Absolutely agree with everything you have said, thank you for sharing your opinion and feedback!
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I agree with all of these points. Our whole prep plan was also according to how icon planned the prep system. If we have rewards we see that as a support of the community. We plan projects and execute it with necessary dev outsourcing if we don’t have it we just wait till we have. Outside that everything we did is from the commitment from our free times. Our team was 3 member which is all developers. I am running 2 company so I don’t do much of coding for several years other members are also working full time. In the end, we onboard several developers from other chains to icon ecosystem and I see that as a big contribution more than what we put out as a project under our prep name because we need developers to work on the public chain to keep building and trying.
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I also agree on almost everything that you said (maybe I wouldnt go as far as ‘Im losing faith in Icon because of that’ but still…)
Almost as Im not sure about the ‘filtering’ of preps by skill, experience etc. Although I see the necessity for higher qualified preps to be picked to lead the system, it would be very difficult for such ‘criterias for joining’ to be implemented in a fair way. I think that a much better strategy would be for Icon to actually ‘invite’ better skilled preps and that way replace the current not working ones in a non-intrusive way.
In order for this to work though, we need to find a way to deal with another major problem - the stagnant votes as otherwise that effect might be nullified as the voters will stay where they have initially voted at. I think that if we put our minds to it, we can easily solve this problem as well (and just in time for IISS 3.0). Off the top of my head we can set a requirement for the voters to switch/confirm their vote every month and if they dont, the system can automatically re-assign the votes that have not moved to either: all preps, to a random prep, to chosen pilot program participants or whatever other option we can think of.
That way whoever wants to vote for a specific prep can do so but will have to confirm that he still is happy with them each month and if they would not bother - others will pick for them.
Whatever we pick as solution. we would need to set up some precautions so its effect does not result in another problem, but we can figure it out if we put our minds to it
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stagnant vote is caused by the lack of clear criterias to evaluate P-Reps. You see there are more than 70-80 P-Reps. Voters hold a ton of other coins other than ICX. They won’t spend days going on about to research which P-Reps are good or bad. They would just put it all on ICON Foundation to be safe, or the top few on the basis that they think the top few are good if not they won’t be at the top.
However, if we have a clear transparent dashboard on every single P-Reps productivity level, work progress, contribution % to the ICON network, work done or etc. I know there are transaprency groups. Everyone is trying to figure out ways to improve transparency among P-Reps. But it still doesn’t quite make the cut.
That’s why I mentioned we need clear evaluation model on P-Reps. So the Founders have to first decide what criterias they want to set for ICON. Then based performance metrics on those KPI goals. If not it is really all over the place as we are seeing right now.
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I know what you mean, however I dont think that its the only issue. Even when there were 20-30 preps and most of them were constantly spamming social media about their achievements, there were a ton of people that were ‘bragging’ that they voted for the top 3/5 as they would not like to waste their time to decide on who to vote for when they are getting the same rewards for voting for any of the teams. Most of them have not moved their votes ever since (I assume that most have not sold as well as we are not very far pricewise to where we were a year ago).
So all that Im saying is - you are absollutely right that the info should improve but without dealing with the voter apathy/stagnation problem, the effect will not be huge. One thing that I have learned in the last year is: Dont understimate how lazy/silly some people are even when their profit is on the line
In regards to the prep evaluation: I personally have had numerous discussions about that with @BennyOptions_LL, however each time I get fired up on presenting a solution about it, it comes down to the same problem: who, how and in what way will evaluate them. If you only look at who: will it be other preps (conflict of interest), iconist (thats what they are supposed to do now - what are the results), automated system (correctly set to engulf all types of contribution with no circuvention possible and able to evaluate automatically with no human interaction… almost impossible), a combination of those…
I thought about it for quite some time and couldnt find a solution. If you are able to find one, dont hesitate to share 
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That was a good read, it kinda talks about the elephant in the room.
Our team has already talked about it here [Contribution Proposal] DeFiCON - ICON Decentralized Finance
The current Stake and reward distribution model need to be revisited as it relates more to the traditional Proof of Stake (POS) or Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) rather than the intended Delegated Proof of Contribution (DPoC) governance model. For the various reasons that will be addressed later in the paper, the Proof of Contribution is showing characteristics of a rather restrictive model where reward/return rates are favoring the “lazy” nodes.
During our work the foundation came our with IISS 3.0 changes and announced CPF so we kinda sidestep with the continuation of the proposal. We give them credit for coming up with the changes as it was a clear sign they recognized the problem too. Both proposed changes were more than positive.
In general, our team is supporting accountability and transparency from day one as it is a clear contribution indicator.
I am still positive as I am waiting for IISS3.0 and CPF to be implemented and I do hope that after reading discussion like this that Foundation will ensure these improvements come out soon.
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I totally agree and this is clearly a problem, perhaps a large one amongst many others the project face, but that’s just normal progression of a public project with an innovative approach.
I was invested in ICON since ICO and relatively close to the project from day 1, did I see the problem arising, yes but you will need to deal with them one problem at a time.
