Chainode Capital — How we view the P-Rep role
On August 16th we were happy to take part at the Friday Open Night Reddit AMA, where we had the pleasure to discuss directly with the community and other P-Reps regarding who we are, what we do and how are we planning to be a trustworthy P-Rep, contributing to the ICON Network and Ecosystem.
As there were a lot of interesting questions during the AMA, we decided to sum up a few of the most frequently asked questions in this Medium article, for users that could not participate in the Open Night as well as for anybody that is interested in our candidacy and journey.
Question 1: What is Chainode Capital’s Strategy as P-Rep
We create. We spread. You Stake.
In terms of our strategy, we are really focused on 2 simple yet very important steps, in this exact order: creating quality around the ICON project and spreading the word about it. The Delegated Proof of Contribution (DPoC) method chosen by ICON requires from the validators per definition the creation of useful tools, products, merchandise, documents, or any type of sustainable contribution to the ecosystem. This is something that voters have to keep an eye on when doing their research on the P-Rep candidates.
As a team, we think that in every project it is very important to be extremely efficient, especially with the time management, and this is why we decided to first contribute to the ecosystem by centralizing all the DApps, tools, ICOs and IEOs related to ICON in one single place: simply because time is one of the most important resources we have and a growing ecosystem like ICON needs a go-to place for the latest information about what was built and what is being built on the ICON Network. You can check the portal that we built here: iconecosystem.io.
Motivated by the same appreciation towards time, we created the #ICONweekly campaign on Twitter and Telegram, with which users receive at the end of every week a summary of the most important events related to the ICON project, so they do not invest their own time to do that and make sure they are well informed regarding the most recent updates on ICON.
Besides the above mentioned tasks, here are a few more things that we are currently working on:
1. Educational campaign about the DApps and tools listed on ICON Ecosystem portal on Twitter and Telegram;
2. We run a node since the beginning of phase 1 and we were pro-active towards designing and testing redundant architectures for having a secure node with high uptime. With testnet phase 2 we created a second node for testing purposes. This was all before even the penalty was announced and it shows our interest towards offering the best for the community even without having a penalty. Everything stated until now has implied a lot of resources from our team, financially and time wise.
3. Currently we are working on another tool we think it is going to be useful for everyone. What we try to do with the products and solutions that we are building is to focus on those that are targeting and are in the interest of the whole ICON community.
4. A few more things that we will do if we will have the honor to be one of the 22 P-Reps:
*Continuously add content, tools, DApps, ICOs/IEOs on ICON Ecosystem portal and continue to develop it/ add new features (we currently have 15 tools and 24 DApps on the portal);
*#ICONweekly campaign;
*Create useful tools for the ICONists;
*Organize meetups with focus on ICON;
*Actively secure and improve the ICON Network;
*Actively participate in governance topics;
*Support innovative ideas, use cases, DApp and tool development;
*Partner with other P-Reps to launch community-driven events or support different initiatives like exchange listings or hardware wallet integration. We also wrote an article about it.
Question 2: P-Rep elections — How to avoid centralization of power
In our opinion, the most important thing community members have to do is to invest their own time and do their own research before voting. Just how it is recommended to do your own research when it comes to investing in an ICO or IEO, we think that this applies for P-REP voting as well. It is really easy to mislead nowadays and content creation is something everyone can do by having only their interest in sight.
Here are a few questions that we think are healthy and legitimate to ask before choosing a P-Rep:
- How will the P-REPs contribute to the effective growth of the ICON ecosystem?
- Do they understand the challenges and threats of a decentralized network?
- Do they have the knowledge to secure the network?
- Are they really incentivized by bringing quality to the space or by financial gains?
- Are they transparent or do they act as a candidate in the traditional voting systems outside blockchain, etc.
What we have to understand from the beginning is that the community has the power. By voting, you transfer that power. The key in any decentralized network is to distribute that power to multiple validators. In the case of the ICON Network, distributing your votes to multiple P-Reps does not only prevent a centralization of power, but it also minimizes the risk of losing part of your stack in case the P-Rep you voted gets penalized. We wrote a more in-depth explanation of this in another Medium article which can be found here.
Question 3: Are you willing to collaborate with other P-Reps?
We already collaborated and had discussions around validator architecture and infrastructure with some of the P-Rep teams and also with the ICON team. We also released an article about it which you can read here.
With the remaining rewards we will create the ICON Ecosystem fund in order to support builders and those who will add extra value. Here we hope that other P-Reps will be open to join forces in order to pursue big achievements like exchange listings, hardware wallet integration or larger events for ICON.
Question 4: How are you planning to spend the rewards?
Regarding our funds, we are going to be transparent about the way we use them and make sure the ICON Ecosystem will benefit from having us as one of the 22 elected P-REPs. We approximate our total monthly costs to be around 10–15k USD for a 3 person team including infrastructure and other extra costs. We gave a range for the moment as this is dependent on many factors like the necessity of having the backup node online all the time.
We are also on our way to onboard the 3rd member, which currently works at AWS in Switzerland. He will help us with the development and node infrastructure. The remaining rewards will go into the ICON Ecosystem fund, which will be used to support builders and people that add an extra value to the ICON Ecosystem. We would also like to use these funds and join our forces with other P-Reps for bigger tasks like exchange listing or hardware wallet integration.
We would like to thank the ICON community for the engagement shown, we are truly grateful for all the likes, shares, quality questions and discussions so far. We achieved an astonishing number of almost 1 Million impressions on our Tweets in the last month. As we have our hands full with the upcoming work, this feedback and discussions keep us energized and motivated to further contribute with our maximum potential to the ICON Ecosystem, so we are looking forward to seeing you on the Chainode Capital Telegram channel.
The full version of the Reddit AMA can be found here.
Social handles & Contact
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChainodeCapital
Telegram: https://t.me/ChainodeCapitalChat
E-mail: chainode.capital@gmail.com
