moonbeam that have hindered BTP testing.
BTP faces a busy February, too, with developers focusing on finding solutions to the gas fee issue and “discussing and specifying BTP 2.0, which aims to create a permanent solution of gas fees, remove the necessity for other networks to hard fork, and allows BTP to be more flexible in the services it supports.”
Speaking of hard forks, ICON is waiting for a response from the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to its hard fork request. So far, they’ve gotten approval from one of three reviewers.
The hard fork is required for BSC to run BTP.
CPS
ICON released a milestones list for the CPS in January. They’ve currently got six milestones planned, including:
- Research on CPS Burning Mechanism
- Research on CPS Hedging Mechanism
- Migration to Java SCOREs
- Dark/Light Mode
- Optimization of Landing Page
- Funded by CPS tag
