At Ice Open Network, 2025 was relentless.
It was a year marked by sustained shipping and forward momentum. Month after month, the team pushed forward across chain infrastructure, product development, ecosystem growth, and one of the most complex transitions in our history. There were no pauses between milestones, no quiet quarters, no moments where progress slowed to wait for attention.
Our focus throughout the year was unwavering: build the foundations for a user-owned Internet that can operate at real scale — technically, economically, and socially. That meant making hard decisions early, committing to infrastructure-first thinking, and holding the line on usability even when it would have been easier to compromise.
By year’s end, those choices had made ION tangible. The chain was live. The ecosystem had fully transitioned into the ION era. And Online+ — a fully functional decentralized social platform — was live, active, and already part of people’s daily Internet use.
This is a look back at what we built in 2025 and what it set in motion.
From Vision to Live Infrastructure: The ION Chain
Everything we build is grounded in a simple conviction: blockchain only matters if it works for everyday Internet users.
In January 2025, that conviction became reality with the launch of the ION Chain.
From day one, the chain was built for performance and scale — a high-throughput, horizontally scalable Layer-1 designed to support real applications, real traffic, and real usage. More than 100 validators joined at genesis, making decentralization the starting condition, not an aspiration.
The ION Chain exists to do one thing exceptionally well: carry the load of mainstream Internet applications onchain. It’s the foundation that allows everything above it — from social to payments to future dApps — to operate without friction, bottlenecks, or compromise.
The ICE → ION Migration: Bringing The ION Coin Home
The successful ICE → ION migration in December marked a defining moment in ION’s evolution.
This transition closed the ICE chapter and brought the ION coin home to its native chain, where it belongs. More than a technical shift, it aligned the asset at the centre of our ecosystem with the infrastructure designed to support it.
Swaps were launched directly inside Online+, allowing users to move seamlessly into the ION era as part of their everyday experience. Behind the scenes, the migration required coordination across exchanges, regions, and regulatory realities — all while maintaining continuity for a global community.
The ION coin now sits at the heart of the system it was always meant to power: a deflationary, utility-driven economy where usage, participation, and ownership reinforce one another.
Rebuilding Social for the Next 5.5 Billion Internet Users
Before Online+ ever launched, we asked a harder question than “how do we decentralize social?”
We asked: how do you bring the next 5.5 billion Internet users on-chain — without asking them to change how they use the Internet?
The answer wasn’t to reinvent social behaviour. It was to respect what already works, and rebuild it on infrastructure that restores ownership, privacy, and control.
Online+ was designed around this principle. Familiar experiences on the surface. Blockchain under the hood. No trade-offs on usability, and no learning curve that pushes people away before they begin.
Digital sovereignty wasn’t treated as an abstract ideal. It became a product standard — embedded into how people create, connect, and participate online.
Online+: A Decentralized Social Platform, Live at Scale
In October 2025, Online+ officially launched.
What went live was a complete decentralized social system, built on the ION Framework and designed for real, everyday use. From day one, Online+ launched with more than 150 partner projects and over 3,000 creators already onboarded, forming an active social layer rather than a new platform waiting to be filled.
Since launch, Online+ has grown into a daily destination for more than 100,000 daily active users, who spend an average of 15 minutes per day inside the app. The platform now connects over 1.5 million onchain addresses, reflecting both scale and sustained engagement.
Every user is a creator by default — able to post, interact, transact, and build a presence without gatekeepers. This foundation underpins the monetization features rolling out next, where participation, ownership, and economic alignment are built directly into how the platform works.
The work hasn’t slowed. Online+ continues to be built, fixed, and upgraded in public, week after week. That progress is shared through our weekly Beta Bulletin — a standing commitment to transparency, clear communication, and accountability to the community.
Online+ demonstrated something critical: true decentralized socials are no longer theoretical, but can and do now live in people’s hands.
Monetization as Infrastructure
From the start, ION’s economic model was designed to align users, creators, and the network itself.
