ICON P-Rep Update

P-Rep Status:

The Pocket/Figment P-Rep node currently sits at 34 on ICON tracker with a performance rate of 97.13%

Fully aware that we have been quieter in the community as of late, we hope that today’s update will further encourage the ICON community to continue to delegate with us.

Development Update:

We have gotten confirmation from ICON developers that our pull requests will be carefully reviewed (ideally merged) for integration with ICON official SDKs!

This took some time to get confirmed(part of the reason we have been quieter), but we are happy to share this information with you today!

The idea behind this is not to reinvent the wheel but instead, work with key players in the ICON ecosystem to embolden their existing toolkits.

The first integration between Pocket Network and ICON network will be for the ICON- Javascript SDK.

We are planning to have this PR submitted after the release of the Pocket testnet, and by the end of our engineering sprint on the 21st of February.

Then following the release of Pocket-Core Testnet, February 11th, the team will work to submit pull requests for ICON mobile SDKs for iOS and Android developers. We plan to have these finalized later in March.

There is a dependency with the mobile integrations, in that the Pocket team is working to create Core tooling for the Testnet and Mainnet release for Mobile platforms. We believe by focusing on integrations for the Pocket Testnet and Mainnet release, as opposed to our current Pocket-Core MVP implementation, we will provide a better experience and more value to the longer-term ICON decentralization objectives.

As a reminder, what the integration for ICON SDKs will do is give the opportunity for any ICON applications using ICON SDKs to connect to ICON nodes through Pocket Network, which by design decentralizes the node infrastructure for that application by way of its relay network protocol. Very much in line with the ICON community’s movement towards maximum decentralization. Not to mention this will be more cost-effective than traditional infrastructure models.

The other aspect of Pocket Network that we are very excited to bring to the ICON community, is Pocket’s node incentivization scheme for full nodes that are serving ICON applications. Whereas before, ICON full nodes had no direct incentives for relaying data between an app and a blockchain, now those nodes will be rewarded for their efforts via POKT crypto-economics.

We believe that this incentive alignment will work to grow ICON’s node network, beyond the P-Rep community and large providers, and into a diverse network of highly performant nodes.

The initiative to onboard ICON nodes into Pocket Network is called “ICON-DI” and we plan to start communications and pre-onboarding support near to the release of the Mobile Integrations, which gives our community some time to sort through any initial bugs, and ICON applications a chance to test the protocol.

As we all know in this space and evolving market, there is much experimentation involved, which takes time to mature, so we are very appreciative of your patience and for all of you who have continued to support Pocket/Figment in our efforts to embolden the ICON ecosystem.

Look forward to more communications regarding our development process, protocol updates, and more as we play our part in ICON’s continued decentralization.

Some things to look out for February.

• Pull Request submitted for ICON-JS integration with Pocket Network
• The release of the POKT economic paper, for information on Pocket’s node incentivization scheme.
• The release of Pocket’s Testnet protocol.