ICON Tools — Whale Watcher

Jaz Inda
4 min readFeb 25, 2020

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The development of Whale Watcher is at a stage where we are comfortable releasing it among the community. We will continue to improve on it so any feedback is more than welcome.

Vote distribution

We strive to keep the ecosystem hyperconnected and healthy. There was a lot of discussion among the community about vote-buying and when a P-rep was caught of doing suspicious things the community responded really well and reallocated their votes. But we want to provide easier ways to detect such actions to prevent such occurrences in the future. Transparency is one of the things that we as P-reps need to provide. If the community distributes their votes among different P-reps that they feel are doing significant improvements to the ecosystem it helps with decentralization. If however, they vote for a single entity it does exactly the opposite and centralizes the network. Usually, good actors in an ecosystem will have no problem providing the information but with so much going on it is hard to keep track of everything so we want to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Improvement of User Interface

Blockchain provides an excellent insight into things happening on it but sometimes fetching the information takes to long for a certain user to obtain that’s why we decided to create Whale Watcher.

Whale Watcher is just one of the tools we aim to create to improve the user interface of gathering information about the ICON network. It will help track votes that contain larger amounts of ICX and the distribution of votes by them. If users that have smaller amounts of ICX are very important to the ecosystem and their votes can also make a change it is not so damaging to the ICON network if they allocate their votes to one P-rep or if they change their votes meanwhile a change or undistributed votes by whales may be damaging for the ecosystem or for a certain P-rep. We all know with great power comes great responsibility but sometimes the ones in power need to be kept in check by the community.

Whale Watcher

A quick overview of the ICON Whale watcher front page (note: data is from test net)

About

Whale watcher provides a visual overview of voting distribution allocated by wallets. It will focus more on the information about the wallets that have more ICX as they have a bigger effect on the network, but it will still be possible for users to check the vote distribution of the smaller wallets. We understand that the basic user wants the tools that he uses to be as simple as possible for people to use, that’s why we’ll provide the basic visual information about the votes of the bigger wallets on a front page with the possibility of other functions for the more advanced users.

Community

If we build tools that the community doesn’t want to use it is just a waste of resources. To be able to provide the tools that the community wants we need your feedback. When whale watcher is released we would love if the community can provide us with feedback about the issues that they see with the tool and we will figure out how we can improve them. The best way to reach us is via our telegram group.

We want the community to be able to have a say in what is going to be built on the ICON network. That’s why in the future, we will be taking suggestions about tools that you want to see and do our best to provide them.

Release

You can expect the first usable version of Whale watcher during the week when it will be synced to the current block height and we will continue to improve it after feedback from you guys. Together we can build awesome things.

We appreciate your votes if you like what we do!

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More about us

block42 is a blockchain solution provider developing applications on top of most recognized blockchain frameworks like e.g. Ethereum, Hyperledger, ICON and many more.

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Jaz Inda

Project & Community manager @block42 Blockchain Company