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ICON's NEXT CHAPTER
Recorded: May 8, 2025 Duration: 1:48:42Space Recording
Short Summary
Sodex is set to revolutionize the DeFi landscape with its launch, focusing on user-friendly experiences and strategic partnerships, while also introducing a new token and optimizing yield generation through innovative mechanisms.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Can you guys hear me? me. Yeah, man. Yep, loud and clear.
Awesome.
Just adding John.
Hello, hello.
How are we doing?
Hey, John.
Doing good, doing good. How about yourself?
All good, all good. It's been a busy week. But all happy, all happy here.
And Sodax is in too. Cool.
We had a couple of minutes.
This is a question to speak. Hey, Rom.
Fez, you good? I'm here.
It's not working now.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah.
No, you're not.
Just Alex to join.
Oh, he's here.
Oh, yeah.
Alex is there.
All good. Hello. Hey, Alex. well he's here oh yeah hugs is there all good
hey alex
well i guess we're good to go john
all good all good my accounts are in
all right fantastic
gm everyone uh good afternoon good evening wherever you are listening from All right, fantastic. GM, everyone.
Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are listening from.
Well, I'm just looking at the charts right now.
BTC over 100K, Ethereum moving like it was back in the day.
I can just imagine Fez is a smile at the moment, seeing the E-chart for sure.
So everything's looking positive. I'd like to welcome you all to a very special AMA
where we discuss icons migration to Sodex.
And we have with us some key, very key figures who are very pivotal to this migration.
We have the immense pleasure of having Min of course who needs
obviously no introduction to the community
we have Fez
Alex and John
as well
unfortunately Elise couldn't be with us
today due to ongoing
the ongoing Sonic Summit
in Austria
and as you've seen
our social she's been very
hard at work pushing Sodex.
We'll be sure to have us entirely separate AMA on marketing and growth initiatives.
So we will share more information on that one very soon.
Yeah, I guess now is a good opportunity
to kind of, before
going to the questions, maybe
Fez, Alex, and
John,
give us
very, very briefly a highlight
of your role
under Sodax.
Maybe I could start with Fez.
Hey. Maybe I could start with Fez. Hey, yeah, so Arash, you're coming through quite distorted.
So quickly, for me, I mean, at the Foundation and now at Sodax,
I look after the technical team and the product side of things. And part of my role is ensuring everything we're building
is on track, right resources, anything to go that goes around
project management and program management,
I just tackle on that side of things.
And yeah, so that's in a nutshell what I do.
And I continue to do it for SODAX.
Fantastic.
Alex or John?
Yeah, so on my side, I'm working on the solver.
So we'll give a bit more detail about it later,
but the solver is one of the centerpiece
of the new SodaX infrastructure. Basically, it will help everybody to crush in actions,
lending, borrowing, every kind of stuff crushing.
Fantastic. The newest member to, well, one of the newest members to our team.
John, maybe to, I guess everyone knows, but I guess on the ZodX, you have a few more responsibilities.
Yeah. So in general, I look after content. content so that's um working alongside Rook um producing graphics um working alongside
Elise on communications around events and things like with the recent Mariah season we had um
and basically uh organizing and scheduling what goes out on our Twitter our blogs and across various platforms we have.
Great. So far, I mean, the communication has been excellent.
I think the community has been really rallying around the new brand and the new migration plans.
So to kick things off, I'd like to ask Min, what was the thinking behind launching Zodax?
I mean, what really pushed the team to take this step and why do you think it was necessary at this time?
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you everyone for joining. This is actually my very first, surprisingly, Spaces. So it's my debut, I guess.
together, it's, I believe, 2.30 a.m. where you're at. So I think that's a testament to
how global our team has become over the years where we have team members from all around
the world. So it's very difficult to have, you know, a Spaces event where everyone can join.
So I think this is sort of an example of how important this migration is and this news is
for everyone. It's been a very exciting week and we're very happy that everyone is able to join us.
to join us and yeah, to start off with kind of telling you the story behind the rationale
and why we have decided to migrate to SodaX. Let me just say that at a very high level, every decision are made objectively, we consider all pros and cons. Obviously,
we put a lot of the emotions aside. Obviously, you know, Icon just being here for eight years
now, there's a lot of sentimental value there. And, you know, changing something that we're used
to is quite hard. So but in this case, it was a very, very no brainer decision. Because
when you find something that is very special, and it's working. And when the entire team is in
agreement, you double down, and you try to move as fast as
possible. So I would like to just start off by saying that
this migration, this rebrand, there's a lot of pieces to it.
But overall, it's been a no-brainer.
What I mean by what is very special is that we are calling this unified liquidity layer,
and it's essentially a combination of a lot of the technology that we've been building. So the interoperability tech or layer,
the network-owned liquidity,
or now we're trying to change the name
to protocol-owned liquidity,
and the intent solvers and so forth.
So a lot of these tech that we've been putting together
now is working extremely well.
And we think there's like a very big opportunity to really scale this up.
Let me just say that the obviously the layer one component, ICON 2.0, I would say, because
we had ICON 1.0 to ICON 2.0.
ICON 2.0 is very novel, but not very scalable.
EVM has become an industry standard.
So adopting EVM allows us to scale a lot faster.
And more than anything else, you know, when we look
at the future, and we think about how do we scale faster? How do we move faster? That
is one of the biggest reasons why we're, you know, making the switch. Second reason, I
would like to say is that we've all heard the term probably less is more. And in this case, what we're
doing, we strongly believe that this holds very, very true for Sodex. As we're focusing
on, like I mentioned, this unified liquidity layer that sits across all layer one infrastructure.
So you know, I think internally,
we've been playing around with different words.
We say that this is a app infrastructure.
I am used to calling it a platform.
Maybe there's another word for it called middleware.
So I think all these words are quite interchangeable,
but, you know, what we've built, it works with any layer one and
any apps can use it via SDK that we're preparing.
So in a sense, strategically, if you think about it, by removing our own layer one, we
remove a lot of this conflict of interest that unlocks a lot of the collaboration opportunities.
So just to kind of elaborate on that, when you're building everything from layer one to,
you know, the interoperability layer, we're providing kind of the liquidity function to it.
And on top of that, we're supporting to build
some of the applications that uses all of this technology.
In a sense, we've been doing a lot,
almost everything throughout different stacks.
And when you're going out there
and we're trying to find partners,
it's very, very difficult for us as,
when you're doing too much in this case, there could be conflict of interest.
So a lot of the layer ones might come to you and say like, you know, you have a layer one
that competes with our products.
So it's very, very difficult for us to kind of support you because there's conflict of
interest.
So we're removing a lot of that conflict of interest by, you know, focusing on something that we feel that we have, we have something very special and we have,
we have a very specialty in it. We have expertise in it. And I think the product itself has,
you know, it's ready to go and it's scalable. Once we do the full migration,
we do the full migration.
Third, sorry for, you know, trying to, I meant to try to keep this short, but at the same
time, it's obviously a very important question.
And lastly, I think I mentioned this through Twitter, Icon's goal has always been interoperability.
When you read our, you know, white paper, our biggest focus has been we wanted to get to interoperable world, not just
in a build a layer one or operator layer one. And at the
time into back in 2017, that was just not a choice for us, we had
to build a layer one because we had no other viable options.
If I don't know how long many of you have stuck around since like, you know, how far you go back. But in 2017, it was pretty much the Bitcoin layer that was the Ethereum.
