On March 10, 2020, ICONLOOP, announced their new Employee Participation Program that will change its employees’ access to the ICON Project from restricted to limited, as a way of nurturing talent, and promoting entrepreneurship and diversity in their decentralization goals.

The South Korean-based blockchain technology company listed, “incentivizing contribution, aligning open-source vision and celebrating hard work,” as the three main factors that inspired their decision.

ICONLOOP employees will now be able to apply to either the new Employee Grant Participation Program for independent projects or the Employee P-Rep Participation Program for group projects. ICON stated:

“We believe these two (2) programs will further accelerate the development of our ecosystem and by incentivizing individuals with the best knowledge of ICON’s technology to contribute even more.”

Employee Grant Participation Program

The ICON Foundation’s treasury will be in charge of supporting this program. To qualify for submission to this grant, interested employees would first have to get their projects approved by ICONLOOP executives and proceed to apply via the ICON Community Grant Program:

“This program will operate until the ICON Contribution Proposal System is fully developed and implemented on the ICON Network. Recommended proposal types include, but are not limited to: infrastructure, development, education, marketing, public relations, and community activities.”

ICONLOOP recognizes that most of its employees are more than capable of starting their own companies. Therefore, they believe that this incentivized participation will “empower individuals to continue working on the ICON project while also providing the opportunity to be entrepreneurial outside of their day-to-day responsibilities.”

Employee P-REP Participation Program

Unlike its counterpart, this program, according to ICONLOOP, will be supported with a portion of the team’s allocation originally stated in the ICON whitepaper.

Employees in teams of 3 to 8, will be welcome to submit their proposals detailing their plans to add value to ICON. Only a maximum of 10 teams will be approved, and successful applications will be required to cover operation and node registration costs, while the ICON Foundation will delegate 50,000 ICX per employee up to one year:

“Also, for each 50,000 ICX delegated for the Employee P-Rep Participation Program, the ICON Foundation will remove an equivalent amount from the ICON Foundation node.”

More Access Equals More Threats to the Network’s Security; is ICONLOOP prepared?

Last year ICONLOOP announced its partnership with Akamai Korea, the local branch of US-based cloud service provider and content delivery network (CDN), to secure its endpoint security.

While ICONLOOP does not mention how they will handle security now that they will significantly increase the number of people with system access, they maintain that their project is open-source, and anyone is welcome to join.

Meanwhile, VeChain is counting huge losses after losing more than 1 billion VET tokens to what they termed as staff negligence in their financial department: