ICON Monthly Grant Update — November 2020

ICON Foundation

Published in

Hello ICON World

8 min readNov 28, 2020

Six New Grant Approvals and Migration to Contribution Proposal System

Greetings ICONists,

We are very pleased to approve another 6 grants in November capping off a successful ICON Community Grant program. The 6 grants consist of many exciting initiatives including community building/marketing, an NFT marketplace, and more applications of $ICX.

Last December, the ICON Foundation announced the ICON Community Grant Program and since then, we have proudly funded more than 45 projects that have directly benefited the ICON community. At that time we stated, “this program will operate until the CPS is fully developed and implemented on the ICON Network.” Now, we’re excited to say that time has come.

Starting in December, the current ICON Community Grant Program will transition to the Contribution Proposal System (CPS), a decentralized on-chain grant program collectively managed by the Public Representatives (“P-Reps”) of the ICON network and the Foundation will launch a new ICON Foundation Grant Program which you can read more about here.

As always, we continue to be encouraged by the community’s commitment and participation in the grant process and hope to continue helping entrepreneurs and dedicated ICONists on their endeavors through both the CPS and the ICON Foundation program.

Below is a recap of this month’s approved grants. Please check them out and support your fellow ICONists!

$ICX Lossless Lottery

The Stakin team released the first version of the Staking Lossless Lottery Dapp about 2 months ago, which can be accessed at https://lottery.stakin.com/. These 2 months have been an opportunity to measure the performance of the Dapp and gather feedback for future enhancements. During the initial month, the Dapp generated the below KPIs:

305 unique participants
751 transactions
$ICX 8,356 in rewards across 6 draws (including $ICX 7,800 in sponsored rewards so far)
$ICX 50,000+ in value locked in smart-contract
3rd rank in StateOfTheDapps in ICON category, 4th on DappReview, 4th on Dapp.com

The Dapp also generated some media attention:

Large spike in Twitter volume correlated with the Dapp launch and launch giveaway campaign, which attracted 1,141 participants

Publications by niche media:

Stakin is utilizing community feedback to release the ICON Lossless Lottery v2 Dapp. Below are the key features and projects that will be developed thanks to this grant.

Consolation Prizes
Sponsorship with NFTs, IRC-2 and IRC-3 tokens
Better Data Display and analytics
Monthly giveaways

Project Duration: The goal of this grant application is to finance the v2 of the ICON Lossless Lottery Dapp as well as the marketing activities. The team estimates that it will need 4 months to complete the phase 2 developments.

Project Milestones:

Month 1 (most likely December 2020): Design improvements for better data display, Giveaway #1: Christmas giveaway
Month 2: Smart-contract modifications to include IRC-2 and IRC-3 sponsorship features and smaller prizes, front-end development for better data display, Giveaway #2: Lunar New Year’s giveaway
Month 3: Testing and improvements
Month 4: Launch of the v2, Marketing of the v2 of the Dapp, Giveaway #3: v2 Relaunch, reward sponsoring

As part of the approval, the team must submit the Periodic Report by the timeframes below (UTC):

2020/12/15 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/01/13 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/02/13 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/03/13 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation is going to give out $6,000 in 4 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.

2020/12/16 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,500
2021/01/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,500
2021/02/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,500
2021/03/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,500

Tipicon for Twitter

The Piconbello team started the tipping bot idea as an experiment and kept expanding it with the last grant request. In 3 months, they have developed new dapp integrations and their user base increased 600% from 900 to around 7500.

Additionally, Tipicon has become widely used by some of the most active telegram channels in the ICON ecosystem including Iconbet and Iconphilipinas channels. With this grant, the team wants to replicate this success on Twitter and provide the community with another way to interact in the ICON Network.

Project Duration: 2 or 3 months, depending on web interface decision

Project Milestones:

3 weeks Twitter bot with basic tip function
6 weeks for the rest of the functions
3 weeks for testing and completion
1 month for the web interface

As part of the approval, the team must submit the Periodic Report by the timeframes below (UTC):

2020/12/15 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/01/13 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation is going to give out $6,000 in 2 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.

2020/12/16 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,000
2021/01/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,000

Bounty Cat — Incentivized Promotion and Marketing Platform

Bounty Cat will be a decentralized promotion and marketing platform built on ICON and designed to help businesses and organizations promote their products, services and brands through unique and incentivized digital ad campaigns we call “Bounties”.

