ICON is built upon Proof of Contribution, in which ICONists are supposed to vote for P-Reps that align with their ideals and have valued contributions. P-Reps will have the job of Governing the ICON ecosystem. As such, it is important for P-Reps to have a pulse on the community. Some teams have said they will vote and make decisions in accordance with those who stake / vote for them. This makes sense as a representative democracy.

Our team, Ubik Capital, took action on this and even before being elected made a courageous decision to gather community feedback and have a poll for consideration on a key decision in their proposal. The Ubik team wrote a reddit post detailing the decision to gather feedback and community input. Ubik is a community-focused team and dedicated to ICON success. Ubik has been a major contributor of content, very active in social media channels, and also active in development — even building a DApp called Breadcrmb that was announced as a winner in ICON’s Got Talent DApp contest. We have a very detailed and professional proposal. In this proposal, Ubik outlines giving 100% of their profit back to the community! An overview quad chart of Ubik Capital is shown below, including the allocation of these rewards.

Fiugre 3. Ubik Capital Overview

Ubik received a lot of good feedback on the pros and cons of a specific area of the proposal. The specific area is one which encourages long-term staking to lower liquid supply of ICX. This increases the security of the ICON network and also the price of ICX through the economics of supply and demand. Ubik accomplishes this incentive by providing a higher staking reward for those who stake with 6 months. The intent is that this incentive will encourage ICONists to stake for longer periods of time, resulting in higher price of ICX and a more secure network. Based on the large amount of feedback received, Ubik decided to put the decision to keep this policy to a poll: continue using portions of their profit to encourage long-term staking, which is good for the price and security of ICX or, on the other hand, to move these profits instead to more software development, content creation, and marketing. Currently Ubik plans to use 50% of their profits for the long-term staking incentives and the other 50% of profit goes into SW development, content creation, and marketting. This provides a well-balanced distribution of rewards. Due to the pros and cons of each approach, the poll was inconclusive. As of August 21, the poll had 217 votes and is 50% to 50% (shown in Figure 3). Even if the votes were different by a few %, this would not be enough to make a major change on the proposal.

Figure 4. Community poll for profit distribution

Regardless where you stand on the proposal, I think we can all agree that this type of behavior is what we need out of P-Reps. Ubik is the only P-Rep to offer long-term staking rewards at this time, which shows they are thinking of how to improve ICON and exploring uncharted territory. Ubik also showed a willingness to truly be a representative of the community and have the community’s best interest in engaging in a poll and gathering feedback, with the potential to change their policies if they received enough support in the other direction. This is what we need P-Reps to do: think outside the box and listen to the community.

The laws of supply and demand show that lower supply with the same demand will result in higher price. This is the aim for Ubik’s long-term staking incentives. The team is committed to ICON and will continue to work on developing software, creating content, and engaging with the community in parallel with the long-term incentives. Ubik plans to keep this proposal as a temporary measure. We will work to have a long-term staking reward added to the IISS protocol in order to incentivize long-term staking across the board, and actually lock tokens for longer periods of time (this will not only lower supply but also be a hindrance to exchanges staking with people’s coins, as the exchange cannot just stake for long periods of time. Exchanges staking ICX is not good for the ecosystem since then the ICONists are not voting and pulling their ICX off exchanges — thus it does not have the proof of contribution or the lock-up period). We believe long-term rewards across all P-Reps is the best case scenario, but since it does not yet exist, we are doing the best we can with what we have.