And then there were a bunch of these enterprise blockchain initiatives such as R3 Corda, Hyperledger.
We essentially did our token generation event at the same time as like Tezos and EOS.
EOS and Tezos weren't even out back then.
Cosmos SDK was not available a few years after. EVM compatibility or EVM chains were quite new.
So I think Tron probably took the right step
in going that route,
but we just didn't have too many options back then.
So we felt most comfortable to build our own layer one
and because the future we wanted to be able to be more flexible.
So once you control your own layer one, you, you could have that flexibility in building
whatever technology on top of it and have it, you know, customized to what you wanted
to do, which was introubability.
So the world has changed a lot since then.
So I think that's the biggest point in today's world.
There are many different options out there.
The cost benefit just, we ran the numbers, just doesn't make any sense.
We're spending literally millions of dollars a year just maintaining our own layer one, a lot of that money could be spent on growing our, you know, our platform,
our applications, our user base.
So we're sort of redirecting a lot of those funding and opportunities to actually, yeah,
let's build, let's build, let's build back the community.
Let's reinvest all that money into growth and let's, you know, essentially
let's get closer to the users because that's what we always wanted to do
from the very beginning.
So, um, yeah, so, um, and then maybe the last bonus point is that, um, I think a
lot of people have been asking like why Sonic? I think Sonic has checked a lot of the boxes for us,
but I think EVM allows us to have sort of
a fallback option as well.
There's many, many other EVM options out there.
So if Sonic fails or for some reason,
something doesn't work out in Sonic,
it is very minimal effort for us to switch
to another
layer one obviously we've done our homework with sonic and we're very supportive we don't
think it will fail we actually have very strong faith in being a big part of this sonic ecosystem
and i think that's another um another attractive part about Sonic is that it's still relatively unknown and small
compared to some of the other layer ones out there.
So we have this opportunity to kind of get in early
and help it grow.
And I think Sonic could be a great home for not just us,
but for a lot of the other uh applications and technologies but at the
same time you know like i said we're building a middleware or a platform or an app infrastructure
so we expect our technology to be a home for a lot of the other applications out there as well
i'll stop here no fantastic breakdown man i, man. I think you brought in new perspective and insights, especially like how back in 2017,
there weren't many options and it may have been a route where if L2s were a possibility,
then that might have been a viable option of Icon.
So interesting to know that point as well.
And also, like you mentioned
projects like eos uh and you know projects like a blast in the past i mean they're pretty much
barely existing now so it goes to show like it's important like to rebrand and continue to test your
your strategies and and and to see if if they are still. So I think you made some great points.
Before I go to the next question,
I just want to mention the next bunch of questions
is going to be basically breaking down SODAC.
So if anyone has any questions on that aspect of the questioning,
please drop a question either on the Discord
or on the comment section on this space and I'll
take it up.
I have another question similar to the one I asked you.
We see a lot of projects like rebranding and there's a lot of work that goes behind that
and the community don't really see that aspect of it or probably and and me when i when i see now like the work
that has gone on in the team and like the the different components that needs to be right before
we even announce that to the community you just give a small breakdown uh to the community of
of the elements of that and what kind of timeline it took you to us to get here yeah I think that's a very difficult
question because I cannot pinpoint exactly when a lot of this has started the funny thing is I
actually recently checked back and I saw that we registered a domain name Soda Network back
in 2021.
So that's like four years ago.
So that kind of tells me that we were thinking about like various pivots or various way to
rebrand other directions, you know, throughout the year.
So I think the more important thing for me is that we're always all about just finding the right opportunity and the direction for the project.
I make sure that we're agile and we can switch directions anytime, switch gears at any time.
And that's where a lot of the discipline sort of comes in where we do a bunch of things from
the very beginning and we see what's working, what's not working. We began building BTP to building Xcall to trying out NOL to now we have Alex building
solvers.
It's really sort of a continuous endless battle day in and day out. So, you know, I think until, you know, one day we collected enough data
and we sort of understood like what we had in our hand and this migration was sort of
the natural next step that we needed to have. So we don't believe in, and I never believed in, you know, rebranding just for the sake of rebranding.
I think everyone here on the team knows that, you know, we know that the community has been asking for it.
But, you know, unless we have a real solid reason to shift gears and rebrand.
You know, we just don't do that because rebranding it's, you know,
it's a lot of resources as well.
So we want to save it and do it at the right time.
So, you know, at the end of the day, we, you know, with the team knew by,
I would say by the summer of 2024, that know we had something very special we're calling it the unified liquidity layer today but we didn't really have a name back then
and we are naturally doubling down on this so you know we were working I remember that we had our fall workshop in Korea back in, I think, September or October 2024.
And that was when we all had, you know, come together and decided that, yeah, we need to move quickly and sort of the rest has been just planning and executing since then. So for the real work that went into a sort of shifting years
and having, you know, start putting plans
and things into place,
I would say it was like the summer of 2024, so last year.
But, you know, I would say this sort of evolution has been long-term coming.
Interesting. I hope the community, you know, if there's any more questions you want to ask me about, you know, more on the background towards on the work that went on, went on, feel free to drop a question
in the Discord or on our chat.
The next question I want to focus on is on the infrastructure side of things. things um it's well documented uh of of a hub and spoke model uh you know where where apps like
balanced have taken advantage of of this and right now obviously the infrastructure is an icon
uh but we're soon to move to uh zodex uh sonic uh and under the soda expand uh first i would like to ask you like what was the um
reasons for the infrastructure change like why was it necessary to move uh infrastructure
and the hub okay so uh one of the things once we decided to do this uh was
One of the things once we decided to do this was, you know, and kind of break this down, there'll be another thing that drops with Anton, and we've gone into a lot of detail around this.
But we wanted to, we said, okay, if we can rebuild stuff, we've been building, we're in third iterations of things.
If we could rebuild stuff, how would we do this with the goal to maximize NOL, right?
So we have all this liquidity.
It's currently just locked.
It's not being used efficiently.
How could we do this better and offer a series of products and services to potential new partners and actual users?
So with that in mind, what we knew was we wanted to use the hub-and-spoke model.
We know it's successful.
The goal was to create a chain-abstracted experience, and that's what the hub-and-spoke model can do and does.
But what did deteriorate this experience is the timing it takes.
So even right now, when you're on Sui and stuff,
it feels like a native app.
But once you start hitting transactions,
it's much slower than an application
actually running on that chain.
So what we wanted to do is fix this.
And to fix that, it needed to be a finality, a very fast chain.
And now we're not talking seconds,
we're talking like sub-seconds finality.
So this formed the basis of what we went out to try and find,
what chain would be capable,
and has the right infrastructure set up.
And there was a lot of chains out there.
All stacks were on the books.
We assessed everything.
So when we did assess, one thing we did also want,
we wanted a very open code base for things.
And this is something I've talked through.
But Java, we spend a lot of time at ICON and our teams
building, not innovating.
We're innovating with the relays and things like that
because from an interoperability standpoint.
But a lot of the times where everything else, all we're
doing is copying.
We're copying.
We're translating from one language that already exists that has been
out there for ages,
plenty of audits, and we're
trying to translate that code into Java
and just keep up, which was really slowing
us down.
This was also one of the
considerations when we were going,
okay,
where do we want to move?
We need this code base, and And we need this code base.
And EVM had that code base, right?
There's innovation happening in EVM.
