It has been some time since I engaged with the IC community of developers, last time was the end of last year when I was doing security audits of the IC code.
Since then a lot has happened in the blockchain world:
The cypto bear market is in full swing affecting all crypto currencies.
There does not seem to be much activity from real ICP developers, and apparently the Developer Grant program is dead.
Caffeine ICP seems to be doing fine
Dom is abandoning Web3 and Crypto for Frontier Compute
The IC has launched or is about to launch several new initiatives like Cloud Engines, or the Multi Dex. Caffeine is chugging along,
So here is what I noticed changed for developers, forgive me if I am wrong, and just let me know:
We have now II v2.0 with support for third party authentication (Open ID Connect) providers like Google, and most important the canisters and subnets seem to have changed;
Dfxvm is the new CLI for developers.
Here are my main questions
How do we pay for canisters now? Can a canister spawn other canisters like before? Is the network alive, can we use it to develop?
Can we choose subnets from the CLI and pay for an affordable one? For examle can we pay or select the new SEV Subnets?
Can Canisters spawn other canisters and manage them, like it used to be possible. We have a main canister (management) that spawns user canisters with data on them. Does this work still?
Finally, are developer grants dead?
Finally a comment about Cloud Engines, I suspect they are geared towards Large Enterprise Customers or Governments that want to run a private version of the ICP Blockchain, correct?
To anyone who answers THANKS!
Joseph Hurtado
Founder Granata Consulting Still building for the IC!
P.S. I use Rust, so any Rust related comment would be most welcome.
Yes to all of your numbered questions. Why would you expect any changes in those respects?
Maybe you’re actually asking more about how cloud engines work? Those are just new options for how to host canisters, and not quite production-ready yet (although you can play around with them already not quite yet). On cloud engines canisters aren’t what need topping up with cycles. It’s instead the cloud engine itself (the whole subnet) that needs topping up.
we are in the process to migrate all examples to icp-cli. most have already been updated and soon ICP Ninja will also receive an update to fully support icp-cli (which isn’t the case right now).
what do you mean with paying for canisters? why do you think sth. changed here?
yes, even though I still don’t get the question related to payment
isn’t this a duplicate of Q1 ?
they are still on hold and there is currently no concrete plan to bring the developer grants back.
I think cloud engines are interesting for any entity that wants to fully control their infrastructure. what’s cool is that you as owner of the cloud engine can decide who runs the nodes and switch providers as you want. I think this is quite powerful
yes, please check the skills out and report if your agent doesn’t produce the results you expected it to! we will continue to improve existing skills and add new skills as needed. therefore any feedback on these is appreciated. there is also the icp-cli skill which helps you migrating existing dfx projects to icp-cli
my question to you is:
what in particular is confusing to you right now in terms of development on ICP and why?
In addition to the official response, let me add :
Yes you can choose to deploy to subnet re2t4 that is currently open for public and is the first SEV enabled. Only thing worth knowing is that the cycle cost on this 7 node subnet are the same as on normal 13 nodes subnets.
Regarding my question about how to pay for ICP canisters, just to confirm we can do it via the NNS Wallet, and public exchanges online correct?
I asked because I wondered if the Oisy Wallet would eventually remove the ability to buy ICP from the NNS Wallet.
Also one important question, NNS Wallet used Banxa.com to facilitate purchase of ICP. Would there be, or is there a way for third party developers like myself to buy ICP programmatically from a website like Banxa using US Dollars?
Joseph Hurtado
Founder Granata Consulting Still building for the IC!
You can pay for cycles using the icp cli tool mentioned above. The documentation is here: Tokens and Cycles | ICP CLI
You would type something like icp canister top-up my-canister --amount 1T -e ic
You can buy the cycles from an exchange like icpswap and them send them to the PID for your icp-cli identity, or you can mint them with ICP using the cli tool as well.
Additional options are out there such as automatic top-up services. I recently released one (you can read more about it here: Beta release of Unicycle top up service ) or just check it out directly at https://ic-unicycle.com/. This tool looks at the minting price and swap prices and automatically chooses the best deal for you. You can configure options for how low you want to allow your canisters to get before topping them up and how many cycles you want to top up with each time it dips below that value. There is a 5% fee for top ups, but it earns you credits that will reduce or fully cancel out the fee over time (again - full details in the linked post above).
) and in Rust you can look at the 
we will continue to improve existing skills and add new skills as needed. therefore any feedback on these is appreciated. there is also the 