Hey @Cali thanks for taking me up on my suggestion and transitioning over to the forum. Happy to answer these questions where I can and hope to see you as active here as you are on twitter.
1.) 5M Buyback - Unfortunately, legal counsel advised the foundation to abstain from sharing any information publicly regarding the buyback due to the lack of regulatory clarity. For obvious reasons, the foundation does not engage in market manipulation activities of ICX prices, which may include sharing more information than necessary, and hence, jeopardizing the ICON project. I don’t see the purpose to this question other than hoping for market impact, which is not aligned with the goals and purpose of the foundation.
2.) We are aware of the complaint. We don’t believe that the theory of the case has any merit. We will provide an update on the token burn as soon as we can.
3.) Sounds good to me, feel free to start it up and promote it. When the CPS launches (December 2020) we will also add another column when voting on ICONex that shows which teams have voluntarily decided to manage the CPS which will be a good barometer for who is going above and beyond in terms of governance responsibilities.
4.) “moving away from voting with the new IISS/Grant program” - I wouldn’t agree with this. There are no plans in doing away with staking + voting. Flat rate per P-Rep creates a massive incentive to Sybil Attack the network. You actually get paid extra for conducting a Sybil attack. I’ll be starting a thread on Vote Stagnancy later this week, but generally speaking you can start a thread on anything you would like, as you have done here.
5.) Currently Public Relations are handled by a professional third party, Transform Group. They are quite experienced in blockchain and you can see a list of some of their previous clients on their website.
6.) This narrative that “public chain has been abandoned and left in the hands of P-reps who aren’t doing anything” is simply not true and comes from a lack of understanding of this industry and public blockchain networks in general. It’s hard to argue with belief - you can believe whatever you want, but there is absolutely no evidence at all to support this narrative. ICONLOOP works for ICON to build the public blockchain. ICON Foundation does not pay ICONLOOP to work on private blockchains and will never pay ICONLOOP to work on private blockchains. Any work outside of public blockchain that ICONLOOP does is not paid for by the ICON Foundation. ICON 2.0 Batang is a more advanced version of our network that ICON is currently working on. FUD will always exist I suppose, but people saying public chain has been abandoned when ICON is literally in the middle of a massive public blockchain project is just clearly false. I hope you see beyond this baseless FUD.
Additionally, I would say that the most successful project ICONLOOP has ever worked on has been the ICON Public blockchain. I don’t see any private blockchains with nearly the success of our $200M network.
Some feel the public chain has been abandoned and left in the hands of P-reps who aren’t doing anything.
People that make this argument need to take some time to understand how public blockchain networks operate and grow, and that a public blockchain is not a product operated by one entity and ICX is not a security/equity/stock in any company.
Public blockchain tokens should not be managed by just one entity. If they are, they would likely be a security (similar to buying Apple Stock), not a public cryptocurrency. People that expect the ICON Foundation to be the only entity working on the ICON Project just don’t understand public cryptocurrencies and would be better off sticking to traditional markets. If ICON were the only one with the ability to promote, build on, develop, and grow the network, ICX would likely be a security, and even worse, it would be a project that nobody cares about because there is no community. Public blockchains need communities of investors, validators, influencers, and developers. They must be decentralized. That’s where the community comes in; that’s where P-Reps come in. Some will be good, some won’t be - it can never be perfect in a decentralized network that anybody has the ability to participate in.