Since decentralization the main issue was to secure 22 Preps, then to hit the 100 mark, now that we have an abundance number of Preps and candidates the target will be to up productivity, filter out the weak members and set standards.
Now that we are officially a Prep, I can see 4 categories of Preps:
- Self Staking Preps (we are a decentralised model and yes this should be acceptable, IE if you mine Eth or BTC no one should care, and the same approach applies)
- Dormant or below par Preps with a number of stagnant votes who add 0 value to the network
- Hard working Preps with a fair vote value
- Hard working Preps with an insufficient number of votes and therefore we are pushing them to leave to better rewarding project or incentivising them to do less.
You would hope the voters can be educated and canny about their votes, but its not the case, so I would like to think that we need to prioritise fixing the second category which then by default will resolve the problem in category 4.
The CPF, Bond… part of the IISS 3.0 are a huge positive development and mean to resolve some of these issues:
- Preps who normally dump their tokens are having to save for the bond and therefore resolved the downward selling pressure for the short term.
- Penalising Preps instead of Iconist to up KPI (node productivity, governance meetings/votes etc)
- CPS to incentivise iconists to contribute and therefore bypassing reliance on Preps or at least the dormant or the less performing ones (point 1 & 2)
Another separate problem i see, we need to differentiate in between hard work and strong business acumen, whilst working hard is respected and desired we would need to strike the balance to ensure our hard work is efficient and not in vain.
On a separate note, as a final statement I would like to think that since we have joined the community 2.5 months ago we set high standards & took pride in our work as we would like to be held in high regard by the community (Voters, fellow Preps & Foundation).
Thank you!
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I like the last comments about how votes can be stagnant and your ideas of making the votes move.
If the iconist does not vote, no staking rewards. It looks like at least we all have different ideas and can pivot…
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I agree with @ICONPLUS.
This is the natural expected order of how the project overall will evolve after decentralization, the priorities shifts after each step concluded or obstacle surpassed, first it was securing 22 P-Reps, then hitting 100 and now we can focus on optimizing the P-Rep model and allow for valuable teams to rise in the ranks and even though I recognize the points made by @tyler64 I believe that we are actually achieving this and you can see it in the way the top 100 list of P-Reps has shifted, although it clearly has been a slow process, my opinion it is that is already occurring.
With that said, of course we can improve, and we should work to make the process of having high-quality P-Reps rise through the rank faster, but is important to carefully analyze the changes that we will be making because we unknowingly might make it more difficult for good small teams to survive if aggressive actions are taken.
In my opinion IISS 3.0 will make highly positive changes to achieve this, requiring a 5% bond, having a Contribution Proposal Fund managed by the top 22 these are all great steps in the right direction, the only thing that I believe is not being addressed in IISS 3.0 is the subject of vote stagnancy and ICONist not spreading their votes accordingly to P-Reps contributions and added value to the network.
Sadly this problem of vote stagnancy is something that is easy to identify but not that easy to resolve, but I believe that 2 clear and defined steps can be made to improve this.
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First, randomize the P-Rep list in the ICONex wallet, and add a searchbar at the top to filter teams by name. This will have 2 positive outcomes:
- the first is that by randomizing the list of P-Rep it will even out the probability of receiving delegating to all teams, there will always be ICONist that will vote simply for the sake of voting, randomizing the list will achieve a more spread distribution
- the second is that by adding a searchbar at the top, the ICONist that do know for what P-Rep to vote based on previous research will easily find the P-Reps that they are looking for.
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The second change we can add is adding a voting pool. This pool will serve as a catch-all for ICONist that either don’t know who to vote for or don’t care and simply want to stake and get their rewards. All the delegations received in this voting pool will be allocated as votes to a set of P-Reps and the decision will fall on the Top 22 the same way the will decide on how to distribute the funds of the CPF. In order to make this as efficient as possible many restrictions can be made, for example:
- P-Reps would need to apply for this the same way the Foundation delegation pilot program works but the decision will be made by the top 22
- create well-defined metrics and KPI for teams to prove how they have a positive impact a set of detailed general goals like the ones described in the latest ICON Newsletter (increase on-chain transactions, increase active wallet counts, increase awareness in untapped regions, etc)
In my opinion, these are 2 very structured and defined ways we can improve vote stagnancy and the P-Rep Governance Model overall.
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One step at the time!
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This is such a good post. So many of the P-Reps suck so badly, but sadly there isn’t really much we can do about it. It’s laughable that the community has asked for Trezor support since 2018; voters have poured millions of $ to P-Reps, yet no one has taken the initiative to do it. If someone just paid a developer a fraction of that amount, it’d probably be done in months if not weeks. The Trezor example is just one of so many examples how P-reps have failed to give back to their voters.
The problem with decentralization is that everyone “owns” ICON. When everyone owns something, then really no one really owns it. So many free riders and P-reps who are all talk.
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Sadly as far as I understand it Trezor won’t accept ICON integration because ICX is outside the top 30 market cap coins. Terrible service from them for our Trezor users
Do you know many others who want support, could put together a joint petition/request?
