Everstake has applied its candidacy to become an ICON P-Rep, and the voting has commenced on August, 26th. Being an ICON P-Rep is much more than being just a block producer, and the difference aligns perfectly with the Everstake’s ambitions. A P-Rep is a leading community member who partakes in its growth, develops new products and forms a technical representation of community’s needs in the blockchain.

Recently, Everstake has run a Reddit AMA session with the ICON community to better understand their requirements for upcoming P-Reps and to provide as much transparent information about itself to everyone involved in the platform development. We are very happy with the results, as the dialog we took part in shows the genuine maturity of the ICON community, and its determination to solve a big amount of problems of modern blockchain infrastructure in ICON.

We have selected the most interesting questions and answers to outline once more the most important aspects of Everstake’s P-Rep candidacy and its plans for supporting a sustainable blockchain platform.

1. I want to know more about what each P-Rep plans to do with their rewards ie how much are you intending on paying yourself, what about the rest? Also will you be having public wallet addresses?

Currently, we can’t give an exact answer regarding the public address due to the technical implementation. However, we’re interested in having a public address, as it gives transparency to all network members.

Most of the rewards are allocated for the server maintenance and building reliable infrastructure. Since Everstake is a leading staking service platform and supports more than 15 blockchains, it is very important for us to maintain the reliability and high performance of our infrastructure. The funds are distributed in various proportions, depending on the needs of the platform, monthly.

We are paying a lot of attention to the support of new blockchains where there aren’t any rewards yet, as well as the development of applications necessary for the community (explorer, telegram bot, IDE, etc.).

2. What’s your strategy to help the ICON Network in both the short term, and the long term? What unique set of qualities do you have for being a P-Rep in the ICON Network?

First of all, Everstake is a team of DevOps engineers. Therefore, it is important for us to provide the services of a quality validator with high performance indicators and with complete fault tolerance. We work closely with the ICON team on the technical issues of the network.

Our next strategic steps are contribution to the expansion of community, with a focus on developers. It’s important for us to create community-friendly products that work with the ICON Network. This allows to understand the needs of the community and the subtleties of the blockchain better.

At the moment, we are working on the development of the Telegram Bot for ICON, which will provide basic information about the movement of funds for the user. Further development will be agreed with the ICON team in order to obtain, first of all, the most necessary applications for the blockchain.

Since we are located in Eastern Europe, we are constantly making meetups for the Russian-speaking community and the English-speaking community in our region. One of the significant advantages is the huge concentration of developers who are ready to work with the blockchain.

This allows us to attract new developers to the projects. At the same time, we prepare a huge amount of educational material and make adaptations to local languages.

3. I would enjoy hearing how the P-Reps will attract more dApps and in such a short term. What is the right path to ensure we build meaningful applications without spending thousands of dollars on inefficient business development?

At Everstake, we have an already working scheme in which the creation of new dApps, necessary for the community directly depends on the trust of the community to us as a validator. We get stake from the community and some of the rewards goes for contribution.

Holding hackathons solves the problem. For a reasonable price, developers are involved to solve specific cases, which leads to the implementation of meaningful applications without spending thousands of dollars.

4. How can we prevent P-Reps from having too much power and driving the network closer to centralization?

It is only possible only if all the conditions of blockchain consensus are implemented. A lot of things depends on the community and the correctness of provided information regarding the P-Reps. In most cases, the P-Reps are interested in attracting larger stakes, and this business model is quite clear for them. That is why the solution to this problems is the task for the core developers team.

In case with the ICON Network, it already has implemented the framework for avoidance of centralization by one of the P-Reps on the consensus level.

5. Which are the specific things that your team is currently working on or planning to work on after the election? When do you plan on achieving/completing each of them? In what exact way will each of them contribute to the Icon’s ecosystem and progress?

Currently, our team is working on the stable node uptime, its performance and a RAID1 (Mirroring) storage setup, and on top of that, we are setting up the backup storage in 3 different data centers.

Also in the works is the Telegram Bot for ICON, with basic functions such as instant notifications for all incoming and outcoming transactions, incoming staking rewards, and more.

6. What are the backgrounds of the P-reps, what have they built before that can demonstrate their ability and integrity?

Everstake, as an affiliated company of Attic Lab, started in May 2018 with the rise of EOS and its system of block producers. We run enterprise-level hardware combined with top-notch software to achieve top performance. This growth attracted the attention of technical teams interested in development for the EOS platform, which have decided to support us.

Our expertise in the infrastructure, namely the symbiosis of hardware and software, resulted in becoming one of the top 21 EOS block producers (atticlabeosb), and a leading company in terms of node performance on the market.

Today, Everstake is actively involved as a validator in PoS and DPoS blockchain networks and has a high level of community trust. We operate in 15+ PoS-based blockchain networks, and more than 10 developed applications for different blockchains.

7. What do you think are the current issues that ICON faces and how do you think the P-Reps can assist in solving each of them?

The primary problem is the application of blockchain in the real economy sector. When blockchain is introduced in the working business and changes it to better, it gives the business all the possibilities for the further growth.

It is not a task that has to be solved by any certain P-Rep. It is the harmonic work of whole network participants (it’s not a kind of vague answer). Development of dApps that should solve certain problems, network support, community involvement — these are small elements which a blockchain should have to achieve the valued goal.

Current problems can’t be even called problems, but rather tasks, which are being solved by the ICON team, the community or P-Reps every day.

8. What are the main obstacles for dApp development hindering mass adoption?

There is a multitude of factors that affect the mass adoption of an app. It may sound unexpected, but often the word ‘blockchain’ in the app description influences the crowd and it rejects the application, just because blockchain is something unfamiliar for them.

Mass adoption is possible only when an app solves certain problems, not because it is blockchain-based. This is why the primary task is the development of right dApps that solve real problems of real-world users.

9. The main contributions to the network can be grouped roughly as: running a stable node, local representation, online representation, technical, boosting adoption. How would you rate those (and whatever I might be missing) according to your team’s priorities? In which groups do you think you team will contribute in? Do plan on expanding your roles in the future or do you plan to specialize in a current sphere? How exactly will you expand your specialization or role coverage and when do you think it will happen?

We prioritize our efforts into running a stable node, as it is the critical point of any blockchain. Moreover, our background comprises exactly running effective and stable nodes.

Local governance is that we love to do. We constantly host meetups and events, and sharing our new developments and the small details of working with blockchain to the developer community.

Technical support, communication with the ICON team and documentation adaptation are important supplements during our work on the two previous matters.

10. Got a couple of questions

- What are your long term views?

- What are your plans if one of the proposals you have mentioned has not been reached or impossible to do so?

- How are you going to encourage “no coiners” to use ICX?

We are present on the staking market for a considerably long time, and we are building a project to last. For us, as a staking service provider, it is essential to support the projects we are working with, and to provide our customers with a high level of service during their stable staking process.

Our work with blockchains, such as ICON, is the basis for our business, so naturally we are interested in supporting the ICON Network for a long time. Our task is staking education of new users, and through this process we attract new users to the blockchain and to the use of its tokens.

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We at Everstake believe that a successful blockchain platform requires heavy input from all its members, core team, developers and other users. Having the experience of being a block producer in over 15 PoS and DPoS projects of all kinds, we have the precise understanding of values that the block producers should bring to the community apart from the work of their nodes.

As an ICON Network P-Rep Candidate, we wish to bring this knowledge to the ICON Network, and give the platform a push to a faster development of a strong and healthy caring community, concentrated around a great useful platform that delivers.