IERC-20 Protocol presents to you the digest of major ecosystem news worth the community’s attention in the second half of February 2024. TL;DR: the end of February turned out to be even busier and more productive than its start.
Intro
IERC-20 Protocol is the pioneering open trading market within the Ethereum inscription ecosystem. It serves as a Layer 1.5 Ethereum scalability solution that enhances compatibility between inscription protocol services. It facilitates seamless buying and selling of a wide array of inscriptions based on IERC-20, ensuring a user-friendly and accessible experience for all.
Major Events
On Feb 16, IERC-20 announced a partnership with MAP Protocol, the leading Bitcoin L2 project for peer-to-peer interoperability built on ZK and light clients. MAP Protocol is the interoperable layer for the Bitcoin network, offering interoperability between the Bitcoin ecosystem and EVM & non-EVM ecosystems. It is the gateway for Bitcoin ecosystem developers and users and the best way for different Bitcoin L2s as well the Bitcoin ecosystem to become interoperable with other ecosystems.
On Feb 18, IERC-20 entered a strategic partnership with BiHelix, a Bitcoin ecosystem infrastructure incorporating the RGB protocol and Lightning Network to construct optimized nodes. Together, they will explore the possibilities of inscriptions on Bitcoin based on the RGB protocol by BiHelix.
On February 19, the final round of Leaderboard ranking ended, and the last $ethpi airdrops based on daily DPoS point consumption were distributed. From mid January, over 3,000 DPoS staking participants joined the leaderboard competition.
On Feb 22, IERC-20 revealed a partnership with TypoX AI, a pioneering force within the KNN3 Network and the premier AI search platform dedicated to redefining the web3 search experience and bridging the gap for a unified web3 world. Together, the partners will delve into the innovative realm of AI-enhanced inscriptions.
Since the current operation mechanism of inscriptions relies entirely on centralized indexing, which raises urgent concerns about security, IERC-20 Protocol announced that it will sequentially unveil solutions for distributed indexing, introducing and implementing a distributed index verification mechanism for the first time. Distributed indexing is applicable to any inscription protocol and allows every action of every user to be mutually verified by multiple nodes without altering the foundation of all inscription protocols. Transactions can be conducted securely and transparently under the witness of distributed indexing.
The protocol revealed that it will collaborate with leading inscription protocols and institutional investors to launch a distributed indexing solution. The participating institutions include Bitget Wallet, Waterdrip Capital, Stratified Capital, Sparkle, Map Protocol, and PATH Protocol.
The distributed indexing solution will introduce a ZKP verification mechanism, addressing the current insecurity issue of inscription indexing by establishing beacon index nodes and verifying index nodes. This initiative aims to promote the decentralization of various inscription protocols. IERC-20 also welcomed more co-builders to join their distributed indexing initiative.
The protocol CEO Serj revealed more details on the implementation solution for distributed indexing. Multiple Distributed Indexing Nodes will be the safety guards for the inscription protocol. They bring all asset-handling methods into a central point, one Beacon Index Node. This ensures every user action is checked by multiple nodes, making transactions safe and transparent.
Currently, the structure of IERC-20 Protocol looks like this:
1. Protocol Layer: IERC protocol focuses on Layer 1.5, reducing user costs.
2. Indexing Layer: The main process involves crawling data, cleaning and classifying it according to protocol definitions etc.
3. Application Layer: Where the protocol uses the data.
IERC-20 will add a layer between Indexer and Application, checking everything. All major actions will be verified by a central point and other nodes before being confirmed, ensuring that everything is safe. Read more details about the solution in this thread.
On Feb 28, IERC-20 revealed a partnership with Bybit Web3, the web3 wallet of the top-tier crypto exchange Bybit. Wallet users can now explore IERC-20 inscriptions through the exclusive Inscriptions Market integrated within it. According to IERC-20, more developments can be expected from this partnership in the future.
As of Feb 29, the TVL of IERC-20 has reclaimed USD 15 million. Currently, community users can stake $ethi, Sparkle and IERC M4 inscriptions.
AMAs
On Feb 22, IERC-20 CEO Serj joined the interview by the web3 summit Synopsis where he talked about the origins of the protocol and its plans ahead. See the interview recording on YouTube.
On Feb 23, the IERC Protocol Community AMA took place on X. The CEO Serj and one of the protocol contributors Beyond addressed the community’s most pressing questions, including the future of various core inscriptions, progress of the distributed index, liquidity optimization, and more. The recording of the AMA is available on X, while its text version is available on the Medium blog of IERC-20.
On Feb 27, the IERC-20 Protocol representative Phyrex joined the X Space on Bitcoin halving for the Chinese crypto community hosted by the web3 media Ctalks.
On Mar 1, IERC-20 will be joining the first Chinese AMA by BTC Security Lab. Leave your questions for IERC in comments to this post and during the free mic section for a chance to win two tickets to the Bitcoin Layer 2 Conference Hong Kong 2024 — East & West, the world’s first event dedicated to the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem scheduled for April 8, 2024.
Community
On Feb 19, in order to implement the successful IEIP-1 proposal where over 99% of participating $ethi holders voted for, $ethpi production stopped after reaching the total supply of 330 million. Previously, its production happened via PoW mining, DPoS staking, and daily DPoS point consumption leaderboard. $ethpi has thus entered the deflationary period that will last the rest of its existence. The success of IERC-20’s first-ever governance proposal has shown the great strength of its community and the protocol’s ability to hear the community’s voice and reach consensus.
$ethpi generation spanned 38 days, with 427.58 ETH burned by over 10,500 participants in the process. Its deflationary use cases will include fee discounts, fee buybacks, airdrop snapshots, and LaunchPad subscriptions. IERC-20 stated that $ethpi will play a pivotal role in the distributed index of the protocol that is currently under development.
IERC-20 joined Vitalik Buterin’s conversation about L1s and L2s. Mr. Buterin has become less confident in the “simplify L1 even at the expense of more complicated L2s” concept than he was five years ago, because when you can trade off between L1 bug risk and L2 bug risk, it’s not actually clear that the latter is better. If you have an L1 consensus failure, stuff breaks, core devs scramble for a day, but eventually things are alright again. With an L2 bug, people could permanently lose lots of money.
Therefore, according to the Ethereum co-founder, it can actually be worth adding some pretty sophisticated L1 features to reduce the code burden of L2s and allow them to be reasonably simple. The stance of IERC-20 Protocol on the issue is that adoption of an L1.5 solution could help avoid the above trade-offs and thus be beneficial. Follow IERC-20 on X to see more meaningful conversations about making the blockchain space in general and the Ethereum ecosystem specifically more efficient and better.
More info about IERC20
Website: www.ierc20.com
X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/EthinscXYZ
Telegram: https://t.me/IERC20OFFICIAL
Whitepaper: https://docs.ierc20.com