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I realized that centralization was an issue quite early, just weeks after the “decentralization phase”. The issue is that P-reps recieve rewards for shilling themselves on social media. Actual honest P-reps are lost in the noise while the lowest quality P-reps (With a few exceptions thanks to whales in particular) generally gets a place in the top 22.
I suggested that P-reps who are in the top 22 gets the same rewards and compete for hashrate - instead of competing for votes, similar to Bitcoin. Why? Because that’s their job. Their job is to ensure the network security, so that’s what they should aim to do.
The current system rewards the P-reps who are most active on social media, which is extremely problematic because most ICONists doesn’t seem to understand what they’ve invested into, which leads to them voting on whichever P-rep is most attention-grabbing. Very few P-reps have actually built exciting ideas the time that I have been around, so what are they actually being compensated for? Why did the DBP program get removed anyways? That was my main motivation to ever build something that ACTUALLY uses blockchain and isn’t built around it like all these tools we so. I don’t have the aspiration to ask for money via grants - but would rather get rewarded for creating transactions On-Chain.
Feel free to read the initial post (although it could have been made more clear):
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There are a few good points in this thread but there are some that aren’t so good as well.
- Some Iconists are placing their blame in the wrong areas. Don’t hate the players, hate the game. Anyone that is pissed at a team for getting the votes they got is misplacing their anger. It’s like being mad at an athlete that got overpaid by a team. Why would you get mad at the player for taking the money the team agreed to pay him? Should you be upset with the player or the system that pays the player? The foundation is working on making changes to the system so all of this is a bit ridiculous to me.
I think we all wanted bigger, more professional p-reps to jump in and take the top spots but who’s fault is it that this never happened? Ubik or Icon’s? It’s certainly not ****** (name removed - let’s just say any particular P-Rep’s) fault, right? They signed up to compete in consensus, did their thing, got their votes and here we are. It’s not like they’ve done anything illegal or played outside of the rules.
- An election is a competition. People are mad at **** for doing well in this competition? Really? We’re sitting here pointing fingers at **** instead of the system and voters again.
Let’s look at mineable for example. He doesn’t develop anything but he makes the best videos for icon. As a result, people vote for him. Iconists are saying they value the mineable team’s efforts more than blockmove, who does awesome stuff on the development side. Should we be mad at Mineable for taking the votes and making the money? No. He’s just doing his thing and is earning the rewards that come to him through the system ICON created and ICON is trying to “fix”.
Additionally, some of the teams with less votes that think they should be ranked higher don’t seem to be doing anything about improving their vote totals. Again, this is a competition so to earn more votes they have to compete. If you have a basketball game and one team is crushing it from 3 point land (imagine 3 pointers are being active on social media) and is winning and the other team doesn’t like shooting 3 pointers, you don’t just change the rules of the game and say no more 3 pointers allowed so the team that is behind can catch up. No - the team that is losing needs to accept that they need to start hitting some 3 pointers. In this case that means the teams that are behind need to start doing some of the stuff that gets votes.
- I think if people keep trashing some of the community teams like **** that they will eventually stop working hard to promote icon. I see ubik on top of the list of promoting icon like every week. If the foundation and people in the community keep shitting on them they’ll probably stop putting in that effort. People think **** pocketing a bunch of money (which we dont even know to be true for sure) has this big effect on price. Ubik’s yearly rewards are like a tiny percent of DAILY trading volume so that’s just kind of crazy to me how much that seems to be blown out of proportion.
Just a few things to think about…
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That’s the thing. U know why this is the problem? I have already mentioned it above.
"stagnant vote is caused by the lack of clear criterias to evaluate P-Reps. You see there are more than 70-80 P-Reps. Voters hold a ton of other coins other than ICX. They won’t spend days going on about to research which P-Reps are good or bad. They would just put it all on ICON Foundation to be safe, or the top few on the basis that they think the top few are good if not they won’t be at the top.
That’s why I mentioned we need clear evaluation model on P-Reps. So the Founders have to first decide what criterias they want to set for ICON. Then based performance metrics on those KPI goals. If not it is really all over the place as we are seeing right now.
WE NEED TO CREATE A SELF-SERVING MECHANISM THAT WORKS LIKE AN INDEX which automatically filters out only the top few P-Reps based on clearly thought of KPI. I don’t understand why you guys don’t get it? That is the problem just like in this forum.
FULL OF TALKS AND BULLSHIT. BUT NOTHING GETS DONE OR IMPLEMENTED!
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I already proposed an excellent solution but i don’t know why people just don’t get it. It is just a simple idea that works. You guys just want to make things complicated.
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Welcome to crypto.
Is this “problem” limited to Ubik or ICON? Not even close.
I really don’t know what the internal members are doing. I mean the problem is pretty CLEAR as shit to me. We could get this right and we could solve it. But I guess Nope.
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This is literally the first time that I see that Ubik is mentioned in the thread.
Can we please take the preemptive prep defense/offense to the specific TG channels or simply make a thread of your own for that purpose - this is a thread for a general system improvement proposal
Fixed. Fair call.
I replaced their name with **** and said we can just add any P-rep’s name in place of it.