Key Themes for 2020: Network Enhancement, Open Source, Governance and BTP/Sidechain

Summary

The core development team has updated its development roadmap plans for 2020. These plans are organized around four major themes that we hope to improve upon this year. The four themes are 1) Network Enhancement, 2) Open Source Enhancement, 3) Governance System Update and 4) BTP and Sidechain. We believe these categories represent the most important focus areas for our expanding ecosystem and will help us to onboard new network participants and improve the incentive structures for contribution. Furthermore, we believe we can improve scalability and provide interoperability.

Of course, there will be other items that fall out of the scope of these themes that the core team may work on concurrently in 2020. But note, these themes will act as a guideline for development work for the year.

ICON’s 2020 Roadmap

Key Themes for 2020

1. Network Enhancement

The Foundation continues to refine icon-service and its loopchain engine through network enhancements and stability features. We are happy with the progress we have made post decentralization having successfully upgraded our network via two on-chain Revision Proposals. But there is still more work to do.

Going forward, this will remain a key focus as we look to improve upon our technology for broader adoption across corporates, government entities and crypto natives. Additionally, we will continue to improve the security features of the network and improve decentralization. Below is a sample of items we will seek to accomplish in 2020:

Block Recovery

2 blocks Invocations

P-Rep Private Key Dualizing

Increase the Main P-Rep Set Size

LFT2 technical documentation and yellow paper

Other Items

Staking and voting APIs on SCORE

Automatic block structure upgrading via Revision Proposal

SCORE internal call function

2. Open Source Enhancement

This year we want to increase the number of open-source contributions from the community to loopchain and icon-service. Right now, our codebase is being primarily managed by ICON Foundation but in 2020 we want to increase our level of open source to a much greater degree. Here are a few of the key focus areas we will be pursuing to make this a reality:

Fully migrate internal development process to GitHub repository

Improve documentation explaining the architecture of loopchain and icon-service, including design documentation

Improve commentary between codes

Enhancing and formalizing the off-chain governance process (IIP)

3. Governance System Update

We plan to propose refinements to IISS in 2020. By better aligning incentives across stakeholders in the network, we hope to promote more collaboration amongst ICONists. These stakeholders include Main P-Reps, Sub P-Reps, Contributors and Delegators. Also, we plan to implement the Contribution Proposal System (CPS) to accelerate the activity on the network. Recall that the CPS is a governance and funding mechanism to support growth through contribution. With this system, ICONists can be rewarded for their contribution through this decentralized mechanism without relying on ICON Foundation for support.

Potential Proposal for IISS Revisions

Adjust the Representative Reward (TBD)

Form the Contribution Proposal Fund

Add the minimum bond requirement for Public Representative

Add the slashing based on the minimum bond requirement for Public Representative

Contribution Proposal System

Improve the design of the CPS

Develop the CPS

Integrate the CPS into the ICON Network

4. BTP and Sidechain

Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) will allow the transfer of value and information between heterogeneous chains. With this technology, multiple blockchains can communicate and interconnect via ICON Network. In 2020, we plan to have the basic level of the BTP technology implemented into the ICON Network. The basic level of the BTP will allow Private Blockchains to interconnect with ICON Network. We have already had success with our BTP v0.5 and BTP v1.0 PoCs and are optimistic about the progress we can make throughout the remainder of the year.

Design the new economic, governance components for the BTP

Integrate the BTP technology into the ICON Network

Develop the new components to ICON Network to support the BTP

Sidechain will be a new layer of the ICON Network to support a reliable smart-contract environment. The primary goal of this sidechain is to incentivize developers to deploy smart contracts on the sidechain leaving the ICON Network to focus on interchain and governance transaction processing. We believe this is not only the most effective solution for improving scalability and implementing a virtual machine but also allows the ICON Network to focus on the interchain and governance, making it a true ICON Republic; an interconnecting hub as the Nexus, referenced in the original whitepaper. All business logic related to smart contacts will be handled on this layer independently. However, the economic and governance systems of the sidechain must technically depend on the root chain so we will implement this into ICON’s IISS and on-chain governance system.

Design economic, governance model of the sidechain

Develop the sidechain using the new blockchain-based on Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

Integrate the sidechain into the ICON Network

Thank you,

ICON

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