DFINITY votes to reject proposal 135318 to remove the Neurons’ Fund (NF) from the launchpad

Governance NNS proposal discussions
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TL;DR

  • DFINITY plans to reject the motion proposal 135318 that proposes to remove the Neurons’ Fund (NF) from the SNS Launchpad.
  • Rather than removing the NF, we propose to consider improvements to the NF and the SNS launch overall.

The Neurons’ Fund (NF) has helped various SNS projects to collect more initial funds than would have been possible with the direct swap. It has also been an opportunity for Neurons’ Fund neurons to contribute to the ICP ecosystem by participating in SNS launches with their maturity.

Let us first recap how the Neurons’ Fund works and who can already make which choices today.

  • The NNS votes on each SNS launch. If the NNS thinks that certain projects don’t meet the bar or criteria that justify a NF contribution, then they can reject the proposal. This has happened in the past.
  • Even when an SNS is launched for a project, each user can choose whether they want to participate in the swap. Different individuals can take into account different aspects that they care about in this assessment.
  • This is also true for NF neurons.
    • NF neurons make an active choice to be in the NF.
    • NF neurons can leave the NF at any point in time. For example, they can leave the NF if they think the NF is not providing benefits or when they see a forum announcement for an upcoming launch with NF participation that they don’t like.

We agree that there are also some aspects about the NF design that can be improved.
However, due to the above mentioned advantages and because each user can already decide today to not participate in the NF and SNS launches that don’t meet their criteria, we don’t think removal of the NF is the best way forward. Instead we would rather consider improving the design.

Therefore we have added items to our roadmap to look further into such improvements.
When we reach those steps on our roadmap, we should first analyse in more detail what improvements make sense, but let us share a few initial ideas here:

  • Review of the parameters for matched funding. This could be used to increase the bar on when the NF contributions kick in.
  • Consider if some of the treasury should be reserved for certain things, like liquidity pools. This would not only ensure that the NF is used in ways that benefit the DAO, but also contribute to solving liquidity issues that some SNSs experience.

Once we approach those items, we will again share and discuss ideas with the community.

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These are some great ideas @lara. I especially like the idea of a portion of the Neuron’s Fund being used to automatically establish liquidity pools on the various DEX built on ICP. There are definitely ways that this can be done that help ensure that initial token swaps don’t show an over inflated trend and help protect the initial investors from what could be interpreted as a rug. I think launch.bob.fun does this pretty well based on how they use the funds that are raised on the boding curve. I assume other apps like odin.fun do something similar as well. I’m sure there are many ways of accomplishing the goal and it would be well worth building this into the SNS framework.

I’m also a fan of the idea of raising the bar for what it takes to receive matching funds from the Neuron’s Fund. In addition to that, it would be nice if known neurons would raise the bar for adopting a proposal to launch an SNS. It would help if there were diplomatic, fair, independent, and public reviewers for SNS proposals that people could turn to for credible and reliable evaluations of SNS proposals before they vote. I personally think the NNS should incentivize people to fill these roles. Not as degens, but with a professional and collaborative approach.

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