And then there's the foundational protocols like your money markets and CDPs, et cetera, that are tried and tested, heavily audited, and very secure now when you think of Aave and things like that. So we wanted that from a code-based perspective, and we knew we needed a fast finality chain.
And then finally, believe it or not,
we needed something that was actually on mainnet.
So we've had a bit of discussions in Discord.
People have been asking, why did we pick Sonic?
When we went back and forth, some of the newer players,
Mega E and a few
others they all had something but nothing was out yet and we were at the like when we started
discussing it was actually middle of the year last year um what potential uh if if we were to
potential if we were to what are options if we were to rebuild this the most of the chains didn't
have anything i myself am a huge you know eth i believe in eth i love the layer twos i was hoping
something around the layer twos but there were certain things that i we wanted to make sure we
didn't go down so we didn't want to just go down
a path where we need to spend on unnecessary infrastructure. And by that, I mean like
actual chain running costs, right? Like we've been there, we've done that.
It is a burden. It's actually not an aid. And so layer twos, there's some components of
infrastructure that you'd have to keep running you had your fragmented liquidity issue which we could resolve but finally there
was uh the layer most of layer twos on ethereum have don't have finality sub-second finality they
have pre-confirmations and anton has done a brilliant job in an episode that will drop soon explaining this.
I won't even dare explain the key difference.
But yeah, I hope that answers when we are scouting what we are looking for.
And the revamp of the architecture meant we needed a sub-second finality chain, which Sonic is,
and it's one of the second generation of EVM chains,
which was also extremely important in the decision-making.
Yeah, thanks, Lafez.
Yeah, I think you made a great point in terms of, like,
even when I was researching Sonic, like,
and then when I was looking at the new guys that
were coming out or about to come out like in terms of the consensus mechanism like a lot of them are
very similar of you know in terms of like uh the consensus um and subsequent finality like all the
embossed of that so like you made a great point in terms of like we were looking for something that is
You made a great point in terms of like, we were looking for something that is live and tested and working.
So, yeah.
I would say, I just wanted to add that I think it's a natural question for people to ask, like, why Sonic?
I think I've asked that question many times before we made that decision.
before we made that decision.
And at the end of the day, the funny thing is,
sometimes like all the stars align, in this case it did.
It's really interesting how,
when we were in this mode of,
okay, we gotta sort of shift or shift gears
and we're sort of ready to do it.
Sonic comes out of nowhere and checked all the boxes and our developers started playing
with it.
They fell in love with it and it just felt right.
And I think it's just like one of those cases where just the timing and I don't know if some of you are superstitious or not, but, you know, sometimes, you know, it just works.
And there's, you know, I think it just had a very good feeling for it as well.
Yep, I agree.
Yep, I agree.
My next question is, yeah, I think this question comes up a lot.
And there's also like, you remember on the workshop as well,
when we were going through like, why Sonic and understanding like the migration.
I think we put sometimes put too much emphasis on Sonic.
on um sonic and you know we're kind of like more than that there's a lot of things beyond sonic
sonic is is just a hub is moving there but uh fez can you can you explain to the community like
like what um like will all our resources be on sonic like what is a game plan with Sonic?
Okay, so when you say all the resources,
I guess in my head,
that's thrown me off.
Overall,
all our resources
have been...
What do you mean by that?
Sorry, give me a little..., obviously our infrastructure is all going
to move to Sonic, but like, like, our strategy, like, from a user perspective, like, I mean,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. I got it. Yeah. Okay. So, and this is a good question. So
the hub, as you mentioned, like, at the moment, it's Icon, right?
And it served us really well because it has two seconds finality.
So in general, it makes a good hub that, as I explained earlier,
sub-second speeds things up as well.
And then having an EVM environment really helps as well.
And when Anton, who led the re-architecturing of everything,
after we built it, if we could start again, he kind of revamped and laid everything and made
crucial decisions where, hey, instead of, and this is again something he explains much better than me,
but essentially at the moment in balance and stuff
for every chain, when we're adding features,
they're very heavy builds like the liquidity part,
right now we've enabled where you can add liquidity
natively on the chain, on every chain,
rather than just being on Icon.
Now this particular piece was a huge build for many reasons,
but also fundamentally how it's been architectured at the moment.
However, when he redesigned things to, one, make sure we can use NOL in multiple ways, thereby amplifying its yield,
but also when we wanted to add features to the application layer so that we can then service our partners,
he wanted to ensure that these features
just have to be built on the hub,
which means it just has to be built on the EVM chain
that we have picked,
which simplifies overall how we can offer these features
across all the hub, not hubs, spoke chains that will be on so um in
terms of building all we've done is once we've migrated to sonic it's just simplified a lot of
these things for us but the focus uh infrastructurally the hub everything will run on the hub
but the focus will not shift like We will still continue to expand.
And from a resourcing perspective,
I think we're on five stacks, in fact,
and there's two more stacks that we just haven't deployed.
It's ready, and we will once most of the work for SODAX
is out there.
But that will continue to be the focus.
The sole reason we've chose this hub
is so that it makes it simpler for us
to keep expanding on features, but also the change component
won't change.
So yeah, I hope that's answered your question.
Resources-wise, everyone's been still working to the same thing.
All we've done is simplified many aspects
of building out our core feature set.
That definitely answers the question.
The next question I wanted to ask is,
yeah, on the, I think,
Marco from the community asked this question
similar to my question
he asked what are the applications
can we expect on
Sodex I mean what are the
applications I guess he's
he understands that balance is going to be one
of them but
what are the applications can we expect?
Yep, so we know our two strongest partners in Balanced and HANA, so there's a few more that
I don't want to announce just yet, but I will talk about who and how application infrastructure can be consumed.
So part of the rebuild was, and this is, you've seen in discords, and this is something we've
been notoriously bad at, was we do these builds and the only people who can understand it is our team, right? There's no, there's no, and let's label it docs.
They are docs, but it's more than docs.
There's no actual, what they call these SDKs that help front end components or other teams interact with our set of contracts in a nutshell, right?
So part of this rebuild was, okay, we're re-architecting it,
but at the same time, we want to make sure
that we have built out these SDKs
so that instead of being hand-holding, balanced,
or HANA and right through the process of,
hey, all these devs keep coming to us,
how do we interact with the contracts?
What do we do?
How do these functions work, et cetera?
Even though they're live on mainnet um we wanted to build you know an sdk around it so
that they can just look at it and go hey all this makes sense all that hard work is done we can just
focus on plugging it in and and that's at its core what we've done so we've built a range of
infrastructure for for at an application level and so things that you can expect our partners to be able to use from my
infrastructure is like the liquidity, the unified liquidity, of course,
like we've made it super simple that anyone and everyone,
not just Balanced and HANA,
any new partners can tap into that liquidity loans,
lending not yet announced, but a rewards component.
There you go, it's now announced. Cross-chain swaps, part of that will be automatic aggregation
that will get implemented a little bit later. And stablecoin, which we all know, BNUSD, the stable coin, and also like a multi-chain wallet integration.
And I'm not talking about HANA here.
I'm talking about, you know, we're on 15, 12 chains,
15 with the new ones.
And part of those bills is integrating
each of those chain stacked wallets.
And essentially what we're offering up
to our potential partners, new partners,
is the SDKs where, hey, yep, grab this.
You want to enable this functionality?
Oh, you need to integrate these new chain wallets.
Don't worry.
That's already done and packaged for you to use.
Yeah, boom, use it.
