Greetings from the ICON Team,

The ICON Team would like to share what we have achieved in January, focusing on the key components of the roadmap that was released last December. Besides updating the ICON Core functionality, we have continued to improve the security in the inter-node communication protocols, as detailed in summary below.

The Interchain Development Team has completed an in-house demonstration to exchange data and tokens between the ICON public blockchain and enterprise loopchains deployed to various organizations and businesses. This protocol will be registered as an IIP and released for developers who are interested in ICON’s interchain capabilities.

Our first goal for the interchain protocol is to allow for cross-chain communication between the ICON public blockchain and enterprise loopchain implementations. Our next plan will be to expand the interchain protocol to other public blockchains.

The Public Blockchain Development Team is currently focusing on IISS Staking and Voting features to allow ICONists to acquire I-Score before the official P-Rep voting phase starts. After the development of the fee sharing feature is completed, the DApp fee settings will provide an environment where users do not have to pay additional fees when using DApps.

DEX core development is almost complete, and we are now working on the stabilization and UI configuration. ICON’s first DEX will increase liquidity for IRC tokens based on ICON’s MainNet. Our next goal is to support token-to-token transactions that can operate on other blockchains by connecting the DEX to the interchain protocol (Blockchain Transfer Protocol, BTP) in the future.

The ICON Team has been running a bounty program with HackerOne to enhance the security of the ICON Network. ICON, along with 440 white hat hackers, continue to strive to discover potential security threats and quickly apply security patches. To date, seven issues have been reported and some are being supplemented. Specifically, the ICON Team received a report regarding the pickle library from HackerOne last December, and we are currently optimizing the system per the roadmap. The pickle library will be removed and stabilized by September, before the nodes are distributed to the public, aligning with the election roadmap. Additionally, ICON’s smart contract currently filters out malicious codes through a thorough audit. With various proposals for project growth and stabilization, the ICON Project is becoming more secure.

Every member of the ICON Project is focusing on creating an excellent product without being affected by market conditions. We have focused on developing the core blockchain technology over the past year, and now we are focusing on user-specific services this year. We look forward to releasing our new services according to the roadmap, so please stay tuned!

-ICON Development Team