This grant will be used to help bootstrap the technical implementation and development of the infrastructure and application resources for this project with the intention and goal of this application to begin generating its own revenue at or, soon after, the time of completion & launch.

Project Milestones:

November 2020

Finalization of Bounty Cat “White Paper” and reference documentation
Launch of Bounty Cat promotional website, documentation and user and promoter information.

December 2020

Development of core application, databases and basic back-end infrastructure.

January 2021

Launch of interactable Bounty Cat Marketplace Test/Demo for Bounty Hunters

February 2021

Launch of Bounty Cat Promotion Management Test/Demo Portal for creating and managing Bounties and Rewards

March 2021

Launch of Web API Test/Demo
Refinement of application front ends
Initial SCORE Development and Testing on TEST Network
Testable Integrations with “Bridge”
Launch of “BOUNTY” Token on TEST

April 2021

Working TEST integrations with SCORE in Application/API/Front End
Working TEST Integrations with Bridge
SCORE Audits and Finalization

May 2021

Deployment of LIVE SCORE contracts
Deployment of LIVE application & databases
Launch of Bounty Cat Promotional and marketing initiatives to attract promoters and users

As part of the approval process, the team must submit the Periodic Report by the timeframes below (UTC):

2020/12/15 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/01/13 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/02/13 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/03/13 02:00 AM (UTC)
2021/04/13 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation is going to give out $16,300 in 5 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.

2020/12/16 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,260
2021/01/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,260
2021/02/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,260
2021/03/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,260
2021/04/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,260

‘Spread Your Votes’ campaign by ICON in Numbers

ICON in Numbers is a joint project between P-Reps Transcranial Solutions and Espanicon. The goal of the weekly report is to analyze different aspects of data, including voting behavior so the team could track the changes over time and inform ICONists and P-Reps to improve the governance in the ICON ecosystem.

The teams have been tracking the number of P-Reps that ICONists were voting for since their report on the voter behavior, and this was implemented in the weekly ICON in Numbers article since July, 2020. They have also shown an indicator for the highest number of P-Reps voted each week after the implementation of the upgrade on the ICON network which allowed for voting of more than 10 P-Reps. The team kept track of the data and helped increase awareness by sharing the data each week via social media platforms.

The team started a ‘Spread Your Votes’ campaign where they encouraged ICONists to spread their votes. With this grant, the team is giving ICONists the incentives to vote for more P-Reps so that the votes are not too concentrated on the top P-Reps. We have seen a gradual increase in the number of wallets and votes in the ‘11+ P-Reps’ voted category.

They hope to continue rewarding active voters that are participating in vote spreading and continue with the work in producing ICON in Numbers.

Project Milestones:

Four (4) ICON in Numbers report per month in two languages (English & Spanish)
One (1) summary report per month in English (Trend Analysis)

LICX governance and Audit

LICX is already receiving a lot of interest and given it could hold a significant amount of ICX in a smart contract, the team wants to fund an audit of the protocol. Additionally, the team is building governance functions around the delegation process for the staked ICX. Below are the respective milestones for this approved grant.

The team wants to implement 3 major milestones for this project:

Milestone #1 — MVP
Smart contract and testing. Functionalities: LICX holders can vote for their desired P-rep(s)
Milestone #2 — Final version
Website, documentation, and testing. Functionalities: functions of MVP, website implementation, and documentation.
Milestone #3 — Audited protocol

NFT Factory & Marketplace project

Sharpn believes enabling an NFT based ecosystem will be invaluable for the ICON network and now is the time. They also believe that this will generate solid organic activities and vitalize our community with a genuine use case.

The platform will have a marketplace for creators to mint NFTs, list them for sale, and gain royalties from each sale. Collectors can also direct buy from the marketplace to build their collection of interests. The NFTs can be in the form of digital collectibles, such as art NFTs. We also plan to expand the service to other forms of digital items such as crypto domain service INS (ICON Name Service).

Last but not least, the project will be DAO based with its own governance token, where holders can weigh in on platform development directions, community to decide what content to feature, and artist to approve etc.

Project Duration: 3 months to complete phase 1

Project Milestones:

Phase 1