The economics of the ICON Network's distributed financial system is based on two main components:
The ICX currency is referred to as a native coin. This means that if a network based off of the ICON blockchain was run, either as a test network, a side-chain, or an independent network, then that new network would contain two currencies with equivalent functionalities.
As explained in the documentation sections on Governance and Network, ICON Network contains actors called Delegates or Validators. These actors are responsible for some important actions that determine whether the entire network is useful or not. Because of this, the delegates are rewarded for good, efficient behavior and are penalized for bad, inefficient behavior. Read more about this system in the section entitled Rewards & Penalties.