Finance

The number of transactions dynamics (information from tracker.icon.foundation)

The ICON Foundation is excited for the upcoming decentralization in September. As the election approaches, many potential P-Rep candidates and community members have asked about how ICON will be participating in the ICONSENSUS Election.

In order to continue ICON’s work long into the future, and given the non-profit nature of the foundation, ICON will be using up to 3% of the total supply to vote for its own node upon the decentralization of the network. This amount will be carefully controlled because this amount should not affect the decentralization of the network.

This is in line with what some other protocols have done. For example, at the time of writing, ZCash takes a “Founder’s Reward” from every block and the Tezos Foundation runs 8 “bakers”, accounting for ~30% of block production, on the Tezos network.

This decision was made after thorough consideration with the goal of aligning the interests of the Foundation and the community, ensuring a smooth transition to decentralization and supporting the growth and development of the ecosystem.

Over the course of time, this will result in the dilution of ICON’s ownership percentage, leading to greater decentralization as the network matures.

The ICON Foundation has submitted its Delegate Proposal to icon.community. The details can be found below:

>>>ICON Foundation’s Delegate Proposal

Recently, ICON Foundation has introduced changes to its IISS, the ICON Incentives Scoring System, purposed for keeping high decentralization rates. It comprises a penalty system, changes to the ICX issuance and transaction fees.

Apart from all other changes, the ICON network now requires to run stable nodes and take their input to the consensus seriously. If a node fails to operate stably and reliably over one representative term (43,120 blocks), 6% of its delegation will be burned, which will lead to losses not only for the node but for the delegators as well.

Everstake ICON Node

Everstake runs one of the most powerful performance hardware on the market. The core principles are to use highly secure and reliable nodes for PoS and DPoS protocols utilizing the enterprise-level hardware to ensure maximum efficiency and security.

The Server

Its nodes are running on the most up-to-date server hardware with lots of headroom in capacity and power delivery.

Intel® Xeon® E-2176G Hexa-Core processor with 12 MB of L3 SmartCache and 12 threads running at up to 4,7 GHz, based on Coffee Lake architecture;

64 GB of DDR4 ECC memory, capable of keeping the whole blockchain in memory;

2x1 TB of enterprise-level SSD for local storage;

Stable 1 GBps port.

Safety and Security

Everstake uses a firewall and key level access restrictions on servers, only to authorized personnel.

Additionally, an HSM server module with API access will be used after the mainnet launch. Currently, Everstake uses an HSM with the development server with separate access to each developer, to master its security protocols before launching HSM on the mainnet node.

Maintenance and Stability

Apart from the Everstake Telegram bot that offers 24/7 monitoring to all Everstake customers with flexible alerts and notifications, Evertake uses the latest monitoring software within its engineering team. Grafana with data feeds from Prometheus collects all possible system’s vital stats, and the Munin’s unique dependency detecting algorithms help its engineers to find the primary problem within seconds after getting a notification.

Recovery Backup

Everstake owns 3 servers located in different data centers. All servers have hardware RAID1 (mirroring). It uses separate backup storage in each data center for fast recovery/backups.

Maintenance Personnel

Everstake is created by Attic Lab, a software development company operating in the blockchain industry. Everstake is a team of highly experienced DevOps, hardware and software engineers that manages all the operations on each of its nodes and servers.

Why You Should Carefully Search for an ICON P-Rep

Every P-Rep should provide the technical details of their nodes to keep a healthy and transparent competition, especially within a network with incentives, such as ICON’s IISS. It is a highly important factor for delegators to make their choices.

IISS provisions three disqualification penalties, of which two are automatic, which would harm the delegators once applied. The validation penalty is applied once a P-Rep fails to validate blocks successively for 660 blocks. If triggered, a P-Rep will be excluded from the process for the whole next term, which leads to delegators not getting the rewards at all. It can happen if the node has an unstable or slow Internet connection.

As with any other DPoS blockchain, block producers are put in a queue, in which they are allowed to validate all upcoming transactions and produce a block, which usually takes 1 to 3 seconds. The validation is triggered once a previous block has been confirmed, hence it puts a requirement of extremely low network latency for the node. The faster the node is notified that it is allowed to start validation, the greater is the chance to complete the validation process in time.

For that purpose, all nodes should have stable Internet connections with as big bandwidth as possible. Look for servers that utilize 1 Gbps ports as it is wide enough but still uses a more stable and time-proven technology than 10 Gbps or faster ports, where constraints of a network switch are also stepping into the game.

The other possible penalty is the one for low production. It is triggered if a P-Rep fails to validate 15% or more of blocks, which can easily happen if they have poor hardware, specifically a weak processor, or a small amount of slow memory without error correction. This penalty will burn 6% of the delegated funds and will lead to direct losses by the delegators.

A powerful processor with large L3 cache is needed to go through the previous transactions of the funds being checked and to verify all the assets down to their issuance point. This process may require checking hundreds of thousands of transactions in less than a second. The memory plays a big deal in this process as well, as it should be fast and capacious enough to give access to any transaction in the blockchain instantly. DDR4 ECC-memory provides access times as low as 12,5 milliseconds and minimizes the possibility of an error, which would lead to repeating the whole verification process of one transaction in the queue.