After the end of 2024, we want to review some highlights from last year with the community and share some key points about the future of Internet Computer governance in 2025.
In this three-part series, we will reveal key technological achievements, governance principles for managing ICP's NNS DAO, and the SNS DAO that governs individual dapps, as well as updates on technical roadmap milestones.
First, we will review some key achievements of the DAO community on ICP in 2024.
2024 Review: An Extraordinary Year for ICP Governance
2024 is an exciting year for on-chain governance of the Internet Computer (ICP), with ICP rolling out a series of impressive governance features throughout the year, most of which were requested by the community. In addition to expanding its capabilities, the governance system on ICP also set record-breaking numbers, demonstrating its true robustness and the growing activity of the community and developers.
A testament to the activity of the ICP DAO community is that 18 of the top 20 most active DAOs on DeFi Llama (measured by the number of successful proposals in the last 30 days) are running on the Internet Computer.
As the year comes to a close, the governance roadmap for the Internet Computer has also completed the Plasma milestone, which covers a range of features, including user-facing functionalities and enhancements for developer experience. We will highlight the most interesting governance features set to be released in 2024 in the next article of this series.
Managing the Internet Computer (NNS)
The Network Nervous System (NNS) is a fully on-chain decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) responsible for managing the Internet Computer protocol. The protocol code of ICP is updated by the NNS, rather than using forks like most traditional blockchains.
Decisions in the NNS are made by a decentralized community of independent ICP token holders, enabling ICP to continuously evolve in terms of security, efficiency, and scale without relying on a single participant.
Since the genesis of ICP on May 10, 2021, the NNS has processed over 11,800 proposals that have upgraded the protocol of the Internet Computer, making it more efficient and secure by continuously updating the protocol on which node machines run, evolving the NNS DAO itself through updates to token economics and voting rules, and more.
Over the years, the number of proposals handled by the NNS has been astonishingly stable, with the decrease in proposals from 2022 to 2023 attributed to tasks being fully automated, thereby reducing the overall number of manual proposals needed.
Managing dapps on the Internet Computer (SNS)
The Service Nervous System (SNS) is a fully on-chain DAO framework that allows any decentralized application (dapp) to transfer control to the community of SNS governance token holders, enabling each community to control its dapp through its own SNS DAO.
After transferring control of the dapp to the community, developers can no longer simply push updates; instead, they need to submit proposals to be voted on by token holders.
In 2024, the number of proposals submitted and processed by SNS surged. While the number of SNS itself roughly doubled compared to the previous year (from 14 to 30), the number of proposals handled by these DAOs grew by 513% in 2024.
The most active SNS DAO is WaterNeuron - a liquidity staking protocol based on ICP that implements an automatic mechanism within its protocol to replicate and vote on NNS proposals.
Following WaterNeuron, the most active DAOs are social media dapps (with the most active being OpenChat and OpenFPL), followed by DEXs (with the most active being ICLighthouse and ICPSwap). For more detailed data, you can check each SNS on the ICP dashboard.
The main goal of SNS is to achieve decentralized governance of dapps. The launch of SNS includes decentralized exchanges, which allow community members and users of these dapps to exchange their ICP for SNS governance tokens, thus becoming part of the SNS DAO community.
Decentralized exchanges provided many communities with the funding needed to continue development after the launch of SNS. 2024 is the largest year for SNS so far - new projects launched since genesis have raised over $38 million, with SNS raising over 10 million ICP.
Summary
Decentralized governance is at the core of the Internet Computer - it provides trust for the Internet Computer protocol itself as well as for the security and integrity of DAO-governed dapps running on it, becoming increasingly impressive each year since its genesis, and 2025 is set to be another exciting year for ICP governance.
We are eager to hear your feedback; you can share your thoughts anytime on the DFINITY Developers X channel and the developer forum, and stay tuned for more upcoming technical roadmap updates.
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