Got an idea you want to build on ICON, but don’t know where to begin?
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.
ICON has a plethora of active communities, well-organized documents, resource lists and grants for developers at your disposal. These include:
- ICON Community Forum: The ICON network’s main website for community-related resources
- ICON Foundation Github: Open-source projects from the ICON Foundation
- ICON Community Github: Open-source projects from the ICON community
- ICON Technical Documentations: Well-organized documents for ICON developers
- ICON Discord: ICON’s extremely active Discord community has a developer channel
- Grant Programs: CPS, ICON Grants and ICED Grants.
Let’s take a closer look at these developer resources below.
ICON Community
The ICON Community is a great place to read up on a whole lot of subjects, including grants, governance and community proposals. There’s also an ICON Development section to “discuss development for open-source projects run by the ICON Foundation or collaborating organizations.” You’ll find some helpful posts on, for instance, how to use Github Issue Labels, updates on ICON terminology, and even a list of “awesome” tools and apps for the technical community.
ICON Foundation’s Github
Wanna collaborate on projects sponsored by the ICON Foundation? This is where you want to come. You’ll find 55 repositories here, including ones for ICON’s “goloop” blockchain engine, ICON SDK and even the relay system of ICON’s BTP interoperability solution. Developers may collaborate in many ways, including actual coding.
ICON Community Github
The ICON Community Github is much like the ICON Foundation’s Github, except that rather than ICON Foundation projects, you’ll find community projects. There are seven repositories here, including ones of ICON’s CPS community grant system and Drogon, a “robust, lightweight application development framework used for developing, testing, and deploying smart contracts on the ICON blockchain,” which is currently in development.
The ICON Community Github is open to accepting new projects.
While we mentioned it above, it deserves mentioning again: this is where you’ll find “awesome ICON,” a curated list of “awesome frameworks, libraries, software, and other resources for the ICON blockchain ecosystem.”
ICON Technical Documentations
This is the definitive list of open source technical documents on the ICON network, the purpose of which is “to inform technical users, including developers, power-users, and enthusiasts, of how the ICON network is set up and how to utilize the various components of it.”
These documents help you get started on how to run a local network or write a smart contract, teach you basic concepts such as ICON’s economics and governance models, and drill down on ICON’s stack, from execution environments (read: Java) to storage and integrated development environments.
The Dev Portal is an open source community effort, so if you’ve got ideas to improve it, here’s the Github repository.
ICON Discord
(discord.com/invite/7a75Hf3cFm)
ICON has a very active Discord community, including a development section with plenty to explore. You’ll find developer discussions on the latest topics of interest, a forum to help developers find teams, beta testing conversations, and even a group coding channel. As with many blockchain projects, community activity is gradually concentrating on Discord, so if you’re developer with questions, this isn’t a bad place to start.
ICON Technical Community Updates
ICON recently began publishing quarterly ICON Technical Community Updates. These updates aim to “inform ICON’s technical community about the ideological focus, milestones, specific goals, and planned timelines for a given time period.”
According to the first update, ICON is already hard at work creating even more resources for developers, including the “ICON Builder Program” to facilitate better communication between businesses, developers, builders and users in the ICON ecosystem and technical tutorials at the icon.community website.
Funding Resources
If you’re building on ICON, the network and its partners offer various funding programs, too, most notably the Contribution Proposal System (CPS), ICON Foundation grants and ICE Developer grants.
Contribution Proposal System (CPS): ICON’s decentralized grant program has access to 300,000 ICX of funding per month, payable to projects in bnUSD, the stablecoin of ICON’s Balanced DEX. This has the obvious benefit of protecting you against fluctuations in potential volatile assets, ensuring a stable source of funding. Also, no KYC checks necessary.
While the CPS system is transparent and relatively straightforward, it does require a little bit of work, including writing your proposal, finding a sponsor P-Rep, submitting progress reports and more. Fortunately, the CPS website will walk you through it all.
ICON Foundation Grants: Complementing the CPS is the ICON Foundation’s own grant program, which provides funding in ICX for new proposals, rejected CPS proposals for infrastructure and core development, and rejected CPS proposals with a business model. For more on ICON’s grant program, read here.
200 Million ICX Interoperability Incentive Fund: The ICON Foundation has a 200 million ICX fund to be allocated over five years to encourage the use of ICON’s BTP interoperability technology. This includes 80 million ICX for BTP-enabled products and 120 million ICX for cross-chain use cases.
ICED Grants: The ICE Network — ICON’s EVM-compatible aspiring Pokadot parachain — operates its own ICE Developer Grant Program. ICE has yet to launch its mainnet, but the ICON Foundation has provided $100,000 in grants for ICED Grants in the meantime. Fore more information on how to apply, visit the grant’s website.
