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ICON Monthly Grant Recap — July 2020

TL;DR

"It was another busy month of grant applications and approvals and we continue to be encouraged by the quality of new initiatives."

July 29, 2020

Greetings ICONists,

It was another busy month of grant applications and approvals and we continue to be encouraged by the quality of new initiatives. Like in prior month’s we’ll go through each approval in more detail below. But separately, we want to announce a change to the grant program that we believe better aligns the interests of the community.

Today, we’re happy to announce that going forward we will be combining the grant program and the P-Rep delegation program.

What does this mean?

Anyone approved for a grant will be eligible to receive 1M ICX delegation for the duration of the grant
If you are working on multiple grants at the same time, you will be eligible to combine delegation up to 3x (e.g. the maximum you can earn is 3M ICX delegation if you are working on three separate grants)
If the grant worker does not have a node, we will encourage them to set one up in order to get delegation
This will begin on August 10th at the end of the current delegation program
For people already working on grants, they will receive it retroactively

As mentioned before, we feel this change best accomplishes the goal of aligning incentives (i.e. rewards) with contribution. Additionally it provides the greatest transparency to the community and is the simplest design to manage. It also encourages more applications for grants, which we think is a big positive for the network and its continued growth.

We look forward to seeing the results of these changes and as always will be looking to make improvements over time.

July 2020

In July, we’ve are extremely excited to announce that we approved 9 grants . These ranged from service integrations, public relations, DApp development, developer tools and analytics. This has been the busiest month of grant approvals since we launched this program late last year and we are very pleased with the programs’ growth and look forward to approving many more grants throughout the remainder of the year. Please see below for more details on the approved grants this month.

Infrastructure: Prime Trust Integration
Public Relations: Transform Group
DApp: K-Pop Content Promoter — Stayge
Education: ICON Development Course into DevEra — ICON DAO
Community: Growth Accelerator — ICON Pilipinas
DApp: Tipicon integrations — Piconbello
DApp: Project Nebula — ICON Forge
Infrastructure: Blockchain Analytics and Data Pipeline — Insight
Infrastructure: Developer Tooling — Yudas Lab

Prime Trust Integration

Prime Trust is a technology-driven financial institution that provides open infrastructure solutions for FinTech innovators.

It provides API-driven open banking solutions for mobile apps, exchanges, OTC desks, platforms, broker-dealers, real estate syndicators, crowdfunding portals, issuance platforms and others.

Prime Trust delivers white-labeled compliant payment processing, AML/KYC, financial accounts, customer onboarding, asset custody, and transaction settlement solutions on a B2B2C platform.

As part of this integration, ICON will be added to Prime Trust services and white-label solutions will be created with their offering.

Funding

The Foundation is providing $25,000 for the integration. And this will likely take ~1 month to complete.

Transform Group

Transform Group is one of the leading blockchain advisory, public relations, and marketing agencies in the world, with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Toronto, Bermuda, and global headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Transform Group is dedicated to creating and sustaining industry leadership positions for its clients through superior strategy, relationships, market intelligence, and consistent execution.

Transform Group has been a leader in bitcoin and blockchain marketing since 2013, launching over 120+ token sales that equate to over 37% of the cryptocurrency total market capitalization, and it has continued to grow and add new offerings as the blockchain world expands and diversifies.

We are excited to partner with Transform Group to amplify and grow our brand.

Funding

As part of the approval, ICON Foundation will engage with Transform Group for a minimum of 3 months. And for these services, ICON Foundation will pay $25,000 worth of ICX.

K- Pop Content Promoter: Stayge

STAYGE One is developing a blockchain-based service innovating the entertainment industry. This service, K-Pop Content Promoter, is a system recording how much the K-Pop fans are contributing to the expansion of K-Pop content.

The Content Promoter will evaluate the distribution status of target content based on the following 3 steps.

Step 1 — Various kinds of content will be gathered at the Fan Community of STAYGE from many content sources including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Step 2 — Content gathered at STAYGE will be converted into personalized and shareable URL links. Such links will lead to the same content of the sources while having personal information including user data, link-generation time, and so on.

Step 3 — When the generated links are shared with blogs and communities, the referral information will be recorded to see which pathways the links have been taken.

Throughout the 3 steps and collected data, STAYGE will know which fans have been contributing to the distribution of content and set a standard to give out rewards based on their contribution.

Stayge has been a key contributor to the growth of ICON Network and we are happy to support this initiative to drive even more adoption.

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

2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/10/20 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation will be providing $28,000 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.

2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $9,334
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $9,333
2020/10/23 02:00 AM (UTC) — $9,333

ICON Development Course in DevEra — ICON DAO

At DevEra academy and with Vietnam National University support, ICON DAO will offer a formal ICON Blockchain Development course to Vietnam National University’s Engineering student body of over 4000 yearly students.

As part of this initiative, they are aiming for the following:

Boost exposure of ICON Network by teaching ICON technology formally as an academic program at a leading university.
Introduce the concept of DApp development with focus on ICON blockchain products and development tools.
Educate students to specialize in ICON development through intensive 3-month programs that focus on topics that cover:
Programming SCORE and ICON Network-based decentralized applications
Leveraging Current ICON Blockchain Technology: Fee Sharing, Virtual Step, BTP
Use Cases including Broof

Education is a key focus for growth in our network and we look forward to seeing the progress with this initiative.

