This year will be a great year for ICON. During the ‘crypto winter’ of 2018, ICON continued to build and develop their technology, laying the foundation for even bigger things to come in 2019, especially in the second half of 2019 with ICONSENSUS!

So what is ICONSENSUS?

ICONSENSUS is the decentralization of ICON, helping to boost ICON to new heights. ICONSENSUS is composed of four main elements:

1. The election of P-Reps (Public Representatives) to decentralize the ICON Network
 2. The election of C-Reps (Community Representatives) to support interchain communication
 3. To promote DApp Booster Programs to fund and encourage quality decentralized applications 
 4. To promote Ecosystem Expansion Projects to encourage the ICON Ecosystem’s growing operations.

What is a Public Representative (P-Rep)?

A Public Representative (P-Rep) is a full node on the ICON Network how verifies transactions on the ICON Network, produce and verify blocks, proposes measures and vote on monetary policy, network upgrades, governance changes, measures that are beneficial to ICON Network.
P-Reps are the top 22 Main P-Reps and 78 Sub P-Reps, chosen by ICX holders according to their vote. Each holder of ICX will have the opportunity to vote for one or more P-Reps, delegating their chosen amount of ICX to each. 
You can find the list of P-Rep candidates here. There, every P-Rep candidate is presenting their proposal, which includes a description of their team, motivation to become a P-Rep, execution plan, and the timeline. Thus every ICX holder should educate themselves on the different P-Rep candidates so they can choose their favorite team/teams to vote for.

The winning P-Reps will serve a dual purpose: they will securely run ICON nodes to confirm transactions on the blockchain and will also represent the community through Governance and other activities. In this aspect, P-Reps operate similarly to elected politicians, with a key difference being that P-Reps can be removed from office if they don’t fulfill their duties, whereas most politicians are in office for at least a few years of time. Thus every ICONist should vote for the P-Rep(s) that best align with their interest and views.

What is a Community Representative (C-Rep)?

The most important thing from our point of view is that C-Rep manages transfers and transactions between different blockchain networks, between the ICON Blockchain and another blockchain. So imagine transactions between ICON Blockchain and Bitcoin or Ethereum, how it sounds? Also, C-Reps will take care of ICON Network in the same manner as P-Reps.

What is a DApp?

DApp is the abbreviation of Decentralized Applications.

Decentralized applications are applications that are storing all their data on blockchain technology, the code of DApp is open-source and is managed autonomously, use tokens to reward users and is using a cryptographically secured protocol.

Regarding specific DApps for ICON Network, ICON has launched ICON TX (Transaction) Challenge, a large blockchain development contest with a total prize pool of 1 million ICX in order to support developers to produce their own DApps or websites. More info here.

What is Ecosystem Expansion Projects?

ICON community members can propose, execute and publish documentation/tutorials/videos regarding ICON Network or can develop other tools to support the network, tools like: wallets, block explorers and so on.

In the next article, we will talk a little bit about Staking on ICON Network.