One thing is certain.
By throwing its hat into the P-Rep campaign, accelerator and incubator ICX_Station brings a wealth of knowledge and experience working with ICON.
“We certainly have the best interests of ICON at heart. We have all been very close to the project for over a year,” says team member Scott Smiley. “We’re intimately familiar with ICON and the direction in which it is going. We can help disseminate that knowledge to ICONists and other P-Reps as well.”
“I think this team is the one that understands best how to operate and govern the ICON network. And we need people who understand how to govern the network to take the lead initially,” says fellow team member Justin Hsiao, contrasting ICX_Station with some other teams who are in it for the block production rewards. “It’s OK for people like that to join the network, but they still need people like us to be around and help them out. So, I think it’s vital to have a team like this as a P-Rep.”
Four Pillars
Should the voters see fit to elect it P-Rep, ICX_Station plans to reinvest its block rewards into four initiatives, or “pillars.” These pillars are:
- Acceleration: providing necessary support and guidance to external projects interested in building on ICON.
- Incubation: pursuing internal ideas that align with ICX_Station’s goal of achieving the future of Digital Nations and DAOs.
- Education: expanding the developer community through partnerships and meetups and educating them on the benefits of DAOs.
- Thought Leadership and Research: publishing thought-provoking content and sharing it with the community.
ICX_Station is especially keen on promoting DAOs. Team member Daeki Lee says, “We believe it’s about time we find a killer use case with blockchain.” And they believe they’ve found one in DAOs, a community effort that uses the “trustless” feature of blockchain to build autonomous organizations that function even if its members remain unknown to one another.
Smiley says, “The more we think about it, the more we realize that networks like ICON are similar in structure with traditional DAOs where we have token holders using their tokens to delegate authority to other entities to make decisions and get rewarded for doing so.”
ICX_Station hopes that by becoming P-Rep, it can become fully self-sustainable, free to contribute to the ecosystem how it sees fit. “We plan to use all of the block rewards to reinvest in the ecosystem,” says Lee. “We’d like to use the block rewards to push the initiatives we’ve been brainstorming for quite a bit.”
Later he adds, “The ICON Foundation will not have any say in how ICX_Station spends its block reward.”
Smiley says, “With the block rewards and our other revenue-generating opportunities with the incubator, there’s no reason in the future that we’d have to continue accepting contracts from the ICON Foundation.”
The team stresses their independence during the P-Rep campaign as well. “We won’t get any direct votes from the Foundation,” says Lee. “It really depends on how the community feels about us becoming P-Reps.”
The All-Star Team
Lee calls ICX_Station an “All-Star Team for ICON.” Smiley concurs with that description. He says, “Not only are we all very close to the ICON project as contractors, but we all have fairly different responsibilities within that.”
Going around the horns, to stick with the sports analogy, Lee and Hsiao handle community relations and the developer community, Smiley works on economics and governance and fellow team member Ricky Dodds talks with institutional investors.
Hsiao doubles as the team geek, working to ensure that the technical side of the operation runs harmoniously. His expertise will help ICX_Station run a reliable and secure node. He isn’t stingy in sharing what he knows, either. “I’ve actually produced a couple of articles on how to set up a node on ICON,” he says. “I’ve been helping a lot of P-Rep candidates get through the testnet phase because a lot of the P-Rep teams don’t necessarily have the server experience.”
ICX_Station believes it’s that kind of knowledge — and a willingness to share it — that helps set the team apart.
“I think it’s meaningless to have a bunch of P-Reps who don’t know much about ICON and can’t really add value to the network,” says Lee. “It’s always good to have folks like us who know ICON, who know how to work with the ICON team and know how ICON technology works.”
Smiley looks forward to sharing what he’s learned about ICON. He says, “I think having us involved in this process helps other P-Rep candidates as well.”