And part of this is being done, part of the build.
So that's how we've done it.
How we've reworked it is from an infrastructure perspective,
made it easy to consume,
which is something we've just never done in the past.
And yeah, these are learnings.
And our two strongest partners, again i keep um coming back to that
because balance for now as you saw parrot nine will take a focus on the front end and the biggest
conversation in the background was how can we make this extremely simple for uh teams like you
because there's always you know there's your smart contract guys and then your front-end guys, and how do we make this very seamless? So using that, getting all that feedback has driven us
to build it how we have now. Another thing I wanted to kind of point out is that I think
our industry has sort of built on this narrative of needing to create a big ecosystem of different players using your technology or products.
And like, honestly speaking, I think that was something that has, is questionable. And that's one of the fallacies that we've learned from that where we, you know,
we built the layer one, we built the, you know, various technology, we try to push other, you know,
applications or app builders, developer communities, or enterprises, government, they all try to use it. We push for that.
That's when you kind of become sort of stale
and you have this third party dependency.
And once you kind of build that third party dependency,
you don't really control your own future,
your own product, your own users, user base.
And that's where I think Sodex is
trying to fix is that we want to be closer to the users. We want
to be more than anything, we want to get rid of the third party
dependency, we want to bring all the products, all the technology
and everything and showcase it under one, one, one roof, one
token, one website for people to use.
And if nobody else wants to use it, honestly, I'm fine with it.
What Fed has been saying is that we are obviously opening up our technology for other people to use
and we want to make it easy and we care about volume.
But we want to get rid of this
third party dependency and we want to build our own direct customer, direct retail use
case so that we could invest and we could grow our user base directly.
So that's what Sodex will bring.
Since we talked about Sodex, I'd like to transition the questions into Icon in terms of what's the future
for Icon at the moment?
Like where is it gonna be,
is it eventually gonna be stopped producing blocks?
Like, can maybe Min first, like?
Yeah, I think the answer is-
In the short term.
Sure, yeah, yeah, the, this is a very short answer.
Yes, the plan is to shut down Icon blockchain network
at some point.
There is no need for block production,
so there's no need for validators in the future. So we are planning to deprecate, and this won't be overnight. This won't be anytime soon. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do in terms of token
migration, we want to give people, the token holders, ICX token holders, plenty of time
to do the migration. So and we're quite experienced in migrating tokens in the past where we gave about three years for the community to
to do token swaps or token migration so yeah we will definitely give plenty of time for everything
for all the partners for the exchanges for everyone so but at the end of the day you know
in about in the future at some point there will will come to a point where we plan to shut down ICON
and all of that details will be announced.
Sorry. I think the questions that we've been getting over the last few days
has been from the validated community as well they're also
um asking you know what's what's gonna what's gonna happen to the validated ecosystem
so yeah yeah i mean like like i said um the since we are moving blockchain, there is no need for validations going forward.
And I believe that is one of the...
We're very appreciative of validators producing blocks for the past eight years, and it's
been a great run, but it's not needed anymore in the future.
Yeah.
Just again, because this can be a bit of a topic,
like as Min said, the chain still is running.
It's not shutting down tomorrow or anything like that.
There needs to be ample of time given for the migration.
And for a period of time, yeah, nothing's
changing with the validators or anything like that.
And when those announcements do come out,
there will be plenty of time runway.
It'll come out early to make sure the validators
are aware of the game plan.
At this point, the focus and effort has been on setting up the new architecture and infra
for the migration.
Then you have the migration.
Then we'll work through how we consolidate the icon chain, which means the shrinking of the validator set so that the chain can be
still accessible for actual migration versus not emitting the token anymore.
And I've explained quite a lot there, but that will happen over a period of time,
quite a long time. So I don't think validators at this point should be panicking and closing shop and running away.
Yeah, this part of the chain, the validator set remains for now.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I think for the foreseeable future, I think the validators have an important role to play
until additions are made on migration and shutting down.
Next question I have is, I think we made clear in terms of projects that are existing right now,
how long, what kind of timeline that they have.
So that'll be all communicated in due course.
The next question I want to ask Min is,
Min, from an organizational perspective,
the ICON Foundation,
how is the structure going to work uh on the sodax yeah i mean there won't be any
changes to the icon foundation uh the icon foundation will continue to support the sodax
project um i want to emphasize that the icon foundation is a non-profit organization so
Foundation is a nonprofit organization. So, you know, I
continue to see, I think there's a lot of misunderstandings from
community members that might not understand the difference
between, you know, nonprofit and for profit corporation, and they
mistakenly kind of think of ICON Foundation as a, you know,
profit seeking corporation. But, you know of ICON Foundation as a, you know, profit seeking corporation.
But you know, ICON Foundation is set up to as a purpose, purposely set up to support
the ICON or the SOLOX project.
So every dime that we spend has to go into this project, nowhere else. And this is like very meticulously recorded
and audited by the regulators since the very beginning,
since for eight years.
So yeah, I mean, the big picture, like I said,
is that in the, you know,
there's absolutely nothing gonna change
from ICON Foundation's perspective,
where we will continue to
support the Sodex project. But the good thing is, as I said, one big shift is that we are,
we're deprecating a lot of the costs that we've been spending from the Foundation and from
the foundation and from obviously the ICON network itself, there's a lot of operational
overhead that goes into it.
So both the cost savings from the ICON network and the ICON foundation will be reinvested
into the growth of the SOT Act, which should be one of the more exciting things that the community
should be looking forward to. Because SodaX, like I mentioned, we're building a very user-centric
product, it's something that's going to be closer to the actual users. So, you know, there's a lot of fun things we can do in terms
of like customer acquisitions, growth strategies. You know, a lot of people say has been asking
for marketing, you know, once you have like the consumer facing product, the ROIs make a lot more sense.
So we're able to redistribute a lot of that into the growth of the platform itself, the
product itself, the brand itself.
So I think these are the things that I think the community wanted.
And obviously we are very excited about it as well.
Thank you. We are very excited about it as well.
Next question I have is on the token emissions and on ICX, would that cease to exist?
What kind of timeline, if so, what kind of timeline are we looking at for that?
I can tackle this.
So in terms of, so the only thing that's going to change with the emissions is at the moment,
you'll see we have a signaling vote going on just
to double check, get consensus from validators
about the direction.
Providing it passes, straight after that,
the next vote will be to essentially half emissions
where at the moment as you know there's close to six percent there's six percent emissions
three of that now I'm generalizing here there's a point something difference but
just just for the sake of keeping it simple uh three percent it goes through NOL, so the goal will be to just remove that component.
And at the same time, the small portion that goes to CPS will get removed and a vote will
be put up. That's all the initial fundamental change will be. Why? Because it's not needed
anymore. And it's also something the community has been asking when and here it is actions
and then finally the the other reason why everything else remains is at its core the icon
blockchain over the next year is not changing it needs to keep running it needs to keep being secure
and uh emissions etc as in staking rewards for staking rewards and security that component hasn't won't
be changing weird uh if yep yep no i just on a final note there's like i know i know everyone
wants more oh when will that what is the date um Specific dates, not ready to talk through.
But again, ample of lead time will be given to specific dates.
But I think from a validator standpoint, definitely end of the year, there would be no shift in this entire year.
There would be no, you know, nothing to worry about there.
