The ICON Foundation has announced it will be giving away 3 million ICX tokens to participants in its upcoming election. The election will determine which parties will serve as node holders, known as Public Representatives (P-Reps) on the ICON network. The giveaway tokens will be distributed during a 30-day pre-voting period, set to open on August 26.

The pre-voting period and the giveaway are part of the project’s ongoing journey towards decentralization, which it calls ICONSENSUS. The 3 million tokens will be distributed as a reward to those ICX holders who participate in pre-voting. The Foundation is providing these tokens from its own supply, thereby dispersing voting influence across the network prior to the full election launch.

The pre-voting period is also designed to balance out votes between the various candidates vying to become a P-Rep. The ICON Foundation is encouraging its community to spread individual votes between multiple P-Reps as a means of avoiding the centralization of power among a few node holders.

This move aims to overcome the challenges faced by blockchains, such as EOS. A large number of EOS tokens are held by a small number of exchanges and whales, which have been found to engage in collusion and mutual voting. ICON is flagging the P-Rep elections as the first step for it to achieve full decentralization.

Voter Participation

The pre-voting period will run from August 26 to September 24. During that time, anyone holding ICX tokens in an ICONex wallet can stake their tokens and vote for their chosen P-Reps. This will earn the right to participate in the 3 million token giveaway.

To help voters decide on their chosen P-Reps, the project has set up a dedicated webpage for the ICONSENSUS process. This includes a full list of the P-Rep candidates together with details about their application. There is also a step-by-step guide to staking and voting. Users can expect to see the wallet interface updated with the voting feature soon.

The P-Rep elections are a significant milestone for ICON, which has been making headway on its roadmap over recent months. Last month, the project rolled out a new transaction fee system designed to increase adoption by overcoming the need for dApp users to hold cryptocurrencies. Shortly afterward, it has released updates to its incentives yellow paper.

Now, it will be intriguing to see if the project’s efforts with these pre-voting initiatives are sufficient to overcome the centralization issues that have plagued EOS. Given ICON’s stated commitment to becoming fully decentralized, the pre-voting incentives are a clear demonstration of its intent to live up to the challenge.

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