Our thoughts on the 30,000,000 P-Rep Delegation

General Discussion
1

Happy Sunday!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend, I want to share our thoughts on the 30,000,000 delegation program. In its current form, we do not want to apply as there are parts of it we feel need to have a second look by everyone involved.

The same day the delegations were given it lowered voters rewards by 2%. I had one voter actually message me that he was so upset about this that he is considering leaving ICON. Since this program is essentially costing the Voters we should be vigilant how we delegate ICX.

It takes a lot of work to be delegated 500,000 ICX (It took us 6 months to reach this milestone of hard work every single day). The first round of delegations was thrown around like monopoly money. Once teams start receiving a large delegation they will start relying on it and if it is taken away there will be negative feelings towards the Foundation or other P-Reps that were awarded the grant.

We support every 2,000,000 delegation the Foundation made because these teams are full-time builders for ICON.

The 1,000,000 and

Since the main purpose of the Pilot Program is for the interest to be given to the new contribution system (Which we think is amazing!!!) we have a proposal that will exclude future infighting between teams and will actually benefit the network.

In collaboration with other P-Reps, the thoughts below may be a better way to distribute the delegations:

  1. Continue delegations to FULL-TIME builders of 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 ICX

****The rest of the delegations need to be visible for the community to see and not handpicked from the Foundation since the community is paying for these delegations with their interest being reduced.

  1. Delegate 150,000 ICX to Sub P-Reps running nodes.

  2. Delegate 100,000 ICX to Sub P-Reps that attended the previous monthā€™s P-Rep meeting.

****The 250,000 delegations above will be given to active Sub P-Reps and they are the two most important contributions the foundation wants from P-Reps.

****If no action is taken 40 Sub P-Reps will slowly turn off their nodes and will continue not to attend governance meetings.

****With rewards being reduced to Subs they have less drive than ever to run a Node or attend a Governance meeting. This proposal would encourage Subs to become active in our ecosystem which can have lasting positive results.

Feel free to agree and disagree here, much respect for the vast majority of decisions from the Foundation!

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ICON Newsletter #20 detailed what was the reasons for the selections of the teams that received the delegation.

As per the Newsletter they detailed the following:

Given that the Foundations goal for 2020 can be summarized like this:

  1. Increase number of active wallets
  2. Increase number of off-chain transactions
  3. Increase community growth in geographical areas where the Foundation does not have physical presence

And that they expressed the following in the letter:

I would say that the delegation program is a way for the Foundation to directly support the teams that in their opinion align more closely to the goals for 2020 and to help these teams grow.

The teams that received delegations of 1.000.000 and 500.000 are the following:

  • 1 million delegations: Piconbello, Icon Philipinas, Chainode Tech, Blockmove, The Iconist, ICON DAO, ICONPLUS
  • 0.5 million delegations: Espanicon, ICON Guide Star, ICONNECT-Global. Icon-4-Business, Metanyx, Midos, Transcranial Solutions, ICONsolidation

I understand that in your personal opinion the 1M and 500k delegations might not make sense, but i donā€™t think it is fair to say this without assessing the projects and growth that these teams have brought (or can potentially bring) to the ICON Ecosystem overall.

It would be too lengthy to details all the projects of all these teams so I would focus on a couple of them and invite anyone to do their own research about them and draw their own conclusions.

@ICONPLUS: Arguably the most active team in terms of marketing. Counting all the members in the team they have over 30K followers in Twitter, their team members always appear in the top 10 most influential accounts on Twitter promoting ICON according to lunarCRUSH and have made several high quality promotion videos and interviews to Foundation members like Min Kim and Ricky.

@piconbello: Creators of the telegram Bot ā€œtipiconā€ this bot is not only on the majority of the ICON related channel but also is right now in the Binance Spanish Channel with over 10k users, it was used by us to distribute 2000 ICX to around 200 people in the channel during our AMA and the admin members of the Binance Team loved the bot so much they decided to leave it in the channel for their members to use. Besides this, they are currently implementing the ICONBet platform (biggest TX maker on ICON right now) into their bot which will increase the TX on the network.

@IconPilipinas: They have currently the biggest ICON related Facebook page in the ecosystem (52K followers), have done several activities like podcasts in popular channels in the Philippines an AMA in the Binance Philippines Channel and will be having an AMA in the OKEx TG channel.

@iconist: A professional team of writer that arguably has created the biggest and most professional website with news and detailed articles about ICON

@iconguidestar @IconnectGlobal @IconPilipinas and us (Espanicon) are teams which their main goals are to promote and growth ICON in specific geographical areas outside South Korea and the US (goal #3 of the Foundation in 2020) these teams are focused in the following areas: India, Africa, Philippines, and Latin America.