In 2025, we began bringing that model to life.
The50/50 burn-and-earn system — where half of platform revenue flows back to users and creators, and half is used to buy back and burn ION — became the foundation for everything that followed. Throughout the past few months, we began building the features that operationalize this model: Ads, Boosts, Premium Accounts, Swaps and Bridges, the ION Card, and, of course, the upcoming Tokenized Communities.
These features weren’t built in isolation. They were designed to plug directly into an ecosystem that already has users, creators, and activity, ensuring that monetization reinforces participation rather than distorting it.
Tokenized Communities and PUMPit: What Comes Next
As 2025 came to a close, two major pieces of the monetization and ownership stack were nearing completion: Tokenized Communities and the PUMPit Chrome extension.
These will be the first major monetization features to go live in 2026.
Tokenized Communities, launching on BNB Chain, enables creators and communities to form on-chain economies around shared interests — aligning participation, value creation, and ownership at the social layer.
PUMPit brings those same mechanics directly to X, allowing posts to be tokenized and traded natively on the platform, as well as on Online+. That flow works both ways: tokens created on Online+ are equally tradeable on X via PUMPit, creating a unified social-token layer across platforms.
This architecture is designed to expand across chains over time, without fragmenting liquidity or communities, and built on the same principle that has guided ION from the beginning: meet users where they already are, and bring blockchain to them — not the other way around.
An Ecosystem Already in Motion
By the time Online+ launched, the ION ecosystem was already active — with more than 150 partner projects onboarded across gaming, AI, finance, consumer applications, infrastructure, and a growing range of emerging use cases.
These partners aren’t simply integrated into a network. They join Online+ as communities, while also building their own social layers using the ION Framework — creating dedicated spaces where users can interact, organise, and grow around shared interests, directly on-chain.
Online+ functions as a connective tissue between these communities: a shared social layer where users can move seamlessly between projects, conversations, and experiences without fragmentation. The result is an ecosystem that behaves like a network, not a collection of isolated products.
What emerged over the course of the year wasn’t a list of integrations or announcements, but a living system shaped by real use — one where partners, creators, and users all participate in the same social and economic fabric.
Signals That Matter
Progress isn’t measured by headlines or speculation. It shows up in how people use what you’ve built — and whether they keep coming back.
By the end of 2025, the impact was clear:
- 1.5+ million onchain addresses connected through Online+
- 100,000+ daily active users, spending meaningful time inside the app
- A global legacy community of 40+ million users transitioning into the ION era
- A growing public presence, reinforced by figures like Khabib Nurmagomedov, reflecting ION’s increasing cultural reach beyond crypto-native circles
Most importantly, the community stayed engaged, demanding, and deeply involved — shaping the platform alongside the team and continually holding us to a higher standard as we move forward.
מבט קדימה
If 2025 was about building foundations, it was also about proving them under real-world conditions. Over the past year, ION moved from architecture to infrastructure, from concepts to live systems, and from ambition to daily use. The chain is live. Online+ is active at scale. The ecosystem has transitioned into the ION era. What was once abstract is now operational.
That changes what’s possible.
With the core pieces in place, 2026 is about activation and expansion. Tokenized Communities and PUMPit will bring ownership and monetization directly into the social layer, turning participation into something users and creators can build on economically. The broader monetization stack will go live around an ecosystem that already has users, activity, and momentum.
Alongside this, the introduction of the ION dApp Builder will mark a pivotal shift. By making it possible to build on-chain applications without deep technical expertise, the Builder removes one of the last major barriers to adoption. It’s designed to let creators, communities, and businesses launch their own applications and social layers as easily as launching a website — powered by ION infrastructure, without needing to understand the complexity beneath it.
This is how the user-owned Internet moves from possibility to reality: not by asking people to change how they use the Internet, but by upgrading the Internet beneath them.
As we move into 2026, the focus remains the same — build what lasts, ship what matters, and bring the next generation of Internet users on-chain by meeting them where they already are. The work continues.