I have emailed all the top exchanges on coinmarketcap with full specs of IXC and its recent developments.Hoping one or two of these take notice of recent develpments.
On another note I talked about IXC a while back with peeps about how good IXC was and it being merge mined and suitable as sidechain and one had interesting response but maybe somewhat negative
Sidechains and merge mining have their own intractable problems, and in particular they do not mix together very well (merge mining makes the sidechain problems worse, and vice versa). If freicoin were to be sidechain to another chain, it would have to either (1) be a separate proof of work, or (2) have all full nodes of both chains validate each other, an idea more commonly known as extension blocks. Setting freicoin up as a separately mined chain with a different proof of work (and therefore different hardware distribution) prepares for the first possibility while not excluding the second. But in reality I expect that freicoin will remain different from bitcoin and other coins, and not an active sidechain, except perhaps via strong federations or higher level protocols using cross-chain payment channels.
There is at least one person I know who has made a recent ASIC purchase for freicoin mining, and I would hate to invalidate that investment. But the transition period also serves the purpose of having incentive for securing the sha256 portion of the network for some time to come, which helps protect other full nodes. In fact, current full nodes will be able to sync indefinitely into the future, even after the transition is complete, as the difficulty will have transitioned back down to diff-1, and all cuckoo cycle blocks will require a follow-up diff-1 sha256 block in order for the cuckoo cycle miners to actually collect their payment -- the trick which makes the soft-fork deployment possible.
I would not describe the issues with merge mining and sidechains intractable - however, they do have tradeoffs. Going by the definition of sidechains/merge mining described in this post -
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/merged-mining-vs-side-chains-another-kind-of-merged-mining-313347 - both are mechanisms to leverage the hashing power of Bitcoin proof of work. Merge mining allows a coin such as IXC, which is mined out, to attract much more hashing based on fees than it could otherwise. There is an increased risk of centralization as indicated by this recent research -
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/791.pdf - I would argue that this will diminish over time due to increasing compute power and demand for higher volumes and lower fees - see my earlier posts on this thread for more details. Further there may be one instance where a sort of combined approach would be warranted. For a merge mined coin, waiting for a block where consensus is met on both chains would be a way to implement very low risk atomic transfers between chains. This would not require any changes to Bitcoin but would require an additional soft fork on the merge mined coin to support.