All the validators still need to operate and their their
rights their commission rates etc what they're earning at the moment wouldn't
change
great that was clear I'd like to move into the sort of tokenomics aspect of it I
know and a lot of members another area of interest and rightly so uh fez you were a
key designer of the uh the new tokenomics um
for our icx holder before we go into details of the tokenomics
what is the exact benefit of migrating to Soda?
Okay.
I don't know how to answer that one apart from, like, you know, it's a rebrand.
It's still, nothing's changing fundamentally.
Like if you're an icon holder, all we've done is for the last two years, what we've been doing,
we've doubled down on what we've been doing and reassess and stripping, you know, this overhead expenditure.
Right.
So, and part of that is that, unfortunately, the chain
and things that are happening there.
So, you know, part of the rebrand,
it's like we need to build new tokenomics.
There's a lot of tokenomics out there.
And by me, the entire team was involved.
We wanted to keep it simple and we want it to be, you know,
value-driven. So the reason why everyone
migrates is, well, you have your ICX here. We're not abandoning the project. You're shifting and
you're getting a one for one to the new token. But the new token has a lot of perks, right?
Like emissions were a pain. Everyone was sick of it. It's like, okay, what if we just did away with emissions?
What else?
I would argue, you know, you've got this layer one premium narrative,
which exists, I get, but I would argue we have a backing.
We add a liquidity premium, I would argue,
because we have over $5 million now, although right now it's probably trending to close to six given the markets.
But even in what was quite a real depressed bear, what everyone said, doom and gloom, we're still holding close to $5 million in assets.
And I would argue that's our premium right now.
And part of the tokenomics was, well,
how do we amplify this? How do we keep amassing an underlying asset and keep backing our token
with not market speculation or any of that stuff, actual assets that benefit the protocol and the token. So, you know, part of that,
that was brought into it. And then, you know, we all love the burn. Well, so the burn remains. So
part of this entire thing was, we wanted to make sure that holders earned by staking, when they
stake, they actually earn fees. And this was a big thing.
The model needed to be fee-orientated,
not emission, where you just get this token
and it's minting more of it,
and eventually it starts impacting things.
So it needs to be fee-orientated.
If you stake it, you earn rewards.
Part of it is it's constantly being burnt.
The other part of it is at the same time,
more value keeps getting added to it in the underlying intrinsic backing in terms of BTC
and other tokens. And yeah, that was it. So we had this initial layer to start with $5 million
and the tokenomics had been designed in that way. So you have all three things happening at the same time
that constantly grow its appeal.
I mean, yeah, I can't think of another token at the moment
that apart from sharing its revenue,
which a lot of AMMs do in a V33 model,
have an actual underlying backing of assets that it owns rather than user, rather than rented
liquidity, et cetera. I would say we're very unique in that and we've kind of tried to really
focus
the tokenomics around this.
No, I think it's powerful.
I think, Fez, you've obviously
researched a lot on
tokenomics on other projects, how it
works, the different
utilities it brings and
the burning and the efficiency behind emissions
and maximizing on the efficiency.
So obviously taking that into account
and what you've said in terms of linking proper fees
to actual, the fee structure going,
the fees that are generated by Soda
is going directly to the holders of Soda
and creating that flywheel.
I think it's immense.
And it's also like from ICX,
we've learned from the ICX tokenomics
and made Soda much more efficient
and much more, you know, it doesn't
carry on the negatives of some of the things that ICX, some of the negatives, not negatives,
but drawbacks that ICX has.
Just my next question.
There's some questions coming in from the committee.
Lytos says he wants to get an understanding a bit on when Sodex goes live on-chain on
Sonic. He wants to get an idea of what happens in the backend, I guess his meaning in the hub.
Fiz, can you give a small rundown on that?
If I may jump in quickly.
What he's asking, basically, I don't think he's completely grasped whether we are moving infrastructure
or moving a chain over some kind of sub chain so he's kind of looking to grasp um the the general
build of what we're doing and also when sodax is running will sonic tokens be burnt um and how does our tokenomics work on top of that so i guess
um we will be running on the sonic blockchain would be the start there and then where the
tokenomics picks up from there yeah yeah i think that answers it. Yeah, we're in the application layer running on their blockchain.
And all our infrastructure in terms of like relays, et cetera,
we've connected via Sonic to other chains.
So, yeah.
Yeah, cool.
Yeah, I think the next point is is i think we've had a few discussions with the
community members on this additional uh mint the one-time mint of 430 million soda tokens
uh can you just give a brief explain on why it was decided to go to one-time mint rather than a emission-based model like we
have on icx maybe uh min or fez um i can just throw my uh why we went down this path like I just wanted for the sake of transparency.
Okay, that was one big thing.
It's easier to get behind.
Here is your total supply we need.
And then now you can see that it's reducing.
Now, first thing thing it's not in
circulation it's going straight into the doubt it's locked um two the mint we specifically
ensuring that you know we're not pulling that uh those tokens out of the dow to um fund staking
rewards and things like that this is this is, the path we don't want to go down.
I think I answered one of the questions like,
oh, why is it there?
It's there to ensure that we can grow when needed.
But from day dot, like the circulating supply
is what's circulating at the moment.
When stuff migrates over to the new infrastructure,
that burn will, if you look at the total supply,
the burn will just start clocking down off that total supply.
That will never change.
And the goal was, yeah, let's get what we need
to ensure there's backstop, there's enough for growth,
growth, user growth.
That way, two years down the line,
we're not walking into the DAO and trying to do a
vote for a new mint, et cetera. Just didn't want any of that to happen. So this is kind of where,
and there was a lot of back and forth, if I'm being very frank, within the team around this,
because we feel the same way and we understand how it can be viewed. But at the end of the day, it was like, yeah,
transparency was key.
Do it now.
Be upfront about it.
This is how we're going to use it.
And ensure everyone understands how we've
built the new tokenomics.
And it should be then quite clear why we did it this way.
Mim, I don't know if you have anything else to add. MIMI LIUMANN BORCHETT- Yeah, and it's be then quite clear why we did it this way.
Min, I don't know if you have anything else to add. Yeah, and it's the industry standard,
but more than anything else, like you said,
it is, at the end of the day, it's irrelevant.
Bitcoin having 21 million cap and pre-minting that
and giving it a little bit away every time. Or I think Ripple is another good example where they already have like a supply locked
up and they have emissions.
There's plenty of examples out there where when we looked at it, there's a lot more pre-minted methods and what is how the funds are going to be
used, who is going to be given to, all of that.
And I've always been the proponent that when we started out the project, Ethereum had infinite
supply.
I mean, all of these were other layer ones. Most of them had the industry standard
was infinite supply. And it's more aesthetics, I would say, if you actually understand sort of the
finance behind it and the difference between circulating versus non-circulating and how
market cap works, how trading works,
how, you know, liquidity works.
It, you know, these are all just aesthetics.
It really doesn't matter at the end of the day.
Thanks for that.
I'm trying to see, I think, Faiz, you've definitely highlighted in your early question as well about the specific utility of holding Soda tokens. Do you want anything to add to that? Because my next question was on utility, but you've answered that earlier in your responses. But is there anything else you want to add to that?
No, I think overall, I'm pretty excited about the technomics
and nothing more to say unless there's other questions around it.
Yeah, so far, so far, not seen, I think. Yeah, in terms of timelines as well,
we'll provide more information when it's available. But I think at this point, I think a few questions
that are coming in on the exchanges. Have you started discussions on that front?
Min, can you add anything to that?