As part of the approval, ICON DAO must submit Periodic Reports by the timeframes below (UTC):

2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/10/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/11/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/12/21 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation will be providing $27,000 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.

2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $5,400
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $5,400
2020/10/23 02:00 AM (UTC) — $5,400
2020/11/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $5,400
2020/12/23 02:00 AM (UTC) — $5,400

ICON Pilipinas Community Building Growth Accelerator

ICON Pilipinas will be accelerating blockchain growth in the Philippines by educating people about ICON. As part of their work they will highlight the major benefits and why ICON should be a premiere blockchain project in the country. And seek to build one of the largest blockchain communities in the country.

Currently, ICON Pilipinas manages one of the largest and most active ICON related channels in Telegram and with this grant, they will seek to continue this growth.

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

2020/07/22 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation will be providing $12,000 in 3 monthly installments based on the Periodic Reports. The amount of ICX will be determined and paid according to the price at 02:00 AM (UTC) on the day of payment.

2020/07/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $4,000
2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $4,000
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $4,000

New Dapp integrations: Tipicon — Piconbello

Since its inception Tipicon has been a success. For example, in nearly 2 weeks after the Iconbet integration, it managed to create 500,000 transactions with 5 million ICX in volume. This number continues to rise as top users of Iconbet utilize Tipicon to play the games.

At one time, Tipicon created 35% of the transactions for Iconbet and helped them become #1 dApp in terms of transactions according to dapp.com. Currently, in the first month, Tipicon handled 1 million transactions. The team expects this to grow substantially as more integrations are completed. Next on the list of integrations is Iconswap, a decentralized exchange built and managed by ICONation.

Overall, each additional dApp integration will take 3 weeks, including testing and such, which makes 3 months in total.

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

2020/07/22 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation will be providing $3,500 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.

2020/07/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,166
2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,167
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $1,167

Project Nebula — ICON Forge

Project Nebula is a space themed collectible strategy game on the ICON blockchain. It will be released as a cross-platform browser game to ensure accessibility to the widest possible audience. The individual unique planets in Project Nebula will be non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which players can claim inside the game and trade or sell if they wish to do so. There will be several rarity categories for the planets — each planet will have unique design and attributes that will determine how useful and powerful they will be in the game. The game will also include elements from the “4X” genre such as exploration, research and resource management.

Below are images of the planets, exploration features and the marketplace. We are very excited about the use of ICON’s NFT standard and look forward to seeing the progress of Project Nebula.

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

2020/07/22 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation is going to give out $22,800 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.

2020/07/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $7,600
2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $7,600
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $7,600

Blockchain Analytics — Insight Data Science

Insight intends to track the growth and adoption of ICON. They believe that when the process is built right, insights can be gained in near real time to track items such as monthly active wallets or number of transactions for individual smart contracts and DApps over time. By analyzing the blockchain’s adoption, the community can gain insights into user behavior and act on them by directing resources more appropriately to increase transactions.

This proposal focuses on building a robust business analytics tool suite to support blockchain analytics. It will use the same architecture being used on the top blockchains per the blockchain-etl github organization by orchestrating data pipelines with Apache Airflow and inserting the data into various relational databases for further analysis. The project will then build dashboards with Apache Superset for analysis with a long term support for additional metrics requested by the community. These visualizations can then be embedded into various block explorers or used by individuals doing exploratory analysis.

We agree that analytical tools to measure blockchain adoption and activity are necessary in order to grow our ecosystem.

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

2020/07/22 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/08/20 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/20 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation is going to give out $20,000 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.

2020/07/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $6,666
2020/08/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $6,666
2020/09/24 02:00 AM (UTC) — $6,667

ICON Contract Hub — Yudas Lab

Yudas Lab will be improving the developer experience by building blockchain tools for the ICON Network. Below are the new tools to be built:

Primary

*Transaction history viewer, categorized by external and internal TXs.*Similar to a mini tracker, with features/UI designed and well-tailored for SCORE development only.
Favorite contracts, a bookmark of contracts, to help us quickly get back to contracts being worked on.

Secondary

Wallet swarm simulator, quickly create/import wallets and imitate real world user behaviors which will be very convenient for testing/interacting with contracts.
Contract stats, it helps developers quickly grasp their contract metrics like TX count and volume.

Optional

Aiming for “backendless” architecture, the whole thing is a one-page application running on a browser without the need for communicating with an external API backend ( for instance, query pre-processed TX data ).
Migrate codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript, for better code readability as well as maintenance/contribution

We agree that blockchain tooling on ICON needs to be improved and are excited about working alongside Yudas Lab.

The team must submit the Periodic Report by the timeframes below (UTC):

2020/08/11 02:00 AM (UTC)
2020/09/08 02:00 AM (UTC)

Funding Amount

The ICON Foundation will be providing $5,000 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.

2020/08/13 02:00 AM (UTC) — $3,000
2020/09/15 02:00 AM (UTC) — $2,000

Thank you,

Hyperconnect the World

ICON Foundation

Homepage : https://icon.foundation

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