With so many options, we wanted to poll the ICON community to see what was most important to them. We made a poll and presented it to the community to vote on. The poll has received 151 votes to date and can be seen in Fig. 1. For those who have not voted, they can do so in the Ubik Capital Telegram Channel.

Figure 1. Community P-Rep Selection Poll

The poll was limited to one response, which ensures it takes into account only the top choice. Each category listed is important, but by limiting to the top choice, we can see what is truly most important. The poll clearly shows community involvement as the top choice in selecting a P-Rep team (33%).

Community involvement shows the P-Rep team cares about and understands the community. This is very important so that P-Reps are able to make proper Governance decisions that embody what the community wants and needs, and what is best for ICON. If P-Reps are in a vacuum and not engaging with the community, then how can they be expected to represent the community? Additionally, P-Reps will be expected to represent ICON and maintain significant knowledge of the project. Thus, P-Reps will be best equiped to engage with and educate the community in all areas related to ICON.

The next categories are using rewards to improve ICON at #2 (23%) and involvement in ICON projects at #3 (22%). These are both areas where P-Rep teams will really separate themselves. Some P-Reps will use rewards for their own profit, while others will put these rewards back into the community. Ubik will be putting 100% of our profits back into the ICON community across many different areas. One such area is through offering loyalty rewards to those who stake for a longer period of time. Ubik will track those who stake for 6 months and share profits with them, based on staking contribution. This incentivizes longer-term staking, which improves the security of the network. It also develops a loyal voter base, which is important for stability. Lastly, since Ubik is a community-focused team, we feel we should give back to the community with some of our rewards. Some other examples of using rewards to help ICON are to use rewards to develop tools and applications on the ICON network, purchase marketing efforts for ICON, and help ICON become listed on new exchanges. Ubik will also use rewards for these types of efforts as well, providing a distributed contribution of our profits to different areas to improve ICON. Multiple P-Rep teams are also discussing teaming together with their rewards to be able to have a greater impact together for the improvement of the ICON network.

Involvement in ICON projects is equally as important. This involves participation as moderators (such as the ICONation team), running an ICON accelerator (such as ICX-Station), ICON ambassadors (such as Ubik), running an exchange (such as VELIC), DApps (such as SOMESING), as some examples. We expect P-Reps will continue to become more involved in ICON projects once elected. I would expect consideration to be given to P-Reps who are already involved, however, as that shows dedication to ICON even before being elected.

While node security and configuration, and TestNet participation are important, running a node is expected from every P-Rep and essentially P-Reps will disqualify themselves if their nodes are not running. Higher node resilience, however, is important in order to strengthen the ICON network and will likely be a discriminator for some voters.