With exchanges, we've obviously, you know, there will be more details coming out with
more instructions and plans.
So I would just say that everyone should just
wait for an update there.
Okay.
I'd like to shift focus now.
I think we've, we're just over one hour,
but we made it a point like not to press ourselves
with time and be as informative as possible
to the community.
So please take this opportunity to ask questions.
We are available.
So keep those questions coming.
I'd like to shift focus now to the big one.
I know Alex has been waiting in the wings for some time.
I hope he's not getting too nervous as time goes on.
But Alex, I'd like to ask you about NOL and the solver.
My first question is on the NOL.
With the new infrastructure, what are the changes,
what are the new features that NOL will be able to do
in the new world?
Yeah. Everyone can hear can you hear me not sure yep yeah yeah so basically
right now the NOL most of the NOL is locked on balanced pools right so so it's used for users
to have good like swap path and then we earn yield from the swap fees, right?
So that's how the annual is used right now.
But if you want to provide so many good prices
and so many paths, you have to have
thousands of millions of every token everywhere.
So it's kind of complicated right now
on how the null, the annual is used because it necessitates so much.
How the NOL is going to be used on Sodax is that the NOL will be pulled out of the pools, of the liquidity pools.
So we get back this NOL and we can put it in different services to earn yield first.
And also we can use that NOL for the solver to solve path.
And every time the solver solves a path, it earns like fees.
So it generates some yields for the NOL.
So on SODAX, the NOL will be way better used
because of everything we can do with it
from the solver perspective,
but also where we can place these tokens on services
like our money market or stuff like this.
Cool.
My next question is all, this is obviously your forte, and this is one of SodaX's main pillars to drive revenue, is on the solver.
to why the solver is the important part?
Can we go into a bit of more basics on the solver?
I think it's important for the community to understand
what the solver is and what does it actually do.
Yeah, so basically a solver solves, right?
In the question world,
when you want to swap a token from a chain to another, the UX is really hard because you have to find some bridges, you have to find some good swap venues to ensure you have a good price and stuff like that.
Many times it takes time, like you bridge from the chain to another and it takes like 10 minutes.
So crosschain UX is really broken, right?
What a solver do is actually making all those steps
for the user.
So you just tell the solver that you would like to swap,
for example, some ETH for SUI
and the solver will just find the best venues,
the best bridges, the best path to do the swap for you.
And the other good thing about Solver
is that the Solver will give you your money
before actually executing that path.
So let's say if you want to swap like some ETH for some SUI,
it would take maybe two, three, four minutes, maybe more
to actively do that swap but the
solver is able to give you your sui first so basically you just wait a couple
of seconds to receive your sui and then the solver will just do his job to make
that real easy to sui swap on on the back end so that that's that's what the
solver is it just solving the best path to do an action
it it basically just doing an action for a user and the solver for sodax is just the
the machine the software that will help the user to crush the actions
really fast and without the need to find a lot of venues to do it.
I think I just wanted to add something there, Arash. As you heard Alex break that down,
it should also become very clear how and why the strategic doubling down
and what we've changed here, right?
Like initially the goal was to amass liquidity
so our LPs were beefy.
But as soon as we started exploring this option
and we built our first iteration of the solver
and by that Alex Alex built it.
We realized, hey, hang on, we don't need to keep having this beefy LPs,
et cetera, and be another competition on each chain
where essentially we just fragment the liquidity even more right we can actually be a partner to everyone
via our solver and our nol where we use the core liquidity and then the solver depends on each
chain's native amm and their liquidity basically to do everything Alex just said.
And I'm just giving a bit more context there that you start to see the value of how having
this NOL, we've been able to kind of go, hey, actually, we can utilize this so much better.
And now we can depend on everyone's liquidity with our own liquidity that we own
yeah yeah one more thing about it is just like a simple example is that if you want to provide
a user like a good price for swapping is for sui by using nOL and a regular pool, you would need a million dollar of ETH, a million dollar of SUI,
just to provide a path that has a good price.
But with the solver, we just need a fraction of this
to provide a good path.
Because if someone wants to swap one ETH, which is today
more than $2,000 um which is really great um
we just we just need like basically we just need two thousand dollars worth of nol to solve that
path without a lot of slippage and with the with the actual version we would have needed like two
million of nol just to solve this so So basically we really need like less NOL
to provide big swap path,
which doesn't mean that we need less NOL in average.
We need a lot of NOL to be able to provide path
on every chain, right?
But with the NOL we have,
we are already able to provide really good price
for big amounts of swap instead
of what we're doing right now, where if you swap more than $10,000, you will have a bit
of slippage.
No, I think, I think that's great.
I think Fez and Alex, like, um, from where I understand understand it like the nol or under the new world the pol
protocol on liquidity like the new infrastructure and and the nol like firstly it's much more
efficient use of nol um you know um uh the liquidity the liquidity will go to uh rather than sitting idle it'll actually
be diverted to the exact needs of you know if the user wants to swap certain things like
like the liquidity will go to the exact needs rather than now where it just sits there um
you know and a lot of it is not is is unused so right now when
the new infrastructure with you spoke where money markets uh it brings like new dimensions to liquidity
it brings new dimensions to uh uh how the solver can usually could you do multiple things um so i
think it's very exciting i think I think the solver and the
query has shaped the strategy for Icon and now Sodex brilliantly, I think.
Yeah, exactly. One more thing about the solver would be on the user base side of things.
the user base side of things um you know right now um if a protocol wants to be cross-chain
and integrate our our current solution uh the icon solution they have to integrate actually
they have to integrate icon and stuff like this with the solver we we just provide an sdk for
everybody to use so basically everybody every project that wants to go cross chain
can just integrate our solver
and then our solver will just solve path for them.
And every time we do that, we get some fees.
So actually in the future,
the solver might be like integrated into different uh services like different services from sodax
and we will be able to solve that for those services and and and earn fees from that so
so the server also allows us to have volume from people that doesn't know us at all um
which is a really great thing because uh that's how the solver makes money, right?
Because of volume.
And we all know that it's hard to have a big user base.
But first, we're working really hard on it.
But also, yeah, other services will be able to use the solver and we will be able to solve
that for them really easily.
Yeah, exactly. And also like under the new world, the money markets offer solver like new dimensions to it,
like, you know, in terms of like more liquidity, more borrowing, like which currently like, like you can't do at the moment.
So, yeah. which currently like like you can't do at the moment so yeah um
uh yeah my next question is um uh to alex again um where do you see uh i mean you've you've
answered this question to an extent but is there any real advantage uh advantage that our solver has to the existing solver mechanisms in other apps and other ecosystems?
Yeah, so mostly solvers that are already existing are mostly only bridges.
So you can just swap USDC from a chain to another
or also solvers that are mostly on the same chain.
If they can solve any path on Arbitrum
or any path on another chain.
But there is some solvers that are actually going cross chain.
And for the moment, we provide better quotes than most of them.
And it's only going to be better
the more we work the more chain we add and the more venues we add the quote goes better so so
our solver is already quite efficient on that way the only really good thing uh uh from our solver
and and not from the solver but from from the Sodax architecture that has been built
in since a lot of time now is that adding a new chain
is now like easier for us than for other intent solution.
Thanks to the whole architecture that we built.
So we will be able to add new chains really fast compared to other intent solution.
And also that's basically already the case because we are one of the few solvers compatible
with SUI. A lot of solvers are not just not compatible with that. So we are especially
way better at integrating new chains that are not EVM because it's more simple for us to integrate them for the other.
