The ICON Foundation announced its plans to launch an interoperability incentive program worth 200 million ICX, about $200 million at the time of publishing this story. The foundation supports the development of the ICON network, the largest chain of public aggregators in South Korea. The foundation said it hopes this program will incentivize the ICON community and its associated networks to adopt the ICON blockchain-based 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 from other ecosystems to explore BTP’s cross-chain communication opportunities.
The majority of the proceeds are expected to go towards developing new, high-quality use cases for BTP technology, while a portion will go towards incentivizing long-term adoption of BTP within existing protocols and communities, according to the company.
BTP integration is currently underway with many blockchain networks, including Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Kusama, Moonriver, Astar Network, Edgeware, Acala, NEAR Y Harmony.
ICON claimed that its incentive program is the first fund entirely dedicated to interoperability. Min Kim, founder of Project ICON, said in a statement that the goal is “not fragment existing development communities”, but to create opportunities for collaboration between them within the layer 2 ecosystem.
Scott Smiley, Head of Strategy at the ICON Foundation, told Cointelegraph that security and decentralization are not the only ones leading the adoption, stating:
“We are confident that once users and developers engage with BTP, they will recognize the value of a uniquely secure, scalable, chain agnostic protocol. This incentive fund will give the market the ‘push’ it needs to snowball of adoption.”
ICON recently released ICON 2.0, introducing an updated core blockchain engine, support for Java smart contracts, BTP interoperability technology, and updated tokenomics.
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