Dear weBloc supporters,
weBloc has ranked at 6th at the moment of September 2nd, 2019 thanks to your support.
I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to all the weBloc supporters and ICONists who have voted for weBloc, believing in the potential of the weBloc project.
The ICON ecosystem seemed to be on a shaky ground — the entire blockchain market has been super bearish, the price of ICX has dropped making the ranking of ICON on the CMC dropped as well. But the event of the P-Rep Election has made the ICON community excited and brought huge attention.
Such heat and participation of the mass may work as “Good News”, possibly leading to increase in price of ICX. But basically it would be necessary to think about the fundamental meaning and impacts of being a P-Rep. That is because the ICON ecosystem would not function well as the huge volume of money circulation in the ecosystem does not simply guarantee the activation of it.
Look at the blockchain industry. So many blockchain projects claim themselves as the leader of decentralized public chains making transparent and irreversible networks. Still, it is questionable that how many projects are operating truly “decentralized” blockchain networks.
ICON Foundation is going through the P-Rep election to build a decentralized network run by dPoC, Delegated Proof of Contribution. Elected P-Reps will run the nodes and build the future of the ICON’s ecosystem via continuous communication and negotiation.
Elected P-Reps will receive incentives making it easier to operate the P-Rep nodes and many teams may have participated in the list of P-Rep candidates pursuing the incentives. There are about ten days up to the end date — there could be more candidates and the ranking may significantly change as well.
September 24th, 2019, at the moment, there are 53 candidates with low difference in received votes. But this list can change anytime as it is reaching to the end of election. Those receiving at least 1.6 million votes and raking higher than 22nd will be elected as P-Reps.
Looking at the candidates, there are familiar names and new names — it is great to see the ICON ecosystem activating while it gives a chance to think about the meaning of being a P-Rep.
With the current system, those candidates more “delegated” from ICX holders — ICONists — are going to win the election. This means anyone who can get more ICX can be a P-Rep, who will decide the future of ICON ecosystem. Well funded projects are always welcome as they would be able to operate the node without a problem but it does not necessarily mean that being rich is the most important aspect of being a P-Rep.
Then, how do we define the most ideal P-Rep candidate?
The scalability issue would be one of the tricky problems the entire blockchain industry has not solved. We don’t have a Killer App leading to mass adoption of blockchain technologies. Most people see them as the means of investment — betting, in many cases — and have not experienced the benefits they can give to users. If we can have such a service or product, it would be considered to contribute the most to the growth and expansion of the ICON ecosystem.
This may be the reason why ICON Foundation launched the Tx Challenge Event to boost development of applications and services using ICON’s mainnet. It rewarded the top 5 teams that marked the highest transaction volumes. ICON also had made efforts to find good ICON Dapps by throwing DEMO Day events over 10 months last year. This had led to partly good results as it was noticed that tens and hundreds of thousands of transactions were occurring during the Tx Challenge period and ICON could prove the stability of its mainnet.
However, partly such efforts proved that ICON still has not had a real service yet. After the Tx Challenge event was ended, the volume of transaction has plummeted and the Block Insight application service operating by weBloc’s partner Insight Protocol took 20% to 30% of the entire transaction for a while. In other words, without economic incentives, ICON couldn’t have attracted services to come and run on its mainnet yet — It needs a real service.
When the election began, many teams promised a handsome rebates to get more votes. But now it has stopped as the ICON Foundation officially announced that it is against these incentive methods, and now such programs have been dropped. After that the rankings had shifted quite a bit, showing that the incentives promised for the P-Reps might be the sole purpose of many candidates had — and if the price of ICX drops too much to the point where the balance sheet is written in red ink, many of P-Reps might stop the node and give up the position. For sure, this is not a desirable case scenario.
Overall, it should be very important to develop services generating “meaningful” transactions and solve the scalability issue to make the ICON ecosystem grow further. In fact, this is a conclusion anyone who is remotely interested in blockchain can draw.
It is Service, Stupid!
Anyone can easily predict that one killer Dapp WILL be a game changer not only to the ICON ecosystem but the entire industry. Then, I believe what ICONists should consider when they vote would be the candidate’s capability of developing — or at least supporting — Dapp services. Simply running the P-Rep nodes is not enough as it only requires a small amount of money to rent AWS servers. If that’s the enough qualification for being P-Reps who decides the direction and future of the ICON ecosystem, there are many possible problems we can easily think of.
Without activated Dapps, decentralized or not, ICON’s mainnet would be useless. To be stone cold, if there’s no change, it will be so considering the decreasing number of Dapps on ICON.
This definitely explains why ICON has been focusing on developing services such as Broof and MyID via ICONLOOP. But again, without activated Dapps and an friendly ecosystem for them, it would never reach the goal of expanding ICON’s network and ecosystem.
weBloc is one of the most activated Dapp of ICON.
Without a doubt, weBloc is one of the most activated Dapps of ICON at the moment. This fact may have been proven by seeing how many votes weBloc has received. weBloc is the very first project going through the TGE(ICO) process with ICX only and one of the most well-known Dapp of ICON.
Last year, weBloc launched DEVOTE, a decentralized voting application, and ICON Watch, a real-time ICX price tracker, on the ICON Testnet. Honestly they were the first services officially operated on the ICON’s network and DEVOTE was actually used to have the winner of ICON’s DEMO Day events. (Now the services are off as the Testnet has been updated.)
This year, weBloc has launched and been operating an AD-wall service, PAYWOK, running on ICON’s mainnet. In the 4Q of 2019, new services like TIME-Ticket have been announced and another services will be launched. JUBJUB and PICK are the candidates at the moment.
Such efforts definitely show that weBloc is capable of developing new services using ICON’s mainnet and deeply connected with ICON. The leader of weBloc project, Joon Hong is one of the most influential leaders not only in the Korean blockchain industry but in the overall startup and digital advertising industries. His strong and wide human network has been having positive impacts on ICON’s path so far —establishment of Deblock, ICON accelerator and partnership with JEJU Municipal government, etc. — and will possibly lead the communication and partnership between P-Reps, bringing positive impacts on the ICON’s ecosystem.
Believe in weBloc, Vote for weBloc
An ecosystem develops to the direction the members pursue. weBloc team has been making its utmost efforts to grow and expand the ICON ecosystem and it will always have as the best Dapp of ICON and a vigorous service provider.
weBloc has been able to rank in the top 10 thanks to the supporters who have believed in weBloc project. The team will never stop making its best and relentless efforts. I hope more and more ICONists support and believe in weBloc until it becomes a P-Rep standing at the forefront of the growth of ICON ecosystem.
Thank you very much!
weBloc team
