ICON Monthly Grant Recap — August 2020
Six New Grant Approvals and New Use-Cases For $ICX
Greetings ICONists,
In August, we’ve approved 6 grants ranging from DApp development and developer tools to design and documentation. These approvals follow the 9 grants approved in July, the highest total since launching this initiative late last year. Please see below for more details of each respective initiative:
- DApp: STIN - Combine NFC and the ICON Blockchain Progress
- DApp: Stash — A rewards program for ICON
- DApp: $ICX Staking Lossless lottery
- Developer tools: OpenDevICON Continuing development proposal
- Design and documentation: PARROT9: Bridge and ICON documentation
- DApp: FutureICX 2.0 Gamified Trading Platform
STIN
Block42, together with “STIN” (https://www.stin.at/) a local distiller of premium gin and a NFC hardware supplier, want to establish an application combining the capabilities of NFC-technology with ICON’s blockchain technology. Block42 will equip 1,000 bottles of a limited edition gin with special crypto enabled NFC chips (“Security Controller”), which provide the highest available security for blockchain systems. The limited amount of bottles is written into the blockchain and each customer should be easily able to check the integrity of the bottle and the total amount of available bottles by interacting with the NFC chip on the bottle.
The ICON Foundation is going to give out $8,390 in 3 monthly installments based on the Periodic Report. The amount of ICX will be determined and paid according to the price at 02:00 AM (UTC) on the day of payment.
- 2020/08/31 02:00 AM (UTC) — $2,797
- 2020/09/28 02:00 AM (UTC) — $2,797
- 2020/10/30 02:00 AM (UTC) — $2,796
As part of the approval, the team must submit the Periodic Report by the timeframes below (UTC):
- 2020/08/28 02:00 AM (UTC)
- 2020/09/26 02:00 AM (UTC)
- 2020/10/28 02:00 AM (UTC)
Stash — a Rewards Program for ICON
Stash is a rewards program for ICON that enables a consumer to earn ICX when they shop online. Once they earn the ICX, they can then spend it using their Stash issued ICON debit card. See Pitch Deck.
Stash enables users to start accumulating ICX risk-free. Instead of buying it, users are earning it. The team believes this is a great top of funnel opportunity for ICON. As an example, part of the StormX vision has overlap with what we are building, and they already have 2.5M application downloads. By way of comparison, ICONex has 25K downloads.
The team has broken this project into 2 stages. This grant application is for stage 1 only.
Stage 1 includes:
- Chrome browser extension: Enables the consumer to activate rewards on partner sites, track and manage rewards.
- Android and iOS native application: For mobile shopping (which, makes up the bulk of online shopping), we will have a native app, where the consumer can discover supported retailers, create wish lists, track price drops, and of course track and manage their ICX rewards.
Stage 2 is the creation and management of an ICON debit card, which includes the ability to seamlessly transfer ICX to the debit card, which then converts it into fiat for use in-store and online. Stage 2 will be submitted as a separate grant via the CPF.
$ICX Staking Lossless lottery
P-Rep team, Stakin, has been working on the first staking lossless lottery since April 2020. More specifically, Stakin received 1 million ICX delegation from Velic Financial for 3 months in order to kickstart this project.
Through this project, the team is building a DApp for a lossless staking lottery on ICON. For more information on the staking lottery project, you can refer to these Medium posts:
- Introducing the ICON ($ICX) Lossless Lottery
- Blockchain Lossless Lotteries are Turning Gambling Into Saving
There are numerous gaming DApps on blockchains, but few have managed to successfully integrate with the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) landscape. Staking on ICON offers a very attractive yield, representing a massive opportunity to attract more crypto-enthusiasts to the protocol.
Built on the model of Pool Together, the Stakin team is building the first staking lottery DApp, and they are building it on ICON. Now, anybody can reinvest their I-score into lottery tickets, and get the chance to win an entire pool of ICX. You don’t lose any ICX that you used as capital if you do not win. Instead, you will be instantly included to the next round of the lottery. Hence, it is called lossless.
