Piconbello 2020 Progress Report
Hello ICONists, hope you are feeling well and being healthy, despite the current pandemic conditions around the world. Since we are almost done with the year 2020, we would like to use this report as a summary of what Piconbello has done for the ICON ecosystem over the year. We didn’t release a report for several months and were silent over social media since all we did was work for grants and just covering server costs.
Our main release for this year was Tipicon, our Telegram bot that is integrated with ICON blockchain. Over this year, we had so many releases of Tipicon, adding new features and improving user experience. Our idea was to supply ICON ecosystem experience to all users that use Telegram, which is relatively easy to access. As an initial start, our first release consisted of a bot that was able to open accounts to anybody that desire to and have an ICON wallet for each account. After having great feedback from the community, we started to integrate dApps of the ICON ecosystem to our bot. Our first releases were DAOlette and DAOblackjack of ICONbet, two of the most popular dApps of the ICON ecosystem. Our user base simply skyrocketed after this release and we saw the opportunity to create a service that encompasses the ecosystem as a whole. Hence, we continued to integrate dApps of the ecosystem. We shaped the overall product according to your feedback as well as overall ideas of ours. Currently, Tipicon supports DAOlette, DAOblackjack, DAOlevels, DAOdice, DAOlottery(currently unavailable since the smart contract is on maintenance) from Iconbet and Iconswap. Sadly, Iconswap will be unsupported later, since the service is shutting down soon. As an overall KPI, Tipicon supplies 30–50% of all transactions to Iconbet. In total, 15844 distinct users utilize Tipicon, which is substantial since ICON Project main channel only has 12714 distinct users. Similar case applies to Iconswap, where the main trade group has 239 users and 222 users utilize the service from Tipicon, almost all of the group. Overall, we are quite satisfied with the product we have and we know you are as well.
While thinking about possible improvements over the network, we realised that the ICON ecosystem lacked a proper batching tool. Batching is a process in which transactions are bundled together, resulting in a lower cost of transaction as well as easing the process of sending to multiple addresses. Thus, we designed a smart contract that batches the transactions. We gave a sneak peek of this tool by utilizing it in our promotion, shared on Twitter. Since this is a rather niche project, that is, the user base will be relatively low, we will release this project only after our current projects are completed.
We also wanted to design a game in which ICONists can have ownership of the pixels on a pixel board and draw whatever they desire on it. We applied for a grant, yet it was denied. Although this request was denied, we still went forward with our design and have been working on it with our own funds. We have a prototype available for testing, yet since we have been working on our projects that we took grant for mostly, this project will also be released at a later date.
Our next major product on the pipeline will be Tipicon’s Twitter integration. We applied for two grants for it, one with collaboration with the ICONPlus team and one on our own. Our self request was accepted, hence we have been working on that project for some time. Our web infrastructure is finished, we are currently working on database and Telegram connections to Twitter. After that, again, we will have public testing and feedback gathering with the community. You will be able to use Tipicon on Twitter, without dApps due to Twitter’s rules, on Q1 of 2021. We hope you’ll like it as much as we do.
Since we are a group of native Turkish speakers, we realized that there was a lack of information about the ICON ecosystem in Turkish. Hence, we joined with ICON Daily community and started our own Turkish news channel, called ICONHaber. We continued to translate the news to Turkish as much as we can, yet we saw that we lacked the proper interaction with the Turkish community. Hence, we have paused translating the daily news for the time being.
We would like to also congratulate the Iconpool team for joining the ICON ecosystem and becoming prep. They were our outsource developers for most of our projects and they also won Hackathon. Our approach was to find talented developers and recruit them to our network, which we did with their group. We believe they will be a great addition to the ecosystem. You can check Iconpool from here.
Our fund status is as follows: we have a temporary 1 million delegation from the foundation and without it, our monthly reward is as low as 400$. We never had a sustainable and high income to carry our products. We lack funds to carry any projects on our own. Despite having low rewards, we have been delivering substantial contributions to the network by applying for grants and utilizing our low funds to contribute to the network. If you like what we have done for the ecosystem so far, as well as what we will do, please consider supporting us by voting for us. Your votes will be beneficial for us, thus be beneficial to the network. Also, please consider rating our progress in 2020 from 1 to 5, which will be great feedback for us. Please click here to evaluate. We wish you to have an amazing and healthy life in 2021.
