How to choose what ICON P-Reps to vote for? Russ Follow Apr 28 · 5 min read

The ICON network is growing everyday! Public Representatives (P-Reps) on the ICON Network have a responsibility to run and manage the ICON network. Voters have an opportunity to elect their chosen P-Reps by voting for them. In return for fulfilling these actions, voters are rewarded (roughly 16% annually for voting at the time of this writing) and P-Reps are rewarded (varies based on votes, but rewards can be seen on the ICON Community Webpage). This article outlines some ways to learn more about the different P-Reps and make informed voting decisions.

How do voters know which P-Rep to choose?

There are 122 P-Reps at the time of this writing (from many different continents, as shown in Fig. 1)!

Fig. 1: P-Rep Locations (from icon.community webpage)

Most people don’t have time to look into what each one is doing. The question of who to vote for or how to see what each team is doing often comes up. Just today, this question came up in response to a tweet I wrote encouraging teams to spread votes to lower teams to further decentralize the network and support many teams (Fig. 2). How does one make an informed decision?

Fig. 2: How do we make an informed decision?

P-Reps have a responsibility to govern, run, and secure the ICON by running nodes to ensure the ICON blockchain is running smoothly (perform block validation and block production) and also participate in Governance (voting for different proposals and changes to the ICON ecosystem, such as the recent IISS 3.0). More details about the ICON ecosystem can be found in the ICON Yellow Papers. Many P-Reps go above an beyond these tasks to further try to grow and bring value to the ICON network. This is done in a variety of ways: outreach, community engagement, marketing, education, or development are a few examples.