The ICON Foundation announced plans to launch an interoperability incentive program for 200 million ICX, or approximately $200 million at the time of publication. The foundation supports the development of the ICON network, South Korea’s largest public aggregator chain. The Foundation hopes that this program will inspire the ICON community and its partner networks to adopt ICON’s Blockchain Transfer Protocol, or BTP.
The incentive program aims to distribute up to 200 million ICX tokens over a five-year period, funded primarily by the ICX reserve allocation raised during the 2017 token sale. ICON intends to attract development teams in other ecosystems to explore BTP’s cross-chain communication capabilities.
According to the company, the bulk of the proceeds will go towards the development of new high-value use cases for the BTP technology, while a portion of it will be used to incentivize the long-term adoption of BTP within existing protocols and communities.
BTP integration is currently underway with many blockchains including Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Kusama, Moonriver, Astar Network, Edgeware, Acala, NEAR, and Harmony.
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ICON claimed that their incentive program is the first fund dedicated solely to interoperability. Min Kim, founder of the ICON project, said in a statement that the goal is “not to fragment existing development communities,” but rather to create opportunities for collaboration between them within the Layer 2 ecosystem.
Scott Smiley, Head of Strategy at ICON Foundation, told Cointelegraph that security and decentralization are not alone in adoption, statin:
“We are confident that once users and developers interact with BTP, they will see the value of a chain-agnostic, scalable and uniquely secure protocol. This stimulus fund will give the market the “nudge” it needs to start the adoption snowball.”
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ICON recently started ICON 2.0, introducing an updated core blockchain engine, support for Java Smart Contracts, BTP interoperability technology, and updated tokenomics.
