PICONbello has been around since the ICON network decentralized in Q3 2019. They’re a very active P-Rep team — registered to vote on the CPS, maintaining a DAO and constantly hard at work developing ICON products — even though they are a sub-P-Rep with little in the way of funding.
Sound familiar? A lack of funding is something that many lesser-known sub-P-Rep teams struggle with, and it’s even more of a struggle for those with great ideas they want to implement and a real passion to help ICON succeed. Heck, The Iconist itself even had this problem back in 2020 when we tried to launch a node. (We are no longer a P-Rep team, as a result.)
Point being, it’s tough out there.
As this is an issue that resonates with many in the community, we thought we’d feature a sub-P-Rep for a change and show the cool products they’re developing. Meet PICONbello.
Tip o’ the hat to Tipicon
PICONbello are the developers behind Tipicon, an ICX tipping bot available on the Telegram instant messenger. Telegram tipping bots have become popular in other cryptocurrency communities, so PICONbello made one just for the ICON network in 2020.
Since Tipicon’s first release, it has seen many improvements. Notably, PICONbello integrated ICONbet gambling DApps into Tipicon, allowing users to play roulette (among other casino games) right from within Telegram.
The team has also worked hard to bring Tipicon to other platforms. A Twitter integration is nearly complete (but on hold at the moment) and a Discord integration is in development right now, funded by ICON’s Contribution Proposal System (CPS).
Tipicon is easy to use, and works with any ICX wallet. PICONbello team member Contau explained to us how new users can get set up:
“In Tipicon, we open individual user accounts and assign each a different private key. You send funds to Tipicon from your ICX wallet. You can also export your Tipicon private key and use it to access that account from any wallet that provides private key import.”
Start using Tipicon now by following this link.
A gamble that paid off
Tipicon quickly grew to become one of the favorite ways for Iconists to place their bets on ICONbet. The tipping bot now handles an average of 15 to 16 thousand daily transactions to the gambling platform. The biggest single bet placed on Tipicon so far was 10 thousand ICX (approximately USD 20 thousand as of the time this article was written).
Owing to the massive popularity of Tipicon’s betting function, the PICONbello team is now working on a HiLo DApp for ICONbet. With the exception of Dice and Mini Roulette, third-party developers build all of ICONbet’s gambling DApps. The platform pays 30 percent of a DApp’s daily profits to the developers who made them.
Meaning, the move to online gambling could be a profitable one for PICONbello, made even sweeter thanks to back-integration with Tipicon.
“One of the biggest hurdles for traditional online gambling, maybe the biggest, is the payment process. Cashing in and out of a gambling site is quite tedious and requires a lot of effort,” Contau said about the rising popularity of cryptocurrency gambling. “Blockchain provides an amazing way of solving this problem, since everything is on chain and cashing in and out is seamless. We believe the biggest aspect that blockchain provides to the gambling industry is the ease of payment processes, mainly for big, central coins that have wide market recognition.”
Other products and activities
Hailing from Turkey, the PICONbello team started their own Turkish ICX news channel called ICONHaber, with the intention of disseminating ICON news in the local language. A lack of interaction caused them to stop the daily translations, however they still keep a Q&A contact channel open which does see some use owing to PICONbello’s prominence in Turkey’s blockchain community.
They’ve also worked on a number of smaller projects, some of which have been made redundant due to changes in the ICON network. One of their still-functional products is a private key extractor for Ledger users, although it has quite a niche userbase.
The team also designed an as-of-yet unpublished pixel game which allows players to purchase and modify pixels on a shared screen. PICONbello originally tried to get funding through an ICON grant for the pixel game, but their proposal was rejected.
Making do with minimal funding
As a low-ranking sub-P-Rep, the team does not earn enough rewards to pay for all these efforts. And to date, the only grant they’ve had approved was for the aforementioned Tipicon Discord integration. This means that, apart from the work they’re doing on the Discord bot, much of their work has been self-funded.
“We’ve had to pursue projects on our own, financed either from our P-Rep rewards or our own money. This does mean that some of our ideas have had to be downscaled to stay within our budget,” Contau said. “Our plan from the start was to onboard talented developers to ICON and work with them to create quality products. We believed that if we worked with these groups, they would be onboarded to the ecosystem and try to create products just like we do. However, our budget has only allowed for minimal collaboration.”
PICONbello remains fairly positive about their situation, however.
“As a team, we are not money or profit oriented. We simply try to aid the community and shape products according to their needs. Overall, we are quite happy with the projects that we have managed so far with the little funding we have, and hope they work well for the community,” Contau said.
He also stressed the importance of the CPS for developers looking to build on the ICON blockchain, explaining that a well-written proposal and proper marketing of the project, either via social media channels of direct interaction with the voting P-Reps, will go a long way toward securing funding for your project.
Join the DAO
PICONbello also operates their own newly-founded DAO which has its very own PICONbello Governance Token (PGT). The DAO will be instrumental in deciding future projects and activities that will be taken on by PICONbello, as well as how the team votes on the CPS.
PGT is airdropped daily to those who vote for PICONbello with their staked ICX, giving every voter a say in how the P-Rep team is run.
“As a general philosophy, we believe that community is the foundation of blockchain, which includes the transparency of our operations and opinion gathering,” Contau said. “The DAO structure provides a more seamless way of interacting with the community through PGT-backed votes. This is a key deciding factor in our decisions.”
