Hello ICONist, hope you are doing great. We have been having a blast since our candidacy and thank you to all of you for making the network great. Although we have been sharing everything, we have been doing from our social media channels, we thought it would be great to have a report of our accomplishments. For this report, we will summarize what we have done so far from our candidacy to this date, and we hope we can make it a habit and create monthly reports.

TRANSPARENCY & COMMUNICATION

First, after making our candidacy official, we prepared and presented you with our proposal. In this proposal, we gave you an insight into our aims, how can we accomplish them and why you are the key aspect in all of them. Then, we created our social media channels and website. Our Twitter, Telegram, Medium, and Reddit are all online and we are trying to be highly active on all of them, as well as our website. We have been engaging with you from these channels and try to answer your questions, take feedback and requests. We want to be totally transparent and do that within a jurisdiction and a legal framework for it. That took a lot of time for us since all of them have some limitations. After finding the best solution for us, we started our registration and bureaucratic process. We prepared all the documents that are required to form the company within the legal framework. We want to be transparent, thus we tackled all these legal works to ensure we can be transparent, as promised. We are ready to launch our private company; we are simply waiting for the right time.

There have been many Q&A sessions for P-Reps to engage interactively with the community and provide their opinions about topics that shape the network. We participated in Reddit AMA and P-Rep panel to have discussions with you, the community. As we value you the highest, we don’t want to miss any chance of interacting with you. Any questions you have were also answered from our social media channels, which will continue to happen.

TOOLS & RESOURCES

Before pre-voting started, we prepared a guide to describe to you how to vote and what to care while voting. We also gave you some suggestions regarding the security of your wallet and P-Rep selection. For details https://medium.com/@piconbello/pre-voting-guide-c13e157eceaa

We also observed two lacking points since pre-voting started. We saw that there were no visual tools that show how each P-Rep is ranked and their percentages. Thus, we created a visual tool to make the information easier to access and understand.

Then, we saw that extracting private keys for ICX from Ledger was a bit problematic for many users. To overcome this issue, we created a private key extractor for Ledger users, which are plenty. We deployed both of our services to our website, which we hope many of you are using and enjoying. You can reach both tools in order https://www.piconbello.com/voting/ and https://www.piconbello.com/bip39/

COLLABORATIONS WITH OTHER PREPS

We are also open to working with other P-Reps and groups that will create a better network. For this purpose, we joined ICON Europe initiative, which is a DAO formation consisting of several P-Reps. P-Reps and sub P-Reps contribute to an overall fund to have a budget for their ideas. This is great for sub P-Reps since their ideas might lack funds to be a reality. It also makes the whole process of engaging in bigger projects easier, since they will be worked on by multiple representatives, instead of one. You can check ICON Europe from https://www.icon-europe.community/

As another task carried with other P-Reps, we deployed Daedric Price Feeder for Hylian USD/ICX Price Oracle. This oracle was developed by ICONation and they got green light for mainnet deployment, which means it is soon to be on the mainnet. They wanted to decentralize the oracle; thus, we deployed our Daedric Price Feeder to ensure decentralization of the information provided to the network. You can check Hylian USD/ICX Price Oracle of ICONATION from here: https://forum.icon.community/t/hylian-icon-price-oracle/97

TESTNET & NODES

After successfully running our testnet Node and Citizen Node, we tried many configurations to ensure the health of the network. We decided to have 2 nodes running at the same time, in order to overcome the risk of one failing. With this approach, we believe it is almost impossible for us to lose efficiency, which should be very beneficial for the network and for you. We also utilized Google Cloud, since AWS was widely used by other P-Reps.

We are now approaching to the Phase 3 of the testnet and we have successfully established our Phase 3 node. We are among first to shift to Phase 3 nodes since we believe soon is better for the network. Phase 3 is very important for us and the network since it is the first time that testnet and the mainnet will be the same, before phase 3, testnet was a small testing environment created to make P-Reps get to know the process. Testnet was not widely used nor it had the same functionalities compared to mainnet. In phase 3, we will have an equal network of the mainnet, in which P-Reps are responsible for securing and managing all testnet. This will be a great opportunity to see since we will have many capabilities on the network, to ensure our system works as flawlessly as possible. Thus, we quickly prepared our nodes for Phase 3. Due to some P-Reps not being ready, Phase 3 was delayed. We were sad to hear this, yet we are very excited and ready for this phase. Since our candidacy announcement, we have been actively participating in the testnet and participated in the stress test to see what kind of problems we might encounter on the network and devise possible ways to solve these. We can’t wait to test our limits on Phase 3 testnet.

Overall, this process has been thrilling for us since our candidacy. We hope to increase the usage of the ICON network by building more tools and more services. While doing so, we hope to hear from every one of you to ensure your demands are met in the network that’s why we occasionally ask for the brilliant ideas in the ICON Project Group on Telegram, which we believe will redirect us to the community’s needs. If you need to ask for something, please do not hesitate. You can contact us via our social media channels or directly on Telegram.

Have a great iconsensus, ICONists.