With the conclusion of the pre-voting period approaching in about a month, we’d like to take the time to update the community and show our voters what RHIZOME has produced thus far. For, it’s easy to make promises but, it’s hard work to keep them.

Content

Our team members at RHIZOME have been creating unique content about the ICON project dating back since practically the beginning of the project. More importantly, this content is unique in the sense it is “fresh” - meaning it’s not some simple “copy and paste” or overtly recycled material. It’s our own insights, with a fresh perspective on news bites, press releases, and even topics of interest to ourselves and the community.

Written content has been produced on the RHIZOME blog, as well as the blogs of team members William McKenzie and Brian Li, and additionally, the Medium account of Iconographer (which includes the go-to ICON beginner series - “ICON 101”).

Audio content has been produced in the form of our podcast, “The RHIZOME Report,” and our podcast series will continue to provide a platform for other notable ICON community members and P-Rep teams to engage with the community.

Additionally, video content has been released on RHIZOME’s own YouTube channel through our “RHIZOME Offline” series, which is focused on providing ICONists with the latest news and updates about the ICON ecosystem and more importantly, seeing our faces and hearing us in real life. Additionally, video content has been released on our team member Mineable’s own YouTube channel.

To consolidate our efforts at RHIZOME, we have included a full index on GitHub of our contributions on the content end. So, if you want to see that, be sure to visit our ICON resources page on GitHub!

Now for the fun stuff – the numbers.

As of our most recent count (September 22, 2019), across several of our team members’ personal blogs, medium accounts, and even guest posts within “ The Iconist”, we have collectively published 82 articles with over 100,000 words.

Additionally, we have released 14 videos on YouTube across Mineable, and our very own RHIZOME Youtube Channel. Total run time is over 3.65 hours or approximately, 219.15 minutes of video content. Total views on our video content is over 80,000 (as of September 22, 2019).

Lastly, with our “The RHIZOME Report” podcast series we have released 7 podcasts thus far of which are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Total run time is over 3.66 hours or approximately, 220 minutes.

The above of course does not take into account our interactions within various ICON social channels but, includes a rather exhaustive list of content we have produced thus far as we promised in our initial proposal.

Development & Node Infrastructure

Recently, we updated Marvin, our Daedric price feed bot, to operate on the ICON mainnet. Additionally, we deployed a version of Marvin on AWS Lambda – Amazon’s serverless computing platform. Compared to deploying Marvin on traditional cloud services like Digital Ocean, EC2, and Compute Engine, deploying on Lambda results in a significant cost savings.

Running a stable node infrastructure is one of our core focuses as a P-Rep, and we have a few pieces of exciting information to share on that end. Over the last few months, we’ve been constantly testing ICON’s citizen node and P-Rep node software. As a result, we’ve gained a lot of experience on how to deploy clusters of load-balanced citizen nodes on top tier cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform and AWS. This is good news for our voters because scaling up our citizen node infrastructure can help with protecting our P-Rep node from malicious attacks.

Manual node deployment can be a cumbersome process that is prone to errors. This is even more true if you’re trying to scale up infrastructure under pressure. To address this, we’ve developed a node deployment script that is capable of spinning up a fully functional citizen or P-Rep node in less than two minutes. Feel free to watch the video below to see how it works.

In its current incarnation, the node deployment script is tailored for our specific workflow and infrastructure. With that said, we think this kind of tool would be hugely beneficial for the ICON community. At the moment, we are working on building a public version of this tool that will allow any ICONist to spin up a citizen node or P-Rep node in a matter of minutes. Check out the tweet below for a sneak peek of what we’re working on.

Looking Forward

Should we get elected as a P-Rep for the ICON protocol, we will have the resources and ability to increase the volume and rate of our content production and also pursue other endeavors that will benefit ICON and require funding. Also, we are actively working on creating useful infrastructure tools, and have participated in all phases of the testnet and will continue to do so moving forward.

With RHIZOME as a P-Rep, the ICON ecosystem will benefit from high-quality and high-volume content, expansion of new development initiatives and rest easy knowing we will be able to maintain a node that is as reliable as possible.

As of this date, we are overwhelmed with the amount of support that has been shown for RHIZOME so far by the community and we appreciate the support.

We look forward to contributing even more to the ICON ecosystem if we are elected.