ICON’s main P-Reps will begin voting today on adjustments to the network’s contribution incentive system.

The ICON Incentives Scoring System (IISS) 3.0 proposal attempts to address several issues of concern, including vote buying attempts, voter apathy/stagnancy, excessive competition leading to emotionally charged infighting and instability in the social media communities, excessive advertising/self-promotion in the public channels, a lack of clear incentives to collaborate vs compete, and a lack of direct rewards for direct contributions.”

One of the most significant adjustments is the introduction of a minimum bond requirement of 5% of delegation received. The requirement aims to lower incentives for vote buying while forcing P-Reps to have proverbial “skin in the game.”

“Bonded delegation” rather than the total vote received will determine rankings, rewards and governance power. The bond is structured in a way that allows P-Reps to “ease” into the requirement without having to pay the entire bond up-front.

According to the proposal:

At its core, DPoC is a form of proof of stake. In our current design, there is no stake requirement by those securing the network. This system creates a security hole, where teams can accrue a meaningful amount of votes without any requirement to invest in the network. After meeting an acceptable return, malicious nodes could attack the ICON Network with no economic consequences. With this new system, if a Main P-Rep (or any P-Rep) decides to sell all of their ICX and abandon the ICON Project they will now lose their ranking, governance power, and rewards cash flow.”

THe IISS 3.0 proposal also calls for:

  • the elimination of B1 rewards to disincentive Sybil attacks;
  • the creation of a decentralized Contribution Proposal Fund managed by Main P-Reps (the details of which are still in progress) and funded by 10% of all P-Rep inflation;
  • Governance-slashing penalties to discourage passive nodes from running Main P-Reps and harming the governance process;
  • An option for P-Reps to stop additional delegation so that they can stay out of governance or avoid increasing their ICX bond.

At BTC Manager, Aisshwarya Tiwari writes:

Notably, the proposal is one of the first on-chain governance proposals to date that aims to bring major changes to a blockchain project’s reward allocation structure. The proposal is especially significant as it will encourage all ICON validator teams to collaborate and contribute a part of their current rewards for the long-term benefit of the network. Essentially, it’s a testimony to ICON’s strong community ethos.”

ICON’s cryptoeconomic architect BongAn Ha says the revisions will better reward those making real contributions to the network.

Building a fair economic structure in a decentralized network is very important because the rewards from the network should be properly distributed to those who participate in and contribute to the ecosystem,” he told The Iconist. This is the key point of IISS 3.0 which includes the Contribution Proposal System, an on-chain reward fund to implement DPOC, the core of the ICON Network. This system will make it possible to incentivize people who contribute to the network. Since the ICON Network is a fully community-driven network, we’ve been focusing more on creating a structure for the network to grow on its own, and we will share this power with the community.”


Voting begins at 7:30 AM on April 23, UTC.