With the staking lottery, ICX token holders will benefit from a new option to stake their assets. ICON might gain some additional press coverage, and non-ICX investors may even buy some ICX tokens in order to take part in the game. The team’s hope is that this will encourage more community involvement and become a valuable marketing tool for the ICON blockchain.
The goal of this grant application is to finance the latest developments and testing of the ICX risk-free lottery, as well as the marketing activities around the launch scheduled for September. The team estimates that it will need 3 more months to complete the latest developments and initiate a successful launch.
Project Milestones
- An extensive set of tasks has been completed since this project started in April 2020: Specs, Design, Front-end, and Back-end have all been developed at 90%+. A current version of the DApp (used for testing!) is available on https://dev-lottery.netlify.app/home 5. The project has already gathered solid interest with 1,515 waitlisted users on https://lottery.stakin.com/ 9. The next 3 months will be focused on finishing the smart-contract, testing it, polishing the back-end and front-end, and launching this revolutionary product.
- Month 1 (most likely August 2020): Smart-contract final developments and testing
- Month 2: Launch and initial improvements based on feedback
- Month 3: Focus on marketing activities and new functionalities (e.g. fiat on-ramp integration), with the goal to have at least 1,000 users by Month 3.
OpenDevICON Continuing development proposal
The main mission of this project is to provide a resource and reference hub for ICON developers, to accelerate the training of ICON developers and reduce friction and time in development of ICON SCOREs, dApps and DAOs. The OpenDevICON project has been already initiated and we have contributed much in the development works. Following are the updates on the progress we have made so far for ODI during the previous delegations.
Accomplishments so far:
- Jupyter Notebook approach:
We published the SCORE practices using Jupyter Notebook in development and testing of SCOREs using Dice SCORE as a reference. This will save the extra time of developers for developing SCOREs and testing their interaction with the blockchain.
2. SCORE library:
We have initiated a SCORE library. For now we have made a token library that will support the creation of IRC2 tokens providing them additional functionality than the IRC2 standard.
- Mintable token
- Burnable token
- Capped token
- Pausable token
- Snapshot token
3. Magic link Demo App:
We created a Magic Bulb 1 App that shows the use of magic link integration in ICON dApp. This app shows how passwordless authentication can be used while developing a dApp.
4. NFT Demo App:
We created an IdolToken App for a demo of IRC3 standard token and performing some basic operations over it.
5. Platform Updates:
We have worked in the content of our OpenDevICON (ODI) website and updated the gitbook
Work for inclusion in this grant application:
Jupyter Notebook : (60 hours)
- To make it easy for developers to call public functions on a SCORE from a jupyter notebook, provide a tool to read the contract ABI and automatically generate a library of functions that will be imported into the notebook.
- Specific application of notebook approach with SCORE libraries for IRC3 , IRC16
SCORE Library (50 hours)
- Collaborative work with other ICON developers to include their work by reference.
- IRC3
- IRC16
Video Tutorials (50 hours)
- Magic Link demo app tutorial (15)
- Band Protocol Oracle Integration (20)
- Collaboration with other ICON tutorial authors. (tutorial from Justin for example) (15)
Demo dApps (30 hours)
- Band Protocol Oracle integration
Marketing / Promotions, Blog Posts (50 hours)
- Band Protocol Oracle integration
- Distributions and integer math for zero dust.
- What is the snapshot token and how does the snapshotting of token balances at a specific point in time work?
- What is the best way to make use of the token SCOREs in the ODI library?
