The recent rise of a 98th-ranked currency, ICON (ICX), has caught the attention of many in the market. As of the weekly chart, ICX has gained almost 100%, marking a significant achievement for the token.
Furthermore, the token will reach an 11-month high tomorrow, breaking a major resistance point at $0.47. One reason for the recent surge in ICX’s price is its growing popularity in South Korea. Local traders have placed their bets on the token, leading to a 40% increase in the past 24 hours.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volumes have been recorded on local South Korean crypto exchanges, with the ICX-Korean won token pair seeing over $420 million in trading volume on Upbit, a prominent South Korean exchange.
ICON is a layer-one blockchain that builds a scalable, secure multichain bridging solution that connects partner blockchains via BTP. It enables cross-chain token swaps and messaging features, allowing ICON to connect various blockchains, including Binance Smart Chain, Near, Harmony, and more.
Despite a tumultuous 2022, ICX has had a good start to 2023, rising from $0.1408 in December 2022 to $0.2047 in the first three weeks of the new year. This latest surge pushed the token’s price up more than 34% on April 4, recording over 185% YTD gains.
Currently, ICX is trading at $0.4102 with an almost 8% gain in the last 24 hours and a 7% gain in market cap in the same period. With its growing popularity and innovative use case, it’s safe to say that ICX is a cryptocurrency to watch out for in the coming days.
ICON Activates BTP Blocks On Berlin Testnet
According to the latest development update for March, the BTP team has successfully activated BTP blocks on the Berlin testnet.
Additionally, BTP contracts have been deployed on the ICON Berlin testnet, BSC testnet, and ETH Sepolia, enabling trustless outbound messaging from the ICON blockchain. However, inbound messages are still making use of trusted relay verification.
For April, the team plans to continue testing, identifying improvements, fixing bugs, and improving the relay and BMV components. After one-way bridging, they will work towards full trustless bridging with BTP on the testnet.
The team also invites other teams to explore how they can adopt BTP’s xCall to enable new functionality on their applications.
In the past month, the team has made significant progress, such as completing unit testing for ETH 2.0 BMV implementation, developing a custom API for ETH 2.0 relay implementation, and testing integration on local ICON and ETH 2.0 instances.
For the next month, the team plans to start BTP block testing on the Berlin testnet, deploy BSC integration to ICON (Berlin) and BSC testnet, and continue ongoing BSC and ETH relay testing and debugging.
Additionally, the ICON blockchain will focus on improving code coverage, optimizing rewards through diversified pricing tiers, and evaluating validator productivity.
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