So in the future, the SODAX solver might be able to integrate new chains before the other competitors.
Great. I'm already getting excited.
So Alex, when is this all coming out? Soon, TM.
It's a rhetorical question.
Yeah, I think we've covered most of the questions. I'm trying to see if there's any questions always
there's one question from the community uh they're asking will there be a staked
sodax token or soda token like sicx yes
uh yes so we'll announce a little more around that.
There will obviously be staking because that's
how you will earn your staking rewards.
And it's only natural that there's
going to be a liquid stake version of it.
So yeah.
In terms of the when, again, there's something tackled with Anton in a bit more detail, but
just so that there's quite a lot of people that are listening.
The reason why the announcement has come out and things are being spoken about now is not
because we're starting the build now.
The core infrastructure, you've heard me even
say the relays are connected to Sonic and other chains.
These are all live and some components.
Obviously, everything is in phases.
You can't just ship all of it day one.
But the core initial infrastructure is on main nets
and going through final testing and stress testing.
Components of the solar that Alex has talked about
is already integrated into the new infrastructure
with the final chains.
Because the goal here is new infrastructure
connected to the same set of chains.
It all has to be up and running
so then we can do the migration,
kick off the migration of liquidity, tokens,
all of that stuff.
But yeah, this is not a, hey, we're starting to build now.
We're live on mainnet,
and now it's getting ready for the other components,
which is setting up the new stablecoin
and a few other components, which is setting up the new stablecoin and a few other pieces,
getting the SDKs that our partners can utilize in the final state, so it makes it easy for them to
implement. Yeah. Well, thanks, Lefez. Just a few more more last couple of questions from my end as we close out. I just
want to ask Min, what do you see the biggest challenges ahead for Sodex? Are there any
particular risks or areas that the project is keeping a close eye on? Wow, that's a tough question.
There's obviously there are many challenges and many risks in our industry, some that
we try to minimize as much as possible.
I think there's a lot of security risks, for example, a lot of exploits happening in the
industry that we obviously, as tools and our innovation continues to develop.
I think we could do our best to minimize those risks.
But I think the biggest challenge for me is always building the best DeFi product.
That might sound very boring answer, but it is absolutely very difficult.
And we think the best DeFi product obviously is well onboard.
Our goal is to onboard mainstream users.
A lot of talk about there are millions of crypto users today.
In reality, these crypto users are all holding their crypto in centralized exchanges, mostly
just investors.
If you actually look at real on-chain users that are actually making meaningful transactions and
doing interesting things on-chain, it's only a fraction of that.
So we want to change that.
And again, the challenge, like I said, just not having mainstream users, We started all of this where the ethos of blockchain was actually to democratize
finance. And for me, this is why I personally jumped into crypto, but we've been going backwards.
And blockchain was supposed to take out the middleman and make transactions cheaper. But, you know, fast forward eight years today, that hasn't really happened.
Yes, like there are stable coins and there are some promises, but, you know, when you
take out your, you know, you don't really use stable coins in your daily life, you have
to convert it to other, you know, to fiat currencies to use it,
then there's a lot of fees for something like that. So all of that, I think it's starting to
change, but you know, it's actually, in my opinion, not moving fast enough. But so we want to make,
you know, DeFi products super simple and safe, which is, you know, that's our goal here.
We named our next project as Sodax because, you know, we call it secure on chain digital assets exchange.
And the goal is to, you know, help real people grow their digital assets portfolio.
We know that there's a lot of Web3 native users here
who enjoy trading, but I think in a sense that we're sort of missing that large segment of people,
the mainstream users that actually don't really understand how to use crypto. And I think there's
a big opportunity there where we could help people take back,
use crypto in a much simple way so that we could help them take back control of their
financial assets. I think for decades that we were so used to letting third parties,
these financial institutions handle our monies.
And that just became the norm.
And I think crypto kind of presents that opportunity to reverse that.
And we've learned the hard way.
So as many of you who have been with us from the very beginning know that we've worked with governments,
we've worked with financial institutions, and we were very, very hopeful. We've done a lot of
successful use cases, we helped this trade by lower costs and, you know, do faster transactions,
do settlements. But I think, at the end of the day, we've learned that a lot of the trade fi are very protective of their profits and they will go out of their way to
protect their high fees.
Um, and not only that, like these trade fi organizations are trying very hard,
not only to keep their high fees, but you know, they're trying to figure out
how to upsell and take more fees from, from the users,
from their customers. And that's just the reality of it. So I think we were very naive to hope that,
you know, we were able to work with governments and this is traditional finance when obviously
there is some level of conflict of interest. So at the end of the day,
we're trying to give much of the wealth and power
back to the people and away from these financial institutions
because I think the more we let financial institution,
as we've experienced from back in financial crisis
of 2008, we know, 2008.
You know, we are just giving so much power to these, you know, institutions because we
give them our wealth, we let, you know, we hand over them to for them to control our
wealth.
And I think SODAC is sort of the contrarian thesis to that, where Sodex, our effort is to kind of reverse that trend
and to fight that trend.
And obviously, that is sort of why Bitcoin was born in the first place.
And I think we often in the world of capitalistic society where investing and money making is a big goal for a lot of
people, we lose that ethos of blockchain and why we actually started this crypto in the
first place. So I know I've been kind of ranting here and there, but I still believe that the
biggest challenge is to gain mainstream users. And we need to work to kind of, you know, make crypto simpler and more usable.
And, you know, Sodex will be, that's why we want it to be more closer to the users because,
you know, we built all these infrastructure over the years and hoping that there will
be an application that kind of brings in, you know, mainstream users.
But, you know, I think there was a lot of frustration within uh
not just me but from our team that uh we felt we could do a much better job and that's why we
assembled the team that sort of understands that and it's you know sodax is our kind of
initiative to go after that huge huge opportunity a great answer like i really liked uh that answer i mean um yeah um just have a another question
coming in uh from mountain dew sorry ifs you you want to add anything to it no i i i do there but
i did notice some um questions and i thought maybe just in the interest of time,
I can quickfire answer some questions here.
So one, how will we make use of Sonic's VM?
Yes, we will take advantage of this.
You may not know, but when we launched
Infrastructure and Balance launched some of the cross-chain swaps,
you just click a swap and you're able to do it. There's an underlying transaction in the
background that happens that you've probably noticed Lysi has announced gasless transactions.
We did that from day one. And we did that how we auto execute that particular piece and we fund that transaction.
So what I'm getting at here is the underlying technology to connect chains costs money.
Cosmos has the same issue with their relay infrastructure.
That's what really passes the information from one chain to another.
And it's always had funding issues.
Who's going to pay for that? How?
At this point, the foundation has covered all these costs.
And the beautiful part about the VM is we'll now integrate those components into funding the relay infrastructure. It won't cover it all, but it does help reduce those costs of running like a
cross-chain application, cross-chain infrastructure for applications to use.
cross-chain infrastructure for applications to use.
So that's one.
I'm not going to take a break between this just to get through.
There's one. This is a good one.
What lessons will learn to the tech develop around XCOL and BTP?
I think to address that, many, many lessons have been learned.
I would argue, though, in the last two years,
if you have been following,
you would have seen a huge turnaround in development
in how we've been able to turn things around.
A great example, although now a little redundant,
Icon took on, once we revamped how we operate
from a development standpoint, we took on the IBC build.
