ICON Reviews
Project category: Development
Project duration: 6 months
Project description
Why Reviews?
Voter apathy and vote stagnation are inherent problems we face in the governance of ICON network. We have conducted a detailed analysis on this topic (https://medium.com/swlh/investigation-of-vote-stagnancy-on-icon-network-icx-5aab416b8b2e), and found that about 40% of total votes were ‘untouched’ in the last 90 days, while 75% were not moved (stayed on the same P-Rep). The ‘untouched’ part of the problem will be solved by the implementation of ICON 2.0, where “inactive voters have their ICX spread to all top 100 P-Reps”. This ‘vote spreading’ solution will “allow active ICX holders to have the greatest impact on governance”.
However, there will still be a similar, if not more, number of ‘unmoved’ votes to ‘untouched’ votes that would affect further decentralisation. This group of voters are the ones that re-stake their votes to the same P-Rep, whether they truly support the P-Rep and/or for compounding interest. We have observed a strong correlation between P-Rep ranking and the days of votes unmoved, which suggest voters are comfortable with re-staking their votes longer if the P-Reps are in the high ranks (refer to the above-mentioned research article).
We have also noticed that voters tend to vote for higher ranking P-Reps. This seemed especially true for the new voters, where the number of first-time voters has been the highest in ICON Foundation for consecutive weeks since October 2019 (ICON in Numbers).
To strengthen the argument, we ran regression analyses and found strong correlations between weekly P-Rep ranking and voter ranking. Note that the correlation was stronger with first-time voters (right).
It has been rather onerous for voters to know what each P-Rep has been doing. This may be one of the major factors in voter apathy, because it takes too much effort and time to go through individual P-Reps, and may decide to just vote for the Top P-Reps. This is especially true for the newcomers.
Below are some of the voices from ICONists. The list goes on and on.
To increase awareness and to see the reaction of the community members, Tono from our team has done a pilot test as a community member called “Shill Your P-Reps” (https://twitter.com/tonoplast/status/1300978803175432193). Although it did not receive much attraction that it needed, it has proven that community driven ‘review’ would be invaluable and is a truly decentralised way. Such a twitter thread has limitations in that it is a point-in-time snapshot of what the community thinks, and unless this is done longitudinally and compiled each time, this is not sustainable. It is also not scalable.
However, having a ‘ICON Reviews’ website where ICONists can leave reviews of ICON-related topics (e.g. P-Reps, dApps, NFTs), with ratings (both for P-Reps and the review itself) and other perks will make the decisions of the voters easier, similar to looking at Google Reviews for future favourite restaurants.
How will it work?
This will be a community driven effort, and no central authority will need to flag which P-Rep is good or bad, and therefore, bias-resistant. It will also be updated by the community, so ICONists will know how outdated the reviews are. The reviews will be recorded onto the blockchain, so it will be immutable and even if the website goes down, the information will be available on the blockchain.
Also, reviewers will be required to login with their wallet and send transaction fees for leaving reviews, the address will be publicly available and be somewhat traceable to prevent defamation (e.g. a P-Rep member writing bad reviews for another P-Rep team).
Tipping system will allow for the incentives for reviewers, either by the community or P-Reps, and ranking of the reviews would be determined by the ‘like/upvote’ or the ‘dislike/downvote’ of the reviews. And best of all, although small at this stage, we will be creating transactions on ICON network, and there will not be a new token made for this dApp.
Future development will include more features such as data analytics and visualisations of the reviews/reviewers/reviewees, social media API integration and P-Rep reward tracking for automated transparency report.
As we get a decent amount of reviews, we hope that the ratings (IconistScores) could be implemented in voting wallets, such as ICONex or MyIconWallet (approval dependent). This would make an easy gateway for voters to choose based on the voice of the ICONists.
Example (may differ from end product):
- This is an illustration and the ratings may not reflect the real scenario.
A simple design on the front page with Team logos, names and addresses. No ranking will be shown and each visit may randomly shuffle the order of the P-Reps. With reviews, it can be sorted by the number of reviews, total score (IconistScore) and/or date for recency.
- This is an illustration and the ratings may not reflect the real scenario.
Detailed reviews can be found for each P-Rep, with the option to upvote/downvote the review and tip the reviewer. There will be dashboards available for each reviewer and P-Reps for updating their status and tracking the progress of their review/tips.
Final Comments
As the new voters tend to contribute to temporary decrease in the vote stagnancy, it is important to steer them into the right direction. It is critical to educate active ICX holders now more than ever, as their votes will likely carry more weights on which P-Rep gets more funding that will benefit the ICON ecosystem.
We believe that ‘ICON Reviews’ will provide an easy overview of what the community thinks of P-Reps, and ICONists would have easy access to the data which will help new and old voters to make more informed decisions which would be much less taxing than before.
With a grant, we will be able to build this platform and make meaningful adjustments to our existing workload so we can commit more time to it.
Project milestones
- Prototype development and testing
- UI/UX design
- Back-end / Front-end
- MVP
- Finalised back-end / Front-end
- DevOps
- Community Management & Beta Testing
- Marketing
Funding amount requested
Total project budget - $22,000
- Prototype development and testing: $3,000
- UI/UX design: $4,000
- Back-end / Front-end: $9,000
- Community Management & Beta Testing: $2,000
- Marketing: $4,000
Official team name
Transcranial Solutions
Team Members:
Tono is a data analyst with a neuroscience background. He has conducted a number of analyses on the ICON blockchain data and translations for the community.
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sung-wook-chung/
Ted is one of the main contributors within the team. He is also the creator of Icon Transaction Extractor (ITX) and has technical experience in blockchain data extraction and development.
Steven, the latest member of the team, is a software engineer specialising in python and C++ development at Soul Machines. He also has game development experience.
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjson/
Contact information
Email: transcranial.solutions@gmail.com
Telegram: @tonoplast / @skyvell
Twitter: @transcranialsol
Public address
hx2f3fb9a9ff98df2145936d2bfcaa3837a289496b