Overview The Internet Computer (ICP) ecosystem is evolving, and as part of ongoing improvements to the ledger standards, new block types will be introduced that ledgers on the ICP will support. This work is part of ongoing efforts to develop Real-World Asset (RWA) ledgers, ensuring they support essential features for tokenized asset management. It is crucial for developers working on wallets, dashboards, token trackers, and indexers to be aware of these changes to ensure continued compatibility.
Why This Matters If your system parses ledger blocks for transaction history, analytics, or indexing, these new block types might affect your implementation. Ignoring them could result in broken parsing logic, missing transactions, or incomplete data representation.
What’s Changing? New block types will be introduced to capture specific ledger events beyond standard transactions. These may include:
Fee Collector – Records fee collector changes
Authorized Mint and Burn Blocks – Recording explicit minting and burning of tokens, making these operations visible at the block level.
Governance or Compliance-Related Blocks – Potentially capturing administrative actions that affect ledger state.
Other Future Extensions – Additional block types may be considered to support broader asset management use cases.
Who Needs to Take Action? Developers and maintainers of:
Wallets that parse transaction history
Custody providers that monitor transactions to addresses in custody
Token dashboards displaying ledger events
Indexers that track ledger activity
Analytics tools relying on ledger data
Next Steps
Ensure you have monitoring in place to detect if and when new block types appear in the chain.
Register your interest in this thread if you are impacted or want to stay informed.
Consider participating in the Tokens Working Group to help shape these developments and provide feedback.
Get Involved Discussions on these updates are ongoing. If you have feedback or need clarifications, feel free to engage in the community conversations.
We encourage all developers working with ledger data to stay informed and proactively update their systems to accommodate these change
I’ll add that there are a number of other ICRCs in the works that have their own block types. While some of them may be relevant to tokens and some may not, I’d suggest that if your doing work to add new types it would be a good idea to create a way to handle generic blocks that you may not know the details of, but that pop up in the ledger. This will help future proof your wallet/indexer and help us move more quickly to add exciting features that help users.
Is there more details somewhere on github or in docs about this? I’d like to follow up and affirm this won’t impact the Omnity Network runes indexer, which indexes Bitcoin OP_RETURN data from the Bitcoin subnet.
I agree, specially for RWA where we might want to store some custom blocks.
One example that come to my mind is : you store a fingerprint of the asset with a geolocalisation with a specific tools, and so you can keep trace that a this moment, at this place, this principal id validated that the asset has this fingerprint using this specific method of certifying. I imagine according to different buisness cases, numbers of block types will grow more and more.
We are quite interested in this new feature as we are working on the stablecoin product on ICP. May I ask if there is a timeline for the release of these new features, especially the part related to compliance-related functions such as freeze/unfreeze of an ICRC token as done by mainstream stablecoins?
I can give a timeline, but it is a priority for our team and is tracked on the dfinity road map. Since we are working on the block standards corresponding to the functionality that you are interested in right now, it may be helpful if you could (at least once in a while) join the working group meetings in the instances where we discuss this topic.
I’ll organize a meeting next Tuesday, April 8th (I’ll post the details here). If there’s sufficient interest and participation we can then repeat if needed.
As planned above, let’s have a meeting tomorrow (8.04.2025) at 8:30 UTC to get input into our standardisation efforts around real world ledgers. You can peruse the current drafts for relevant block standards: ICRC-122 (mint,burn), ICRC_123(freeze/unfreeze account/principal), and ICRC-124 (pause,unpause, deactivate ledger)
For now this is a one-off meeting intended to make it easier for participants from Asia to join. It’s not a replacement for the regular Token WG meeting.
It should not affect these ledgers, at least not in the short term. And even if it did, it should affect you only if you parse ledger blocks (since we’re working on a few new block types)
