Increasing Decentralization & Reducing ICP Inflation with a Single Proposal

Governance
92

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who contributed valuable input and feedback to this thread.

We had a few productive conversations with folks from DFINITY in the last couple of weeks discussing periodic confirmation as well as related topics and how they fit together. Today, I would like to summarize DFINITY’s view on periodic confirmation and a proposed way forward on how to combine it with other features on the NNS roadmap as a step towards more voting participation and decentralization.

Periodic confirmation

Different motivations for periodic confirmation have been discussed.

We agree with others that for the originally proposed reduction of spam proposals, periodic confirmation is not needed anymore. We also agree that the reduced voting reward inflation is a likely side-effect of the feature. However, we think this should not be the main goal, as in a perfect governance system as many neurons as possible should participate in governance - in which case the reduction in inflation would be low.

In our view, the main advantages of periodic confirmation are the following.

  1. The default following is reset and thus every neuron would have to make at least once a conscious decision who to follow.
  2. Followers are incentivised to regularly reconsider their choice and therefore be more likely to change their following to a more diverse set of neurons. This is contributing to the high level goal of a more active and decentralized NNS.

To address the first point, it was proposed to do a soft reset in the form of a new DFINITY voting neuron. The community does not seem to be in favor of replacing periodic confirmation by a new DFINITY voting neuron. We therefore propose to implement periodic confirmation with the goal of increasing governance participation and decentralization.

Higher level goal

As pointed out by many in this discussion, periodic confirmation alone will likely not lead to further decentralization of the NNS. For a more decentralized NNS it is also required that there are more alternative neurons who are directly voting and can be followed. Therefore, we propose the following combination of features, which seems to be in accordance with many opinions raised in this discussion:

  1. Periodic confirmation of following in order to incentivise followers to be more active and follow a more diverse set of followees.

  2. Incentives for actively voting neurons to motivate more neurons to spend time verifying and directly voting on proposals to become experts that can be followed by others.

Proposed next steps

We propose the following next steps for working towards the two sub-goals.

  • Periodic confirmation. The high level idea was approved by the community in proposal [55651](https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/proposal/55651). Some details still need to be clarified, for example how this can be implemented in a user-friendly way that gives users enough time to act. There are already a lot of ideas how this could be done and we will start working on putting those together into a concrete design in the coming weeks. We then plan to share a concrete proposal on the forum in a new post.

  • Incentives for actively voting neurons. From this thread, it seems that a lot of community members agree that incentivising voting neurons is a feature that should be explored. The ultimate solution for this problem should be built into the NNS and be independent of any centralized party. As the solution space is large and our resources are limited, we expect that it will still take a few weeks until we can share one or multiple concrete proposal(s). However, we are also considering a more pragmatic short-term solution that could be used to already incentivise a few known neurons to get familiar with the process and start voting while the longer-term design is worked out. We are actively discussing this at the moment and plan to share it in a new forum post within the next two weeks.

Even though a lot of this is still under work, we hope it is helpful that we share our current view and the high level plan that we aim at. We look forward to sharing more concrete designs soon and are welcoming your feedback as always!

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