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Here’s to the close of ICX’s best development year yet, realizing our long-standing goal of achieving seamless interoperability, anchored by our enshrined DeFi platform, Balanced. Let's take a look back at the journey to foster products powered by ICX, expand liquidity, and create value for ICX holders.
Enshrinement: Balanced and GMP Launch
Starting the year, we had already developed our interoperable technology centered around General Message Passing (GMP). What remained was a robust go-to-market strategy and a clear vision for aligning GMP’s rollout with ICX. Among our network’s projects, Balanced emerged as the most promising candidate, offering a clear roadmap to maximize GMP’s potential.
As a result, Balanced was enshrined at the beginning of this year, linking its success to the growth of the ICX network. The network would accumulate deep liquidity for Balanced and we would power connections to evermore assets for its DEX and loan products. In return, 50% of Balanced’s protocol fees were set to burn ICX.
The launch of GMP made it easier to move assets across chains seamlessly, automatically connecting new chains to prior integrations, and creating network effects without extra work - Powered by ICX.
Liquidity: Finding our North Star
With the Balanced enshrinement coming into place, the next step was to align the rest of the network with this new strategic direction. What was needed was more efficient use of capital and a focus on creating deep liquidity for the network’s DeFi ambitions. Enter the new Economic Policy, which introduced Network Owned Liquidity (NOL) as a sovereign wealth fund for ICX. This fund has since been used to acquire desirable cross-chain assets and provide liquidity for Balanced’s trading pairs.
Governance rewards were also overhauled to address voter stagnation and improve validator accountability. Previously, voter rewards were static, irrespective of validator performance, and validator rewards were primarily tied to delegation rather than contribution. The introduction of a bond, commission rates, and jailing for underperforming validators ensures that rewards now reflect actual performance, while stagnant votes risk fewer rewards.
With these changes, the 2023 Validator Support Program became redundant in its current form and was restructured to support liquidity providers on Balanced. A whole network now re-aligned for capital efficiency and seamless trade through Balanced.
Expanding: More Chains, More Languages
With the groundwork in place, it was time to grow. Over the last year, ICX has integrated Balanced with an additional 10 blockchains across high-impact ecosystems and diverse contract environments. Today, Balanced contracts cover 7 languages and open up unique swap routes between EVM, IBC, MOVE and more. We aren’t finished there.
Meanwhile, Network Owned Liquidity has grown steadily, amassing $5M in assets that enable low-slippage swaps for Balanced's cross-chain pairs. This ever-growing moat of value creating an unforkable competitive edge for our DeFi suite.
Hana: New Tools, New Users
With new integrations and constant improvements to the features of Balanced rolling out. The next question was how to serve this up to users. In addition to Balanced itself, Hana now brings the swaps and features of Balanced into the palm of your hands. Designed with a mobile-first approach, Hana wallet enables seamless connection to our integrated ecosystems, and one-click trading through Balanced.
Work is also under way to launch Hana Swap, a streamlined UI serving the same swaps you can expect on Balanced but through a simple front end for users who just want quick, low-slippage swaps. Different experiences for different users, but all interacting with Balanced contracts and burning ICX.
Beyond DeFi, other projects like GangstaVerse are exploring GMP’s potential through our custom Relays. GangstaVerse has adopted ICX integrations to power cross-chain gaming tournaments and expand their ecosystem.
Intents: Unlocking Capital efficiency with NOL
Though NOL has been growing, it still has its limitations while being accumulated across a broad set of assets. We began to explore ways that NOL capital could be used to improve the overall capital efficiency of trading. From this thought came Intents-based trading.
Intents-based trading enables Balanced to utilize both NOL capital and external liquidity to fulfil trades at optimal prices. By leveraging liquidity from other exchanges, trades are executed instantly at an agreed price, with partial reliance on NOL assets. Additionally, the ICON Solver was developed to rebalance these trades across multiple pools, ensuring the best rates even if Balanced’s pools are not the most competitive.
Currently, intents-based trading delivers top rates between Arbitrum ETH and SUI, with plans for expansion to additional pairs in the coming year. Bringing market leading rates to more of our trade routes and making Balanced the ICX-burning decentralised home of cross-chain swaps.