Project phases
Month 1:
- Jupyter Notebook — tool to read the contract ABI and automatically generate a library. (40 hours)
- SCORE libraries (40 hours)
- Feedback and bugfixes
- IRC3 libraries
- IRC16 libraries
Month 2:
- Jupyter Notebook — SCORE libraries for IRC3, IRC16 (20 hours)
- SCORE libraries — cleanup, testing for IRC3, IRC16 (10 hours)
- Band Protocol Oracle integration (30 hours)
- Video: Band Protocol Oracle integration (20 hours
Month 3:
- Video : Magic Link demo app tutorial (15 hours)
- Collaboration with other ICON tutorial authors (15 hours)
- Marketing / Promotions Blog Posts (50 hours)
Parrot9: Design for Bridge and ICON documentation
Bridge
A few months ago the Parrot9 team began working on the design for Bridge, a project that will help general users interact with blockchain applications. We offered our services free of charge because we didn’t want to paywall design, and our P-Rep rewards were enough to cover our costs. That’s no longer the case, and as resources are limited, the team hasn’t been able to put as much time into Bridge as they’d hoped. With this grant, the team can make meaningful adjustments to their existing workload and commit more time to it.
ICON documentation
A large amount of the documentation for ICON is out of date or incomplete, particularly the documentation for P-Reps found on icon.community, and for developers through icondev.io. It’s crucial to keep ICON content up to date and easy to digest so we can provide the best on-boarding experience for P-Reps and developers.
After Parrot9 finishes work on Bridge, they will be dedicating some of their time every week to make it better our documentation better.
Project milestones
Bridge
- Branding
- UI/UX design
- Front-end markup
- Website
- Marketing and support materials
ICON documentation
- icon.community website
- Create a content style guide to keep terminology consistent across all communication channels
- Update the P-Rep documentation
- Improve the P-Rep Projects page
- Reorganize the News page content
- Optimize the UX with improvements for readability, navigation, and more
- icondev.io website
After finishing Bridge and the icon.community updates, the team will start on the ICON Dev Portal.
The initial steps will be to:
- Audit the developer content from icondev.io and other community resources to get a complete picture of the existing content
- Come up with a strategy to organize and improve the content so that it’s accessible to developers of all skill levels
FutureICX 2.0
The team successfully released the FutureICX dApp last month and are very thankful for all the positive feedback that received thus far.
Since the launch, FutureICX has generated over 4,500 transactions on the ICON network which have so far added 250 ICX to the ICON treasury. Close to 15,000 ICX have been distributed into reward pools (5,000 ICX via internal promotions and 10,000 ICX via player activity) and were awarded to players up to this point.
With this grant approval, FutureICX 2.0 will be expanding the dApp to include:
New trading game #1 (placeholder name: Trenders): Most experienced traders like to post charts with wave predictions, thus showing off their skills on predicting not only a single price target, but several price movement waves in the future. With this game such traders would be able to post custom charts with a brief explanation of their vision of the future price movements.
New trading functionality (Challenge): With phase 2.0 players will be able to create custom challenges and either keep them private by inviting one or more hand-picked players. They could also open the challenge to the public and test their prediction skills for the timeframes/pairs that they are most comfortable with.
New trading game #2 (placeholder name: Crypto duel): In it the players will be matched together in a several round MOBA style pick and ban phases, where they will have to face off 5 trading pairs that they have selected, against 5 that their opponent has picked. Each pair’s performance will be matched to their opponent’s one and according to how well the player has strategized in picking the better performing pairs and matching them correctly, they could win or lose the match.
New trading games #3 and #4 (placeholder name for the section: Trade wars): King of the hill is a community-based game that is mostly targeted towards large influencers (although anyone could participate in it in theory). In it one of the ‘influencers’ sends a private invite to one or more players that he would like to challenge with custom set rules (candle timeframes, trading pair, resolution time etc). After the invited participants have placed their predictions, the competition is open to the public and all players can vote (place wager) on whose prediction they think will be closest. Community war is a competition between two or more large communities where they could set their own team (or leave the participation open to the public). The difference with ‘King of the hill’ is that each player in the team makes their own prediction and generates team points for their team according to the accuracy of their prediction (compared to all other participants) and their prediction size.
Other pieces of the grant include design improvements to UI/UX and on-boarding. Additionally, FutureICX will look to create a BTP proof of concept and utilize other unique features of the ICON network.
Thank you,
ICON Foundation
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ICON official community
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