About the Project
The ICON Project aims to build a decentralized network that allows independent blockchains with different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries. Anyone can create a new blockchain project and join the network. A new blockchain project is free to connect with existing projects and create new unique worlds, or blockchain multiverse. ICON itself can be viewed as both a living organism and an ecosystem.
BTP (Blockchain Transmission Protocol) is a standard that renders heterogeneous blockchains interoperable, including blockchains that entail completely different consensus models and algorithms. Here, we define interoperability as the ability to facilitate value transfer, service invocation, and data exchange. These siloed operating blockchains can securely anchor transactions through a universal standard as a trustless settlement layer.
About the Integration
The ICON team is working with parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem to integrate the Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) interoperability solution, including Moonbeam. Since Moonbeam offers the most complete Ethereum compatibility and the largest number of live integrations, it was a natural choice.
The first phase of the integration has been completed by merging the necessary precompile contracts with Frontier, the Polkadot EVM project (for which the Moonbeam team received a grant from the Web3 Foundation). This puts all the necessary pieces in place for ICON to connect to any Frontier Pallet parachain. Precompiled contracts will soon also be merged to Moonbeam.ย The next milestone for the Polkadot integration is to have testnet implementations for BTP smart contracts completed by the end of Q2 2021 and main net support upon launch of ICON 2.0.