In the case of our team, we have done 2 AMA in the Binance Spanish channel (over 10k users) we have done collaboration projects with around 6 other teams, we do regular translations (for example we translate the @icxcomics into Spanish, the ā€œDaily ICXā€ by Staking, etc) you can see our projects in detail in our website.

I understand that we all have our biases in terms of how valuable the projects of each team are, but I also think that is important to first analyze the projects of each team before drawing conclusions and I donā€™t think is fair to say that the 1M and 500K delegations donā€™t make sense.

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Hmmm, I guess that I cannot answer for the other teams, but I can respond about my own (Midos)

The work on FutureICX started in September 2019, since than a concept was developed and re-designed multiple times, feasibility and fair-play simulations where done, teams where contacted for feedback and for securing developers. After that there were negotiations with several teams and on these meetings roadmaps, process maps, plans were discussed, structures were developed, each small design, conceptual and development detail was fined tuned and planned for, values and setups where adjusted and re-adjusted. Additional planning and negotiations were done with several teams in each step of the grant process and then and only then we have started working on the app. Which as you can imagine also means a ton of work so a concept or a vision could be transferred into a real-world existing terms and options.

Why am I explaining all that - well, because for all that time (9 months) the only thing in terms of financing that was asked for was the development grant. A ā€˜development grantā€™ as everything that was and will be funded by it goes to our developer - Sharpn (an amazing team that I dont regret for 1 second that I chose to work with). Which in kind means that for the last 9 months Midos has not received a dime for our work on FutureICX and also several thousand usd out of my personal funds are already funneled into the appā€¦

So in regards to your statement ā€˜The 1,000,000 and 500,000 delegations donā€™t make a lot of sense to us as there are a number of teams that could argue they are contributing at the same level as the chosen teams with their particular skills. It seems a little handpicked, and the teams that received these rewards with the exception of ICON Guide Star, Transcranial Solutions, and ICON-4-Business were already well known about in the community and weā€™re already receiving new votes by real voters every day.ā€™ I would like to respond in kind with several questions if I may:

  1. Which are the teams that you are visualising that are contributing more than Midos?
  2. Aside from the 500k Pilot program delegation we currently have around 196k votes, out of which around 180k are my own. So do you feel that we are getting too high delegation funding?
  3. I may not have attended the prep meetings (mostly because they are at 2am in my time zone) but (correct me if I am wrong) I feel that I personally have expressed a thorough feedback on almost every topic that is important for Iconā€™s development. It is quite interesting to me that you think that someone should receive a 100k delegation just for logging into a meeting, but you are against my team receiving some delegations for actually contributing to the chain. Maybe I am missing something so may I please ask you to elaborate further on that?
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Hi Fidel, never said the teams mentioned arenā€™t great but most were already getting votes from real voters for contributions. We are about to have 40 subs that will turn off their nodes in the next few months and very few attend governance meetings.

It comes down to what someone valuesā€¦ Thanks for listening to our opinion and we respectfully hear yours as well.

I want you to know I value your contributions and the teams mentioned but not the Pilot Program in the current form.

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5

Thank you for your reply, I have a different opinion about the Pilot Program but I respect yours as well.

I also understand and share your concern about the offline nodes, but to be completely honest I havenā€™t found out (in my own or reading others recommendations) an on-chain solution that would not compromise the current block speed of the network which is a very valuable parameter for ICON.

Coincidentally enough I was discussing with @BennyOptions_LL about possible solutions to this a couple of days ago and I proposed to him a very similar idea to what @iCONsolidation published here but even that can potentially create a bottleneck on the network every 24 hours when you get all the sub nodes to report to the main nodes which ones are active and which ones are not.

Iā€™m not saying that there is no solution, but is something that we should delicately explore an analyze because it can have very negative and unexpected consequences on the network

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Sorry about that, you are right your team should have been included as a team that may not have been well known. You are doing great work and I respect you for that:) Read my response to Fidel to answer other questions.

Remember ICON does not owe any team any delegation as it is their choice, we just have our opinion as every team has theirs and I respect your opinion.

IMO the contributions your talking about should be funded through Grantā€™s not extra delegations.

Have a great one:)

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Thats absolutely fine, dont worry about it! :wink:

In regards to the additional funding - honestly, I dont care too much for it. Im happy with what we are doing and I dont feel that asking for extra funding could have increased my motivation much further, but it would have decreased the chances for our project to be approved. Thats why I think that the amount requested was the right call.

For us the Pilot program is working as with it we have some additional funds that are giving us the option to provide some additional small extras or give out some incentives to the community and/or our future players without digging further into our personal coffers. I also agree with pretty much every team picked for the program and I think that it actually provides a good boost for the chain, so I guess that we simply disagree on this particular topic (we cannot all agree on everything I guess :slight_smile: )

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I agree with you and Fidel on a point both of you made, I should not have said I agree with every 2,000,000 grant. Maybe a rotating 2,000,000 delegation for full time builders would be great, not just the teams currently receiving 2,000,000.

