UBIK Capital is off to a strong start as a P-Rep — at the time of writing, the team was No. 4 in the P-Rep rankings. And they are looking forward to the year to come.

“We here at UBIK Capital appreciate the strong support we’ve received from the ICON community in voting us to the No. 4 position,” says co-founder Russell Shirey. “Now that we are receiving rewards, we are ramping up our efforts and look forward to continuing to serve the community and to help grow the ICON ecosystem. It’s going to be a really fun and productive next year.”

Developing and educating

UBIK Capital is a five-person team of passionate ICONists in the United States and Europe. The crew boasts extensive experience in software development, program management and server infrastructure. Shirey says, “We really want to use our skill sets to grow the ICON community and ecosystem and to help increase the value of ICON.”

In particular, UBIK Capital wants to leverage its software development experience to create more DApps because, in their view, that will really help ICON succeed. Shirey explains:

“The economics of ICON are built in such a way that the rewards are utilized to incentive contribution and these rewards are going to be funded with transaction fees. Currently, the number of transactions on the network are not enough to pay for all the rewards. That results in inflation. If we can help grow the network through more DApps and more ways for people to use the network, that will lower inflation and form a nice economic outlook for ICON where the DApps and transaction fees are actually funding the rewards.”

Creating a viral DApp is something easier said than done. UBIK Capital has adopted a two-pronged approach: building DApps on their own while creating technical tutorials to educate and onboard developers. The team recently released its first iOS Swift Tutorial, covering how to integrate ICON blockchain functionality into an iOS App using the ICON Swift SDK.

And on Tuesday (Nov. 13), UBIK Capital — along with fellow P-Reps ICONation, RHIZOME and Sharpn – announced ICON CORE, a developer-focused portal and toolset designed to improve the process of onboarding developers by providing a well-documented codebase for a variety of the ICON blockchain’s real-world applications in various programming languages. “Developers will have the opportunity to search by function what they want to accomplish and see different ways to accomplish those functions on ICON in different languages,” says Shirey. “We’re pretty excited about that.”