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In September, ICON made significant strides in expanding its Cross-chain Framework and enhancing network efficiency. Key developments include development of Relay v2 for improved security, ongoing integrations with Stellar and Stacks, and the successful connection to Solana’s mainnet. With progress in intents-based trading and cross-chain liquidity, ICON is steadily advancing toward a more robust and interconnected ecosystem through Balanced. These efforts reflect the network's commitment to continuous innovation and seamless cross-chain functionality.
🌐 Relay v2 Development: Development has begun on the second iteration of the relay. To enhance relayer security, a clustered architecture will be adopted, where multiple relayers work together to verify and transmit messages securely. The relayers will communicate with newly deployed aggregation contracts on the ICON blockchain, ensuring multi-relayer verification and coordination.
🟧 Stacks Integration Progress: Progress on Stacks integration has been a bit slower due to the complexity of this integration. We are currently working through integration testing, addressing bugs and incompatibilities as they arise.
🪐 Stellar Mainnet Deployment: Smart contracts are now live on the mainnet for Stellar, and we are conducting an external audit to ensure they are robust. While the audit is underway, our contracts and relay have gone live to test stability on the mainnet. Once the audit is complete, we will deploy any necessary fixes.
☀️ Solana Integration Live: The external audit for Solana has concluded, and all identified fixes have been deployed. Contracts and the relay are live on the mainnet—ICON is officially connected to Solana! In October, we will initiate all relevant governance votes from Balanced and begin acquiring SOL as part of Network-Owned Liquidity (NOL).
🔮 Intents Development: We have completed a proof of concept (POC) for intents-based swaps. This advancement will allow us to be more efficient with the network's NOL, positioning us to offer competitive rates for all ICON-owned assets. For more information, tune into the latest Inside ICON episode, where we dive deeper into this topic.
🧩 ICON Network Solver: We have also built a POC solver for intents. A solver is crucial for intents-based trading, as it takes the trade, delivers the asset to the swapper, and then works through rebalancing the assets it holds. Given the ICON network's holdings of several Layer 1 assets, we can serve as a solver for trading pairs, offering better rates to users while optimizing our liquidity utilization. Listen to the latest Inside ICON episode for a comprehensive discussion on this as well.
💧 Cross-Chain Liquidity Provision (LP) and Rewards: This new feature will enable users to supply liquidity natively from their own chains. For example, Injective users will be able to provide liquidity to the INJ/bnUSD pair without needing an ICON wallet. This project will be completed in three phases:
Phase 1: Implement cross-chain liquidity provision.
Phase 2: Introduce cross-chain rewards distribution, allowing users to earn rewards without needing an ICON wallet—extending to the cross-chain savings rate as well.
Phase 3: Enable BALN staking on any chain, allowing users to stake their BALN tokens directly from whichever chain they are using.
Each phase must be completed before moving on to the next, and we'll be sharing progress along the way.
These updates reflect our ongoing dedicated efforts to enhance interoperability and ensure robust security across our blockchain integrations. We remain committed to transparency and diligence as we move forward with these integrations and enhancements to the ICON ecosystem.
With progress being made simultaneously across various integrations, follow along with our progress on the integrations milestone board.
📅 September’s Accomplishments:
Completed testing for liquidation enhancements on testnet, and prep for mainnet launch.
Completed external audit for Solana contracts and fixed all highlighted issues.
Completed mainnet deployment for Relay admin Dashboard.
Deployed Balanced contracts and Relay to Solana mainnet.
Deployed Balanced contracts and Relay to Stellar mainnet.
Discovery and POC done for the ICON Network solver.
Worked through tech debt for IBC and Relay.
🎯 October’s Goals:
Commence build for ICON Network solver, initially for SUI and ETH pairs.
Commence external audit for Stellar contracts.
Commence work on Relay security update.
Continue integration testing for Stacks implementation.
Continue work on stability and performance of the Relay.
Continue work on documenting detailed examples for balanced spoke contracts.
Develop intent contracts for SUI, Solidity, Stellar and Cosmos chains.
Review and test code for cross chain LP and rewards.
A Milestone board for ongoing integration efforts can be found here.