After that 18,000,000 is delegated each month I believe running a node and attending governance meetings are verifiable contributions that can be delegated to with the final 12,000,000 that will raise the interest level of about 40 Sub P-Reps that we are about to lose total interest from.

Again, just our teams humble opinion:)

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I respectfully disagree. Running a sub-prep node (when we actually currently do not even need so many sub-prep nodes) and pressing login twice a month is not a valuable contribution that I would personally allocate a part of Iconā€™s inflation to (if it was up to me of course and it isnt :slight_smile:)

Currently the only ways that you can receive funding from the Foundation are Grants (which are evaluated in terms of the chain needs and potential contribution) and the Pilot program (which is once again a subjectively evaluated funding based on track record and future plans, so potential contribution).

Giving away freebies just so some sub preps dont leave us is not the proper way to go imo. If they have something to contribute with, they can apply for funding, try to raise some from the community or try to build/do their thing and pull votes with their contribution. Why would we fund someone that does not bother doing any of that - would that really be money well spent?

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Yeah, if we were told from the foundation running a node is not important then I agree with you, but for now, we have been told it is but at the same time more are not running nodes.

Yes, I think attendance in governance meetings is very important, we have not made them all as well, but only having around 20 to 25 teams in attendance can be improved.

P-Reps main responsibilities are to secure the network and govern. But again, not everyone values those beliefs.

Having multiple nodes offline, even if not necessary today, looks messy. I believe they are important until I hear from the Foundation that they are not.

Again, I respect your opinion and I canā€™t thank you enough for building on ICON.

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11

While I am unaware of the conversation and why it lead to the potential network bottleneck concern, I will only reply to the comment that our offline nodes network proposal can cause a network bottleneck.

I disagree with it. The multiple monitors and trackers are already querying the nodes every minute or less through the API calls. The similar procedures to remove main P-Reps when they miss the block is already in place. The function to change node status from Delegate to Sub P-Rep is already in place. In our proposal, the proposed time period is so long - once every 24h - that a protocol of ICON size should not even notice it.

Our intent was not to provide a bigger and more complex solution to the offline nodes problem. We are rather looking to provide an easy, simple, and practical solution for it. And that is where the real strength of our proposal lies, in its simplicity to sort the problem with a few lines of code.

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I see as P-Rep meetings as a monthly summary of what was done in the previous month and the talk about the planned work for the future. Thatā€™s why I donā€™t see a reason why attendance should be rewarded as the focus should be on all the activities in between the meetings.

For the rest, I will agree on what was said by nblaze, As I could not say it better myself:

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13

Yeah,

You guys do make solid points and I am not saying my opinion is correct:)

  1. I love the proposal you put forward not rewarding Subs that do not run a node, the foundation also informed me they will most likely not award a delegation to a team not running a node, so half of my issues with this are already taken into account, so I am happy:)

  2. I mean no disrespect, and I think everyone can tell, about the teams that were chosen as they are all great, great choices. My thoughts are only related to maximizing these delegations in areas I feel are most important to growth:

A. Heavily reward full time builders with alternating 2,000,000 delegation so no team relies on it. I donā€™t want teams to fight over their contributions being more valuable than others if delegations get taken away. I believe in all teams working together for one common goal and right now it seems like we are all doing that so far:)

B. Use the remaining 12,000,000 to activate 40 P-Reps that we are about to lose, not only as an active node, but any kind of contributions. Showing up to the meetings can activate new ideas, like faculty meetings at school. I really think they are important for Governance.

  • I am talking about the one ICON led Governance meeting once a month and the 100k delegation is only around $100 so that can pay for babysitters, etc. Remember, these P-Reps are loosing 60% of their current rewards, I just want to encourage every active P-Rep.
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Thanks for raising the questions. If the dead nodes are excluded from the future grants than I would say your questions produced some results :+1:

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For it to be a trusted solution it has to be on-chain, no third parties, and what this implies is that some way or another the subs P-Rep will need to send a message to the main telling them that they are online.

the process already exists for main P-Reps the problem is when you scale it to 78 more nodes because to be trustless the decision of whether or not a node is online or offline has to come through consensus and this implies having all the main querying the statuses of all the subs and then propagating the message across to reach consensus and this is where the bottleneck can potentially appear.

As I mentioned this was just a conversation where the idea of a potential bottleneck can appear, but it all depends on the details of the implementation.

after that, the idea of maybe using smart contracts to find out the status of the nodes was also thrown around but nothing was set on stone as a perfect solution nor it was a lengthly detailed discussion also.

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