1What is Icetea?
Icetea is a smart-contract-enabled blockchain with a focus on smooth adoption for both users and developers. It attempts to bring 'blockchain' to regular people.
2Who makes it?
Icetea is developed and supported by TradaTech team. The software is open-source and outside contributors are welcomed.
3Why do you make it?
For years, we depend on big organizations to manage our assets at the cost of they abusing our trust. This is because we have no effective and convenient tools to do it ourselves.
Then blockchain technology appears and offers a way to turn that vision into reality. Yet the 'convenient' part is missing.
It is like this: you invite people to come and live in your area, because there is a lot of green trees and fresh air there. Great, isn't it? However, it is too far from their workplaces, no good transportation, no school nearby for their kids, no entertainment, etc.
Icetea brings that missing 'convenient' part into the picture. For both users and developers.
Then blockchain technology appears and offers a way to turn that vision into reality. Yet the 'convenient' part is missing.
It is like this: you invite people to come and live in your area, because there is a lot of green trees and fresh air there. Great, isn't it? However, it is too far from their workplaces, no good transportation, no school nearby for their kids, no entertainment, etc.
Icetea brings that missing 'convenient' part into the picture. For both users and developers.
4How would Icetea achieve its goal?
Some examples:
Icetea distinguishes regular app accounts (like your social network account) from bank accounts (i.e. accounts which store, receive, and transfer coins and tokens). By doing that, it is possible for wallets to employ different level of protection for each type of account. For example, for regular accounts, users have the option to trust a dapp and tell the wallet not to ask for signature permission again. That reduces much friction, yeah, getting rid of those i-don't-care MetaMask dialogs.
Icetea allows a smart contract to pay fees for its users. That opens up room for free, freemium, and free-trial dapps. Users don't need to buy some 'coins' first just to try the app. In addition, they could pay by traditional methods like credit card, and don't need to directly buy any 'tokens' at all if the dapp is designed so.
Icetea deals with 'account', not 'address'. There's no differentiation between a 'native coin' and a 'token'. You can delegate to others to use your account on your behalf. Multisig, 2-factor, lost key, and property inheritance are thus built-in and natural.
If you are a dapp developer, you could use most of the abundance of existing NodeJS modules to author your own smart contracts. Just npm install or yarn it. It is that simple. There are more to learn though, like utilizing WebAssembly for performance-critical spots, or writing some interesting decentralized bots. There is also a decentralized gate for querying external datasources.
We are also researching about 'autonomous zone' - think of it as a sidechain but you don't have to setup miners/validators/master nodes/whatever you call it. The zone's security is provided by mother chain. This gives dapp developers uttermost freedom ever.
There is more to say. We will publish docs on this gradually.
Icetea distinguishes regular app accounts (like your social network account) from bank accounts (i.e. accounts which store, receive, and transfer coins and tokens). By doing that, it is possible for wallets to employ different level of protection for each type of account. For example, for regular accounts, users have the option to trust a dapp and tell the wallet not to ask for signature permission again. That reduces much friction, yeah, getting rid of those i-don't-care MetaMask dialogs.
Icetea allows a smart contract to pay fees for its users. That opens up room for free, freemium, and free-trial dapps. Users don't need to buy some 'coins' first just to try the app. In addition, they could pay by traditional methods like credit card, and don't need to directly buy any 'tokens' at all if the dapp is designed so.
Icetea deals with 'account', not 'address'. There's no differentiation between a 'native coin' and a 'token'. You can delegate to others to use your account on your behalf. Multisig, 2-factor, lost key, and property inheritance are thus built-in and natural.
If you are a dapp developer, you could use most of the abundance of existing NodeJS modules to author your own smart contracts. Just npm install or yarn it. It is that simple. There are more to learn though, like utilizing WebAssembly for performance-critical spots, or writing some interesting decentralized bots. There is also a decentralized gate for querying external datasources.
We are also researching about 'autonomous zone' - think of it as a sidechain but you don't have to setup miners/validators/master nodes/whatever you call it. The zone's security is provided by mother chain. This gives dapp developers uttermost freedom ever.
There is more to say. We will publish docs on this gradually.
5What is the technology behind Icetea?
Icetea is built on Tendermint Core, the p2p gossip and consensus engine which also powers Cosmos Network and Binance Chain. These are 2 of top 20 by marketcap, according to CoinGekko.
6Is it a public or private blockchain?
Icetea could be deployed both as public, permissionless blockchain and private, permissioned blockchain.
Based on the powerful Tendermint engine which was used in production stably for many private blockchains, Icetea adds support for smart contracts and utilities which are very useful for enterprise environment.
Icetea can also be deployed as a public blockchain under a DPOS layer. Currently, Trada Tech is developing a DPOS layer for an Icetea public-chain testnet.
Based on the powerful Tendermint engine which was used in production stably for many private blockchains, Icetea adds support for smart contracts and utilities which are very useful for enterprise environment.
Icetea can also be deployed as a public blockchain under a DPOS layer. Currently, Trada Tech is developing a DPOS layer for an Icetea public-chain testnet.