Disclaimer: I’m going to admit from the get go that I have my biases and will thus have inherent preference for certain P-Reps over others. I try my best to give benefit of the doubt and attempt to be objective in my evaluation. Just because I say “I haven’t seen P-Rep X do much lately”, doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the case: it could be that I’ve simply missed the memo/have been oblivious to what they’ve been doing; they could have decided to prioritize something else and have ditched their initial plans (totally fair game IMO), or perhaps this is a chance for them to come out and refute my misguided claims. Either way, I hope this sheds more light on the current state of the community and even give an opportunity for some unsung P-Reps to step out into the spotlight and share with the world what they’ve been up to.
One of the widely discussed topics within the ICON community is no doubt concerning which P-Reps have been making the most contributions to the ICON ecosystem. It’s no secret that some are pulling their weight more than others while some are “freeloading”, for a lack of better expression. Me personally, there certainly are a handful of candidates in the Top 22 that makes my initial reaction go “huh? I’ve never heard of them, who are they?” and conversely, plenty others outside the Top 22 that I’m quite surprised aren’t higher in the pecking order. In today’s post, I’m going to try providing a brief summary and my personal POV of the Top 22 current P-Reps. In a future article, perhaps I can focus on 23–50 or simply do a quick “highlight” of who I believe to be underrated P-Reps.
For a high level overview, you can check out the summaries here:
1. ICON Foundation
No introductions really needed here. One thing that jumps to my mind immediately is that the Foundation has repeatedly insisted not to send votes their way. Yet, I do know some individuals that are newer to the ICON ecosystem that believe there’s still a 6% burn penalty and hence, they want to pick the “safe option” and throw votes to them as a default. My understanding is that they do not want the votes and would rather have these distributed to others who are actually contributing to the system. Just for reference, they hold about 46 million votes, which is more than combining all of #14–22 P-Reps’ votes. Unless I’m out of the loop and majority of these votes are self-voted, this right here pretty much sums up voter apathy in this community, which I personally think should be addressed sooner rather than later.
2. ICX Station
Having launched back in 2018, you’ll probably know a lot of these familiar faces including Ricky Dodds, Daeki Lee, and Scott Smiley aka Benny Options. I believe their premise is along the lines of “being an accelerator program sponsored by the ICON Foundation” and looks to me like they’ve been bustling before Day 1 even began.
If I were to provide a very quick recent recap, Daeki’s been leading the charge in terms of meetups and other discussions, Ricky Dodds has been providing some updates (with a strong hint of teasing I may add?), and Scott’s been collaborating with other teams for the widely anticipated, Balanced. Seems like even Daeki’s expressed a stronger interest for bringing DeFi to ICON lately so lets see what happens there.
3. Velic
I’ll be blunt — Velic has been very underwhelming to me (if someone from Velic is reading this, would love to be proven wrong, no sarcasm intended). Skimming through their Twitter, I haven’t seen any recent mention of ICON related, excluding a few @ tags to helloiconworld, or remotely any contribution. I am aware that they have an exchange and I believe the intention was to have a more prominent role in the Asia region but so far, volume seems to be very lackluster. There are definitely multiple mediums of helping the ecosystem grow, whether it’d be through social engagement, onboarding more developers, promoting DApp usage, education, etc and just from my POV (which can definitely be wrong), I just get the impression they’ve been very passive in every category.
4. Ubik Capital
When I think of Ubik, I think they’re pretty OG — I remember them, ICONation, and Rhizome (incidentally both are next on the list), who were quite active before P-Reps were set in motion. That being said, I haven’t heard much of that recently apart from this recent collaboration with Band, which in itself is quite exciting news. They launched an alternative ICON explorer not too long ago, and the latest I heard from them was integrating ICX into a drone project.
5. ICONation
I personally think they’re an underappreciated team, not in terms of votes, but general recognition. I mentioned that they were in the OG category and they’ve been pumping out content and posting videos with commentary long before P-Reps were a thing. My understanding is that majority of them are tech-oriented with a couple involved in social engagement, which is no surprise considering they’ve built out the first DEX on ICON. Special shout out to radiofriendly123 for spending over an hour one time explaining to me security measures and other nuances behind ICX tokens.
