A brief history
Founded in 2017, Icon was released by the Icon Foundation, an organization based in South Korea. The goal of the ICON project is to facilitate a platform where a diverse range of industries- financial, security, insurance, healthcare, education, and commerce- can interact and transact on a single network. This means that computer applications can use the Icon software as infrastructure to create their currencies and economies. Nodes on the platform then elect to support economies in the Icon ecosystem according to their interests. The ICON project consists of five major components: the ICON Republic (governing structure), ICON communities, community representatives (C-Rep), community nodes (C-Nodes), and citizen nodes. ICON communities are a network of nodes within a single governance system; they can operate with their governance structures, numbers of nodes, and characteristics. The ICON Republic governs the process by which new ICX cryptocurrency is minted and its decisions are determined by the votes of community representatives. All nodes except citizen nodes can vote in these processes. This is because citizen nodes are participants in the blockchain that do not have voting rights but can make transactions within a community.

ICX in practice
Core to Icon’s economy is a concept called the “Icon Incentives Scoring System” (IISS), an algorithm tasked with measuring contributions to the ecosystem and distributing ICX. Each ICX cryptocurrency can be locked, or “staked,” to represent one vote that can be delegated to support either, representatives (block producers and validators), Dapps, or EEP’s (Projects funded by the Icon blockchain and that are meant to encourage ecosystem growth). By staking ICX, owners and the entity they delegate votes to receive a small reward. The IISS uses staking to determine I-Score, a unit used to quantify a user’s contribution to the network. The IISS then dynamically determines the rewards and issuance rates per block.