Hello ICONists,

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…

Sound familiar?

Many may be familiar with this phrase from the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The novel tells a story of contrasts and comparisons between London and Paris during the French revolution. It certainly draws some parallels between what we are seeing in the ICON community & greater cryptocurrency community lately as well.

ICONation is excited to be working with the ICON team to continuously improve the quality of the official ICON Community channels so we can all move forward together to enjoy the exciting times in front of us. We are at the dawn of the decentralization of the ICON network. The time to rejoice and celebrate this major milestone and accomplishment will soon be upon us. ICONation will work along with the rest of the CM team to ensure we can celebrate in style.

So, aside from all of the excitement in the ICON community, what else has ICONation been up to over the last month? Let’s take a look…

ICONation Updates

Craftain.com: Getting started with ICON

ICONation collaborated with the ICON & Craftain team to get the first 6 sections of a 16 part series on the Craftain website. These are free, project based online courses available to developers that are interested in building on the ICON blockchain. The courses are geared towards developers that may not have a lot of experience in the blockchain space. If you’re interested, please check it out here. We will be working to complete the next 10 sections in the coming months and will keep the community posted on any updates.

ICONation AMA Repository

If you missed any of the recent AMA’s, including the impromptu AMA in the official ICON Telegram channel ICONation has you covered. Please check out the updated ICONation AMA repository here.

TestNet Phase 2

ICONation has been participating in the 2nd phase of TestNet activities. So far, so good! We have no issues to report.

ICONation would like to encourage the community to take note of the teams that are participating. Practice makes perfect. Do we want to vote for teams that are not particpating in the TestNet activities?

Image courtesy of Russell from Ubik

By ICONists, for ICONists: Chatting with ICONation

New Chatting with ICONation Show Logo

It was a busy month for the ICONation version of By ICONists, for ICONists, Chatting with ICONation. This month, we had the chance to sit down and interview members from 4 different community-focused Public Representative teams.

You might wonder, “Why is ICONation promoting other P-Rep candidates? Aren’t they competitors?”

The answer is simple. ICONation is a community-focused team. We are focused on providing developer tools, creating content directed towards ICONists, and also sharing news and information with ICONists that will help to grow and improve the ICON ecosystem. Our objective with this effort is to make sure ICONists are aware of these quality candidates and what they can offer to you, the community, as well as the ICON ecosystem. Yes, ICONation would love your all of your votes, but we understand there is a bigger picture here that we are hoping to be a part of.

We try to keep these videos & interviews as short and succinct as possible, which doesn’t always give our guests the appropriate amount of time to answer the questions asked, or allow for follow up questions. The hope is that ICONists will see these videos to learn more about the candidates and approach them directly if they have any follow up questions we weren’t able to get to during the interview. We’ve created time stamp links in the videos in case you want to fast forward to any particular topics covered during the interviews. We hope the ICON community is getting some good insight about these great candidates from these interviews. If you missed any, we’ve got links below.

June 14: By ICONists, for ICONists Episode 4 — Special Edition with Rodney from Gilga Capital

· Intro: 00:00

· Interview with Rodney: 03:50

· Rodney’s education and time in South Korea: 05:55

· On Gilga Capital’s formation: 07:33

· On Gilga’s present & future state: 09:00

· On team members & roles: 10:03

· On blasting off the Toronto Launchpad: 13:45

· On finding projects to accelerate: 15:55

· On relationship with ICX Station in San Francisco: 17:45

· On being a community moderator: 19:18

· On cryptospace influencers: 20:48

· Message to ICONists around the world: 21:34

June 15: By ICONists, for ICONists Episode 5 — Special Edition with Russell from Ubik Capital

· P-Rep Application: 00:00

· Interview: 04:06

· How did Ubik form/Where does the name come from? 06:10

· Advantages of running multiple nodes in multiple regions: 07:40

· On server resiliency: 09:50

· TestNet feedback: 11:44

· On voting for P-Rep candidates: 14:40

· On P-Rep economic transparency + giving back: 18:25

· On Ubik Capital’s content creation — past, present & future: 24:06

· Why ICON? Why not Ethereum, for example?: 26:43

· What happens 1st? Hopeless team wins Super Bowl, underachieving team wins FBS, or ICON “goes to the moon?: 31:32

· A message to ICONists: 33:47

June 20: By ICONists, for ICONists Episode 6 — Special Edition with GoodKrak’s Graham Friedman

· P-Rep Application Review: 00:00

· Interview: 03:40

· GoodKrak team members & structure: 06:05

· Advantages being in Miami: 07:30

· GoodKrak + ICON promotional events: 11:47

· TLDR Global & connections w/ startups from LATAM & S. America: 13:57

· TLDR Global status & primary focus now: 16:50

· Creating marketing & promotional content for ICON: 18:42

· Educating the greater crypto community about ICON: 20:35

· So many bagholders…Why is ICON a winner?: 22:50

· Crypto business dinner guests: 24:53

· On organization & execution of application proposals: 25:54

· Krav Maga — kicking ass, taking names, and positive influence on life: 27:02

· A message to ICONists around the world: 29:46

June 24: By ICONists, for ICONists episode 7 — Special Edition w/ Melina & Keith from ICONNECT

· P-rep Application Review — 00:00 Interview + Introduction : 03:29

· BECSA — Blockchain Entrepreneurs Club of South Africa: 06:02

· Blink — The struggles & successes of real world adoption: 07:12

· Working with the ICONNECT team : 09:19

· Release of standards & POC’s that can be built on ICON: 11:25

· Africa Meetup 1.0: 12:35

· ICON’s governance vs other blockchains + AI: 14:00

· Interoperability explained…without “insurance” or “hospital”: 17:32

· ICON Africa DApp Development Program: 19:23

· ICON vs. other decentralized networks: 21:35

· A message to ICONists around the world: 24:09

By ICONists, for ICONists July Community Challenge

Want to win 300 ICX + an ICX hoodie? What is the July Community Challenge? Check it out here.

ICONation Roadmap Updates

ICONation focused heavily on the TX Challenge + Community Moderation initiatives in June, but we do have a few updates to cover.

Here are updates to items not previously covered in this article:

ICONation Citizen Nodes: ICONation decided to pause their TestNet and MainNet Citizen Nodes, as they were consuming a lot of disk space due to the recent high amount of transactions on the ICON MainNet. If ICONation gets elected as a P-Rep, the Citizen Node will be replaced by a P-Rep Node. If you relied on the ICONation Citizen Nodes for developing your application, please contact us.

Aegis: Spl3en has completed v1.0 of Aegis, and released a new version v1.1 that provides more stability and improves performance. It also uses the official nodes as endpoint by default, as ICONation Citizen Nodes aren’t functional anymore. Check in to our community Telegram channel if you have questions.

ICON TX Challenge contest: Spl3en is participating in the challenge and is creating a game for the ICON TX Challenge contest. Want to play? Stay tuned for the announcement.

ICON Image Uploader: Want to add images to the ICON blockchain? Dimitris is working on and has nearly completed a tool that will make it easy as can be. We look forward to providing this tool to the community shortly.

We’ve got a busy & exciting month ahead of us. ICONists, are you ready?

As always, please feel free to reach out to us if you ever have questions about ICONation ,and thank you for stopping by our Medium for the latest!

By ICONists, for ICONists

ICONation