ICON Development Roadmap Update — April 2020

Greetings ICONists,

It was another exciting month for the ICON project, highlighted by the approval of the IISS 3.0 proposal and the launch of our next-generation algorithm, LFT2. Additionally, we continued to make progress on interchain — our blockchain transmission protocol (BTP).

We’re pleased to announce that we are currently preparing documentation for release, both technical and non-technical, to compare our interchain technology with other technologies in the space. Outside of these, we continued to make stability enhancements to the network. As you may have seen, we released a hotfix described below and are currently preparing another hotfix to be released soon.

Note, most of the focus in the next few months will be on implementing BTP, LFT2, and IISS 3.0 into our network. Also, improving open source documentation. We look forward to providing more details in due course.

Hotfix Update

ICON released a new hotfix. In this update, the team implemented a Block Production Time Limit function to the network which will resolve network failures. This function supports setting a maximum execution time for a transaction to be added in a block. Additionally, the SHA256 Hash function was added to the network. Lastly, minor bugs related to Fee 2.0 were resolved.

Since the most recent hotfix, we’ve been working on checking the compatibility of the Python 3rd party package, the execution environment in the Docker, and other system stability. This is a necessary part of network stabilization and we will announce results shortly.

LFT2

On the back of the LFT2 release, we’ve worked on several basic features to support and integrate LFT2 in our network. As you know, the LFT2 algorithm is already published on Github. However, we need some additional functions for LFT2 integration such as a 2-depth-block invocation function and ICON Service <> loopchain communication protocol for support. We will be working on these things in parallel with LFT2 development.

BTP

Lastly, we are excited to announce that the core team is finalizing a draft IIP (ICON Improvement Proposal) for BTP 1.0. Also, we are preparing non-technical descriptions to compare our technology vs. other comparable technology. Recall, BTP 1.0 is the interchain technology allowing the transfer of value and information between private and public chains. We are excited to release the overall structure of the BTP technology to the community, including a demonstration video.

Thank you,

ICON Foundation