We delivered IBC, native IBC to the Icon chain in nine months.
At that time, there were four to five other teams building IBC to Ethereum, and they're still not on mainnet. That should be a testament to highlighting how we have changed how we operate from a delivery
perspective from building technical things. And again today, this space is what I just highlighted
earlier. We're not here making announcements and go, hey, this is what we're doing now. We'll come back to you in a few years.
Most of the work is done and we're in the final stages of things. So I hope that answers.
What else have I got?
What will happen to the NFTs on Icon?
Very quickly.
So this is why if projects want to migrate, they can migrate.
Icon isn't shutting down tomorrow.
At some point, we will shrink the validator set,
but the chain will stay running to have access so that it's accessible
and people can migrate specifically their tokens.
And part of that is if any of the NFT projects set up
migration processes
for their collections, the chain
will be accessible for that.
I think that...
I didn't see any other...
Brilliant, thanks a lot.
Yeah, last one more
I need to ask, our content machine, John works 24 seven.
I sometimes wonder whether there's a bot running somewhere.
But yeah, John, I want to ask you, like, if the community wants to get in touch, understand
more about Sodex and the latest news where do we where does where does the
community go to thanks arosh and we we don't talk about my bots um but um first of all just a big
thank you to everyone who dropped uh questions in the comments and on discord especially lito
there was tons from you um fez quickly ran through most of them,
but also I've left comments on a lot of the questions you put.
So a gold star for you.
If you want to keep in touch with us or keep up
with what's going on, then of course,
follow the ICX handle and follow the SODAX handle.
We'll be pumping content out from both of those.
Additionally, you can go to sodax.com from the Sodax handle or just type it into your URL bar
and you can connect your wallet.
We can see who has done that, so I will leave you with that.
And other than that, you can join the Icon Discord, which is linked on the Icon handle.
Once we are ready, we will rebrand that Discord
and it will become the Sodax Discord.
So you will be in the right place and you won't miss any news.
Otherwise, Telegram soon, I think.
And also, for anyone who has been listening to Fez's hints
throughout this space, inside icon soon as well.
Oh, yeah, for sure. as hints throughout this space inside icon soon as well.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Yeah, I think, yeah, I was not sure the first will actually make it to the space.
Cause when I saw Ethereum running,
I thought it's gonna celebrate somewhere.
I think I saw, I saw like it was the highest ethereum was the highest
gainer for the day and that was highest the last time it was higher it was it beat march 2021 was
uh when it last uh had a rise like this so so yeah i thought, it's not going to make it. GEEF just catches strays everywhere these days, doesn't it?
I think one thing that doesn't really project out on this space is it's pretty quiet.
I think everyone's in sort of the answer AMA mode.
So we're trying our best to be professional and answer these questions
the best way possible.
But one thing that's not really showing us excitement.
This past week has, and, you know, I would say like for several weeks,
our team has been extremely, extremely high energy.
There's been a lot of excitement, a lot of laughter.
You know, we had our team workshop a few weeks ago in Lisbon. It was super, you know, again,
very high energy and it was awesome. So, you know, again, I don't think that really projects out here, but yeah, I think that I just wanted
to mention how excited we are about this change.
And there's going to be, you know, I think that hopefully we'll keep this energy up into
the future.
You probably see a lot of the good photos and videos and content coming out of Vienna at the moment.
We're not going to be talking about things that we're working on because obviously more things need to formalize to be announced.
But there's been a lot of opportunities um even before we made this
announcement so um there's a lot of collaboration that's happening um i think you guys have seen
stellar um we've been working very closely with stellar we've been very working with very close
with sui um sonic obviously where um you know there's, there's a lot of good content coming out from there.
And obviously, there's a lot more that we're having very good business development discussions
with and a lot of collaboration with.
So, yeah, I think the energy is very high.
And I think this new direction definitely provided that energy that we've needed and
we've been yeah we've been needing for a while.
Thanks a lot I mean I think just to add to that we'll have a separate space on growth
initiatives and marketing plans
soon.
So stay out.
Be on the lookout for that.
And yeah, I just want to close off at the end.
I know we've mentioned this in certain points,
but I want to bring this to one question, to one answer.
Like, what are the immediate next steps
that we have for S sodax uh going live
maybe fez maybe um okay yeah so when you say sodax going live yeah and and this is again
Yeah. And this is, again, I think there's a differentiation here.
I want to be very clear.
Min is obviously when he talks SODAQ, he's talking the product,
that front end where we can onboard users directly
through experience that will optimize our way.
For me, when I'm referring to Sodex,
I'm talking about its infrastructure
that the Sodex front end product will consume,
and our partners will consume in the ways they want to consume it.
So that infrastructure piece is live.
We've got, I think Lido has been asking some great questions.
I'll answer these in this.
You know, the underlying infrastructure
for us to able to double tap, triple tap, use our NOL
more efficiently is a money market.
A little hint to understand the type of money market.
If you followed a few months ago, Aave announced
how they're going to launch their V4 money market, which hilariously was exactly how we've designed
R. Now, there may be a few differences, but essentially that's a similar model they've used
because they have this similar issue of fragmented liquidity,
which is what we've kind of solved here.
So money markets would be a component that,
which is already live.
So from an infrastructure standpoint,
the money markets, the solver,
the SDKs to connect to the solver,
there's two chains remaining to get connected to the solver.
That's the thing pending, which will be done end of next week.
Right, Alex?
He says, right, trust me.
And then the other components, the stable coin,
obviously new infrastructure.
And to be there is BNUSD gets, it's almost there as well as part of the new infrastructure.
It is actually getting deployed this week.
So, infrastructurally, I hope this is painting a picture like most of the infrastructure is live, not testnet, mainnet, going through final rounds of testing so that we can actually then kick off the actual planning and announcements and et cetera
of the migration.
And the front ends are in progress
for our partners to update to consume
the new infrastructure, which we've made very simple.
I don't have timelines around that.
Each partner will set their own timelines.
And obviously, what Min refers to that product that front end for our consumers
because there's two types of consumers um that is being worked on as well at the moment
Thanks. Thanks, Fez. Yeah, it's a mega long space. I don't want to take too much of your
time. But thank you again, everyone for listening in.
Can I say one last thing before we start off?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, so just wanted to, I see people dropping off, but one thing I wanted to say is that we are looking to increase our team.
I think I mentioned that we are currently building a creative team and we're specifically looking for a creative lead. So we'll have a job description out at some point in the coming weeks and then we will
also have a bounty on it.
I'm not really sure how much, maybe this is an important position. If any referrals that you give that could lead to a hiring of our creative lead for our
team, I think that will be a reward for it.
Brilliant.
So yeah, if anyone's interested, yeah, do get in touch. Yeah, I think there's
no other questions I'd like to close off this space. Thank you very much for everyone's
time for listening in. It's a great turnout. So yeah, be on the lookout for announcements on our Sodex channels and on the Icon account as well.
Yeah, John, anything to add?
Nope, all good with me.
There was one last question from Laito, but I've handled it in text.
He was just asking about cross-chain UX not being messy.
Also, someone was asking about how we got our PFPs and I've directed them to Rook.
So Rook, if you get a message, he wants to know how to make a PFP like ours.
PFP like ours.
All right.
Thank you again, everyone, for listening in.
And it's goodbye for now.
Take care, guys.
Thank you, guys.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye, everyone.
Bye.
