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January 2024: ICON General Message Passing (xCall) Expands to Wormhole and Layerzero

January 2024 - Main

February 7, 2024

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January's developments for the ICON ecosystem focused on expanding General Message Passing (xCall) integrations and enhancing functionality for application developers. This month, significant milestones were achieved with the release of both adaptors for additional interoperability protocols and the Central Relay with its supportive materials. Furthermore, the ongoing collaboration with the Composable Finance team is progressing well and remains a key focus for our goals in the upcoming month.

January 2024 - Integrations

🌐 Central Relay Progress: A detailed wiki has been set up and can be found at this location: Central Relay Wiki. The central relay is now available for any team to use, allowing them to connect to ICON, Avalanche, and BASE networks, and utilize xCall. Soon, it will also be able to connect to Arbitrum and Optimism.

🔌 xCall Adaptors: Wormhole adaptors have been released on mainnet for Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, and Avalanche. Layerzero adaptors have been released for BSC, Optimism, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and Ethereum. You can refer to the respective milestone board cards to view all transaction tests on mainnet for the corresponding chains that utilize xCall. xCall is not an interoperability solution, it is a messaging standard. The adaptors we have built make xCall compatible with Wormhole and Layerzero, which are interoperable protocols.

In practice, an application can write the message they want to send to different chains using the xCall standard and then select the interoperable protocol they want to use for sending the message. They can choose the cheapest option or, for additional security, they can send the same message through both interoperable protocols.

But why not just use the Layerzero messaging standard or Wormhole's messaging standard? The simple reason is that it would require more work for the team since each standard is different. The xCall adaptors allow you to use the xCall messaging standard and ensure its compatibility with the interoperable solutions we currently support, which are IBC, BTP, Wormhole and Layerzero.

🛠️ xCall v2 contracts: xCall has been deployed on Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism networks.

🔍 Internal Audits: We currently have ongoing work undergoing internal audit processes. This includes ICON emission contracts related to the enshrinement of balance. Internal audits are also underway for xCall 2.1. Additionally, we have initiated internal audits for the balanced saving rate contracts.

⏸️ Composable Finance Integration: We are closely collaborating with the Composable Finance team and plan to deploy to testnets in mid-February. This has been a challenging endeavor, but we are nearing the release on the mainnet. If all testing on the testnets goes well, we can aim for a March release to the mainnet.

We remain committed to transparency and diligence as we move forward with these integrations and enhancements to the ICON ecosystem.

Now that progress can be made simultaneously across various integrations, we have updated the integrations milestone board to make it easier for the community to follow along. For more detailed information on the monthly progress of our IBC integrations, we invite you to explore our latest report here.

📅 January’s Accomplishments:

  • Completed testing framework for xCall adaptors.

  • Completed testing of xCall v2 contracts and adaptor contracts on various EVM chains as noted on the milestone board.

  • Deployed IBC contracts on Injective and opened a channel to have ICON connected to Injective via IBC.

  • Deployed update to optimize fees for BTP on ICON mainnet.

  • Completed Base module for the central relay.

  • Finished local testing of ICS20 application with our Composable Finance integration.

🎯 February’s Goals:

  • Deploy our updated IBC implementation to ICON and Composable Finance testnet.

  • Test the ICS token transfer service on ICON and Composable Finance testnet.

  • Finish development and testing for core contracts needed for 4.1 ICON Economic policy.

  • Internal audits of all core contracts for 4.1 changes - network owned liquidity contracts, insurance fund contract and bnUSD savings rate contracts

  • Internal audits for xCall 2.1 updates for rust, java and solidity contracts.

  • Finish Archway module for central relay.

A Milestone board for ongoing integration efforts can be found here.


January 2024 - Network

Next Month

  • Continuation of the ICON Validator Support Program.

  • Ongoing IISS 4.0 changes.

  • New emission contracts for ICON Economic Policy 4.1.

Documentation updates

Find the latest update from the Dev relations team here.