We have a couple of big pieces of news from the ICON Republic today, including the release of ICON’s development update for May and the launch of ICE/SNOW’s new developer grant program.
ICON Releases Development Update for May
The ICON Foundation released its development update for May on Thursday.
As expected, the ICON team made further progress on ICON 2.0, BTP and ICON Bridge.
On the ICON 2.0 front, the team released Goloop v1.2.5 and Goloop v1.2.6 on the mainnet. These fixed bugs in treasury management and the icx_getTotalSupply API and CLI.
It was on the BTP and ICON Bridge fronts that the really big developments happened, though.
In particular, the ICON Foundation published the BTP Litepaper, an 11-page introduction to ICON’s signature interoperability solution. We’ll be writing more about this in a separate post to come.
The team also made progress with BTP integrations for Algorand and NEAR.
The ICON Foundation also made major progress with ICON Bridge, giving the “BTP-lite” solution its first real-world workout with Wonder Game’s pre-sale on Thursday.
The team also performed end-to-end testing for the BNB Smart Chain integration, working out a few kinks in the process.
In June, the team will focus on BTP and ICON Bridge, though judging from the progress report, we’ll still need to wait a bit before seeing the finished BTP project.
ICON Bridge, on the other hand, looks like it’s basically good to go, with the BNB Smart Chain and Harmony integrations with the Nexus frontend going to the mainnet in the next week or two.
ICED Grants Developer Program
Meanwhile, the ICE and SNOW team announced on Thursday the launch of the ICE Developer Grant Program, or “ICED Grants.”
On its blog, the ICE team wrote:
“Grants will first be awarded for core infrastructure projects, funding developers to build libraries, SDKs, frameworks, explorers and scripts for ICON Bridge and BTP, as well as tooling kits for cross-chain DeFi, Gaming, and NFT DApps.”
The team says these kinds of developments will let DApps built on ICE and SNOW process interoperable smart contracts and tokens “cheaper and more securely than nearly any other protocol in blockchain.”
The grant program apparently began with a USD 100,000 donation from the ICON Network.
The ICE team said:
“As public and private enterprise blockchain tech continues to boom, ICE and BTP will be DOTSAMA’s onramp to a superhighway of cross-chain activity. What will you build on it?“
Interested in applying? Read on here to learn more on the application process.
