The ICON Foundation has entered the P-Rep campaign.
As announced Monday, the Foundation will use up to 3% of the total ICX supply to vote for its own node when the network decentralizes.
The Foundation pledges to carefully control this amount to avoid affecting the decentralization of the network.
In its Medium post announcing the move, the ICON Foundation drew comparisons with measures taken by other protocols such as ZCash and Tezos. ZCash implemented a so-called “Founders Reward” that returned 20% of the block rewards to the ZCash team over the first four years of the network. The Tezos Foundation, meanwhile, runs eight of the network’s block producers, or “bakers,” accounting for up to 30% of block production.
These measures provide the network founders with incentives to remain involved in the network over the long haul, even after decentralization. In ICON’s case, however, the founders – i.e., the ICON Foundation – would still have to contribute as a block producer to receive ICX.
“The Foundation will be voting for their node to provide a stable and steady transition to decentralization, alignment with the community and to continue to support the development of the ecosystem,” says BongAn Ha, Cryptoeconomics Architect at the ICON Foundation. “As you know, ICON Foundation has been leading the project since 2017 and wants to be apart of its success long into the future.”
Voters can check out the ICON Foundation’s candidate proposal at the ICONSENSUS website. The Foundation says it will continue to outline a roadmap for the project and drive its adoption, doing all it can for the network until it grows sufficiently. Contrary to most projects running for P-Rep, the Foundation actually discourages voters from voting for them.
“We would request that the community not vote for the ICON node for the sake of decentralization,” says Ha. “We are very confident in the quality of the P-Reps candidates to help to secure our network.”
The ICON Foundation has a lot planned as P-Rep. It’s currently developing a next-generation loopchain through a contract with ICONLOOP. It will also support the development of ICON’s communities through Ecosystem Expansion Projects, or EEPs, and DApp Booster Projects, or DBPs. It will roll out new networks features, too.
“The ICON Foundation has a vision to build a community of people who want to be part of the token based economy on the ICON network,” says Ha.
“We will work to build communities for P-Reps, DApps and EEPs based on responsibility,” he adds. “The more people contributing to the development, the faster the ICON Network will grow.”
