The First 6 Months of Staking!

Now that you have at least a basic understanding of staking on the ICON network, let’s take a look at some key accomplishments and growth areas in the first 6 months of staking:

ICX Price Growth:

Price of ICX has increased nearly 70% since staking commenced on Aug 26, 2019! (price according to CoinGecko). The combination of decreased selling supply (due to staked tokens being locked up and not for sale), the increased social, media, and investor attention on ICON (through the hard work of the ICON team, the ICON community, and ICON P-Reps aka the ICON Family), and the technical progress of the ICON ecosystem (thank you ICON Family!) have resulted in growth in the price of ICX. ICON is now back in the Top-40 of cryptocurrency tokens and we hope and expect further growth with the bright future ahead for ICON.

Delegated ICX Growth:

Staking started off with a bang! Only after half the day, there was a total of 52,282,054 ICX being delegated (voted) on the ICON network. That number has steadily increased and is currently at 203,841,797 ICX voted (as of Feb 10, 2020), representing 24.85% of total supply of ICX (or 39.13% of circulating supply, since roughly 300M ICX is not in circulation). This is quite impressive, given only 6 months of staking. P-Rep team Block-42 made a useful staking calculator that calculates the reward rates for not only staking, but also staking, collecting rewards, and then re-staking on a regular basis (for compounding interest). An example of the rates of rewards for 10,000 ICX staked (with compounding interest) are shown below:

icxstakr.io reward calculator (built by P-Rep team Block-42)

P-Rep Team Growth:

On Aug 26, 2019, we had 33 P-Rep teams registered. This number has grown to nearly 100 (98 at the time of this writing). The top 100 P-Reps receive rewards based on the amount of votes they recieve. For this reason, once the number of P-Reps increases beyond 100, there will be competition to stay in the top 100 and continue to earn rewards. The current teams, vote allocation, and proposals can be found on the ICON community webpage. The current P-Reps span Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia.

P-Rep Locations (as seen on ICON.community)

ICON Governance:

There have been 4 Approved network proposals. While the magnitude of this number is low, the collaboration required to come to consensus across different timezones, language barriers, cultures, and beliefs cannot be understated! This is decentralized Governance in action. We expect more proposals to be presented in the future. Network proposals are discussed on the ICON forum before on-chain submission for voting. Of note is the looming changes to the incentive system.

DApp Growth:

ICON Decentralized Applications (DApps) have increased in usage, with over 100,000 daily transactions on a consistent basis. ICONBet, Somesing, and Stayge are leading the charge, with more promising DApps being developed and launching in the future!

Grant System:

ICON launched a grant system to help fund promising projects for expansion of the ICON ecosystem. Grants can be seen on the ICON forum webpage, under the “Grants” category. In the short few months since launch, several grants have been proposed with multiple awards (some in the hundreds of thousands of ICX). These are serious proposals and serious projects that will grow ICON. Later this year there will be an on-chain voting for these types of projects under ICON Ecosystem Expansion Project (EEP), as described in the Yellow Paper.

P-Rep Expansion:

Under DPoC, voters should vote for P-Reps who they believe align with their goals and will help grow the ICON ecosystem. Many P-Reps are doing just that! Even before elections began, many teams were contributing in the areas of content creation, software development, community engagement, network testing, and more! Since elections began, more teams are joining, and resources are being earned, the amount of contribution has continued to increase. We expect this trend to continue and look forward to projects such as the developer-focused portal ICON Core, an elegant community wallet, MetrICX staking tracking app, Drone blockchain integration, ICONWat.ch useful ICX tools, high-end videos, continued DApp growth, automated software tools for launching nodes, and more!

But that’s not all!

Last, but certainly not least, I want to remind everyone that ICON is still working extremely hard and putting significant resources into development and growth of the ICON ecosystem. We would not be here without the ICON team and I want to extend my personal gratitude for the countless hours their team has worked to make this a success before many of us were even a part of the ecosystem. There are some major milestones on the horizon, such as the commercialization of Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) enabling interoperability between heterogenous chains, the growth and expansion of MyID Alliance, S-Coin launching in Seoul, and more!