6. Rhizome
Despite the heavy tech prominence they boast, Rhizome has also done a great job of addressing non-tech issues as well. You have the MetrICX app from their developers, very insightful newsletters and commentary on the state of the community, as well as a lot of real-talk, no bull***, points of discussions they bring up. I’m very flattered that many people praised my analysis on the potential of ICX, but a lot of it was derived from reading previous Rhizome’s content and their takes on various subjects. Would highly recommend reading some of even their older posts, as it goes to show just how accurate some of their predictions played out today and may give additional insight on why they believe in the project.
7. NEOPLY
Unfortunately, since they took over the reigns in literally less than a week, I can’t really say much about them. Oversimplifying it, I don’t really see too many downsides to it, but on the flip side, you can interpret that this shows there’s interest from the Korean community and it may be a foreshadowing of other prominent entities joining as a P-Rep in the future. Plus more ICX staked (~10 million this time) is generally a good thing… right?
8. Symmetry SLC
To be honest, I couldn’t find much on these guys. Earlier (unverified) sources suggest most of their votes are self voted. I’m personally not too impressed with them so far but I’m going to leave that interpretation up to the reader. Here’s their most recent report and some thoughtful reactions on Reddit.
9. ICON Hyperconnect
If you’ve read my articles, you’ve probably seen me praise Markus multiple times. He’s been with ICON longer than some of you think (former head of Deblock Research back in 2018), and to say he’s been killing it lately with the Hackathon would be an understatement. Plus, every now and then, he provides a comprehensive summary of recent major news and their implications for ICX’s future. Has the technical chops and the social engagement, this P-Rep team seems to have it all. Whenever Markus posts a multi-Tweet thread, the world seems to stop and listen to his insights.
10. weBloc
I actually didn’t know this until literally now while looking them up, but weBloc has been a My-ID alliance member for quite some time! Looks like they’re still relatively been up to date and hard at work in Korea. While this article is outdated, I thought Rhizome provided a good example of what they’ve been up to. Looks like they’ve been pushing their PAYWOK service quite a bit in Korea these days.
11. Mineable
At some point, you’ve probably seen a Mineable video and it’d be hard to say it’s short of anything breathtaking. David has an uncanny talent for video production and it also helps that he can reach out to a wider audience outside of just the ICON community. To me, he‘s’ been the front face of ICX marketing but has been inactive in recent times (perhaps being strategic and biding his time?). I personally would like to see higher frequency but can also see how this may not be suitable to his plans. Haven’t seen any videos for a long stretch now, I’m hoping for one soon, Mr. Sail.
12. Iconviet
Admittedly, I haven’t seen that much activity from them in recent times, but I want to stress my earlier claim that it could very well be me tunnel-visioning on other areas I’m more interested in and simply have missed what they’ve been doing. Nothing negative to say about them and if anything, I’ve heard generally positive comments from other peers. I do vaguely recall when I first heard of them, they had an ambitious mission to spread the word in Vietnam. I’m going to assume that’s still going well today. After all, they say Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Edit: Great to see a response from them. They’ve been quiet, but they’ve also been quite busy. Check out some of their recent developments!
13. ReliantNode
Excellent, excellent work by them. Go check out MyIconWallet, seriously. UI (User Interface, not to be confused with Ultra Instinct ;)) is a very underrated aspect of community adoption and I think these guys went above and beyond to make the experience as seamless as possible while also making it look aesthetically pleasing.
14. ICONbet Community
These guys are a scam, avoid at all costs. Totally kidding. Some fun facts: all their rewards are purely spent into development of the platform and the developers are working voluntarily (meaning no one’s getting a paycheck out of this). Plus, many of the members have donated their own ICX time after time to help promote the decentralized casino. ICONbet has been leading DApp transactions for quite some time and is also the first DAO on ICON. I’d daresay their channel is more active than the general, main ICON channel with a lot of friendly figures in the community. Some of the newer releases include lottery and blackjack with other games such as poker, levels, slots, and more under development. Not financial advice, but if you’ve been looking to accumulate ICX (as well as the relatively unknown and underrated TAP token), this is certainly one avenue myself and many others have looked to.
