After the end of 2024, we want to review some highlights from the past year with the community and share 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 the ICP's NNS DAO and individual dapp's SNS DAO, as well as milestone updates in the technical roadmap.
If you missed the first two blogs in this series, you can find an overview of the governance highlights for 2024 here, and more details about the 2024 SNS features can be found here.
Without further ado, let’s conclude this series with the third and final blog, which will introduce the NNS or Network Nervous System of the Internet Computer.
Highlights of the NNS DAO on ICP
Introduction
The Network Nervous System (NNS) is an on-chain decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that manages the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). It is responsible for overseeing the entire Internet Computer and makes all decisions regarding the network's future, including protocol updates, node management, and guiding the rules of governance and token economics.
In this blog post, we will closely examine the key updates and new features launched in 2024 to improve NNS governance.
A major focus in 2024 is to promote and strengthen active participation in governance. We will first explore why participation in NNS governance is crucial for the ICP ecosystem, followed by an in-depth look at some key improvements made to achieve this goal. Additionally, we will highlight other exciting advancements that occurred this year.
Governance Participation: The Pillar of ICP Security
All changes to the Internet Computer Protocol are made through proposals and decided by the votes of all NNS participants, with voting conducted by neurons that have locked ICP.
If participants do not have the time or expertise to thoroughly review each proposal, they can vote directly or delegate their voting rights to a trusted expert, which is referred to as following.
Decentralization of NNS is crucial for the security and reliability of ICP, ensuring that no party can alter the protocol or control the network, making it essential for independent governance participants to make prudent and informed decisions.
Since the NNS allows for direct voting and vote delegation, there are two aspects to the goal of enabling independent parties to make informed decisions:
Active Voters: Independent voters should conduct comprehensive reviews and votes on all proposals based on sufficient information. Given the numerous proposals, these active voters can be entities rather than individuals. The more such voters there are, the less likely proposals are to be overlooked, which also helps prevent power concentration.
Consciously choosing followers: Those who delegate voting should thoughtfully select whom to follow, ensuring that the experts they choose have the necessary expertise and make well-considered decisions. Regularly modifying follower choices can ensure that trust and expertise are always reflected in the voting process.
Activities to Promote Governance Participation in 2024
Due to its importance, many initiatives and features related to the NNS in 2024 focused on achieving the key goal of promoting governance participation. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most impactful initiatives and features.
Let us first look at some features that help achieve the first goal of incentivizing direct voting and making it easier:
Encouraging active voting: As mentioned, it is important to have voters thoroughly review proposals and not miss any proposals to ensure that harmful changes are not introduced.
Since all changes to the ICP are made through entirely on-chain proposals, many proposals contain code and are highly technical, making it necessary to have expertise and a significant time investment for reviewing proposals.
To incentivize experts to dedicate their time, we introduced voting grants, funded by the DFINITY Foundation, with grant recipients selected by the NNS through a series of proposals.
The program enables grant recipients to conduct in-depth reviews of proposals and provide critical feedback to proposers on various topics. These reviews are shared with the community and help authors establish themselves as experts, gaining attention if they provide evidence of excellent work.
What will happen in 2025? Voting grants are an important first step in incentivizing active participation, but they rely on DFINITY as the sole funding source. Therefore, the next step is to transition from grants to an automated built-in rewards system, rewarding voters who make outstanding contributions by thoroughly reviewing proposals and making informed decisions.
Actionable proposals on the NNS dapp: The NNS dapp has been updated (see the screenshot below) to clearly indicate to users which proposals they can still vote on, increasing the chances that direct voters will not miss any proposals. It also helps attract users by clearly showing what actions they can take.
Additionally, the following features launched in 2024 aim to achieve the second goal mentioned above, helping incentivize those who delegate voting rights to regularly review their choices:
Regular confirmation: A key feature introduced is regular confirmation. To continue receiving rewards, governance participants must directly vote, set following preferences, or confirm their existing following choices at least once every 6 months. If participants fail to do so, their rewards will gradually decrease until they reach zero after 7 months, at which point the following settings will also expire.
In this way, users can actively reconsider whom they follow and ensure that their delegation aligns with their current understanding of governance and network priorities. In 2024, this feature underwent extensive discussions with the community, and the high-level design was approved in the proposal motion.
What happened in 2025? In January 2025, this feature was launched in the NNS, allowing voters and integrators to learn how to take action through forum posts.
Finally, a series of features are listed to make it easier for everyone to participate in governance:
New organization of proposal topics: Governance participants who delegate voting rights can delegate based on proposal topics, allowing them to follow different experts for different types of proposals. In 2024, the NNS implemented a new organization of proposal topics, making it easier for direct voters (e.g., grant recipients) to commit to voting on proposals on certain topics consistently, thus making them reliable experts to focus on that topic. It also makes it easier for participants to navigate and understand different areas of governance, enabling them to make better and clearer choices about which topics to focus on and who to follow.
NNS explanatory education series: To help new participants join and enhance their understanding of NNS governance, a series of new educational tutorials was launched, guiding beginners on how to acquire ICP tokens and start participating in governance, as well as how to vote or set preference to follow. For more experienced community members and experts, the series explains how to analyze different types of proposals in depth.
Integration of DFINITY neurons: Another important update in 2024 was the integration of two neurons representing the identities of governance participants, namely the DFINITY Foundation and the Internet Computer Association (ICA). Neuron 28 (ICA) was merged into Neuron 27 (DFINITY Foundation), simplifying the voting process and reducing unnecessary complexity in governance. This cleanup simplifies the subsequent process for voters wishing to delegate their voting rights to DFINITY.
Other notable features in 2024
In addition to participating in governance, another significant proposal in 2024 introduced the option for voting neurons to determine whether to conduct voting publicly or privately. This new feature acknowledges that some users may wish to keep their votes private, while others (especially those wanting to attract significant community attention) may prefer to share their votes publicly.
This initiative for flexibility is an important step in balancing the transparency and privacy of the nervous system, and it also opens the door for the development of neuron indexing, which is a much-needed feature.
Conclusion
In summary, significant progress was made in NNS governance in 2024, particularly focusing on governance participation. We look forward to an exciting 2025, engaging in extensive community discussions to further improve the NNS!
Did you like this article? Learn how to participate and use the tutorial to try out the ICP DAO, and share your thoughts on the DFINITY Developers X channel; we would love to hear your feedback!
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