ICON Bridge, BTP, and More With Mo From Web3Labs

The launch of BTP is one of the most exciting (and scrutinized) developments in ICON’s history. But how well do you know the engineers behind ICON’s game changing interoperability technology?

Meet Mo Elshami, the development lead for the recently announced ICON Bridge.

In a recent appearance of Eye on ICON, Mo provided us an update on the current state of ICON Bridge, how it will accelerate BTP adoption, and gave us a glimpse into the technical innovations of the BTP team.

Here are some highlights of the discussion.

The Current State of ICON Bridge

ICON Bridge is a full service interoperability network that can be considered “BTP lite”. The primary difference between BTP and ICON Bridge is the removal of the BTP Message Verifier contract (BMV), which delayed BTP deployment due to generating prohibitively high gas costs.

During the podcast, Mo revealed that ICON Bridge is currently being connected to several partnering blockchains including BNB Smart Chain, Polkadot parachain Moonriver and Layer-1 blockchains Harmony and NEAR.

Excitingly, he announced that ICON Bridge has established a working testnet with BNB Smart Chain, a massive blockchain that holds the world record of 14.7 million blockchain transactions in a single day.

These integrations mark a major milestone for BTP’s long term vision of connecting all blockchains. Especially because any ground covered for rollout, integrations and feature development will seamlessly carry over to the network’s full launch.

ICON Bridge Will Accelerate BTP Adoption

For Mo, BTP’s greatest value is the network effect. Because BTP is blockchain agnostic it can be adopted by nearly any protocol with smart contract capabilities. However, that implementation often requires partner blockchains to undergo a hard fork in order to configure their chain to interoperability standards. This requirement introduced a challenge for early integrations, something Mo personally experienced supervising BNB Smart Chain’s bridging.

All this makes the launch of ICON Bridge even more important, as it presents an opportunity for blockchains to join the BTP Network without the need for a hard fork. Once integration occurs, BTP can grow exponentially via the network effect and deployment of more advanced features like smart contract interoperability can be shipped without significant roadblocks.

BTP Gas Fee Innovations and Role in ICE and SNOW

The gas fee challenge comes from BTP’s bold adherence to Blockchain first principles. Keeping all cross-chain information decentralized, trustless and verified on chain is something that few other interoperability solutions are attempting.

Mo briefly touched on some innovations the ICONLoop team is considering for BMV’s gas fee problem, including batching accumulators and an unnamed solution in development by the Near Protocol team.

Finally, Mo discussed ICE & SNOW and the optimization the Polkadot parachains will have with BTP. Significant interest surrounds the launch of these chains and Mo suggested that tokenomics could play a role in giving them an advantage when bringing cross-chain data to the Polkadot ecosystem.

Exciting stuff! Stay tuned for more.

Eye on ICON

Be sure to check out the full conversation with Fez and Mo on Youtube and subscribe to the Eye on ICON channel to never miss out on the latest news and interviews. Also available on major podcasting platforms.

Eye on ICON is ICON’s first community-led podcast show, bringing weekly news and interviews. Fez and Iconographer host of Eye on ICON, keeps his subscribers abreast of all the latest developments in ICON’s diverse ecosystem, by regularly hosting ICON founders and builders to talk about their projects.

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