15. Block42
Creator of https://icxstakr.io/ I want to say they’re another one of those P-Reps that I don’t know much about so will refrain saying anything out of ignorance. I know that one of their bigger initiatives is working on Liquid ICX, but haven’t looked into it too much.
Edit: No surprises, another P-Rep that’s been busy behind the scenes that I happened to not have stumble upon. Check out their new STIN project, that’s what you call real life use-case!
16. Everstake
Another P-Rep that I haven’t followed too much and thus can’t speak a whole lot about. I do know when staking became a thing, they really went out of their way to provide user friendly tutorials and explanations with it, so kudos to them. Looks like outside of ICX, they claim to specialize in other PoS cryptos.
Edit: Their website seems have a plethora of information. They seem to have a strong focus in both marketing and educating the community, way to go! Other tools developed by them include Icon Vote Monitor, Icon Telegram bot and even a rewards calculator.
17. Paradigm Citadel
I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but another P-Rep I couldn’t find much on. Even Google searching them yielded very few results. Latest I could find.
Edit: Looks like they’ve been active for quite some time. Per CryptoApis’s words, check out citadel.one and their “one-seed multi asset platform with automated ICX staking and iscore claiming functions”. Their Medium page also seems to have a lot of content, actually excited to deep dive into some of them. Doing a quick glance at just a few of their articles, I’m already quite impressed. Hats off to you guys~
18. iBriz -ICONOsph
Finally, someone I’m familiar with. Another hardworking, underrated P-Rep in my opinion. I think browsing their Medium will be a good start. They’ve implemented Alert Bots as well as a TipTap bot via Telegram.
19. Sharpn
Probably their most well well known contribution is FutureICX, which to my understanding, has been quite the hit. Seems quite active and has even more developments in the making. Looking forward to what comes next.
20. Blockmove
I’m a huge fan and regular user of their iconwat.ch explorer. They’ve also created an autostaker and have periodically been providing statistical updates on how the project has been growing. Keep up the great work.
21. PARROT9
A bit old, but nonetheless a powerful statement from them: I stressed earlier that UI/UX design is quite important and it seems like they’re certainly not taking this lightly. I should also note two of their members (Lisa Verheul and Peter Denholm) are on the Balanced team.
22. Stakin (POS Bakerz)
I think they’ve done a good job in terms of social engagement. I see them on Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, etc. They do daily updates which I know some people aren’t fans of due to some of the news sounding trivial or “too tryhard”. Not much else I know about them.
And that’s a wrap. As you can tell, there were quite a lot of P-Reps even I didn’t have much to comment on, and it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, but wanted to show there may be certain disconnects in terms of what the P-Reps are actually doing behind the scenes and how they broadcast these efforts to the outside world (or equally possible, I’ve just been oblivious on multiple instances). P-Reps, if I seemingly underplayed/misrepresented what you’re doing on here, please know that there was no ill intention and I’d be glad to rewrite an edit section if you’d like to add on to what you’ve been up to. I am not saying this to be nice, it’s simply the truth — despite my attempts to keep tabs on ICON, it’s just not feasible for me to be up to date on every single aspect and thus, very likely I may have missed out on some very significant information.
Maybe I’ll elaborate on why more some time later but as a quick shoutout, I personally think P-Reps such as ICON DAO, ICONPLUS, ICON Forge, Foundry Box Media, and Icon Pilipinas have been underappreciated. Immense effort from these guys and I think if provided more resources, they can do even more wonders for the future of the ecosystem! Special shout outs to other individuals too that aren’t necessarily associated with P-Reps but still do a great job help spreading the word.
Think I missed someone? Discuss away. My opinion is far from perfect and the whole point was to stir the pot on how we can shift votes to those who have been working hard, not to criticize practices from certain P-Reps that I don’t necessarily see eye to eye with.
