New SNS ability to mint SNS tokens & revised thresholds for voting

Developers
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Hey everyone!

TL;DR

We propose two changes related to SNS proposals, that have both been previously discussed on the forum.

  1. To increase security for critical proposals, we propose to increase the percent of the total voting power that must vote to adopt from 3% to 50%, as previously proposed in this forum post.
  2. Motivated by different requests from the community (link, link), we propose to add a new SNS proposal type that allows SNSs to mint new SNS tokens.

We motivate and present each change in more detail.

Implementing New Voting-Participation Thresholds for Critical Proposals

Background: Currently, there are two ways a proposal can be adopted:

  1. At any time, if at least 50% of the total voting power votes yes (absolute majority)
  2. If the voting period is over, and at least 3% of the total voting power voted yes, and there are more votes to adopt than votes to reject.

Proposed change: As presented in a previous forum post, we propose to change the 3% threshold to 50% for some “high-impact” proposal types. This includes SNS treasury proposals, minting proposals (see below), and possibly other types of proposals.

Raising this threshold to 50% means that these proposals would only be adopted if 50% of the total voting power votes to adopt. In other words, these proposals could only pass via absolute majority.

This ensures that no unpopular “high-impact” proposal gets passed just because most of the voting power didn’t notice the proposal. This is especially relevant for new SNSs, because DAO members might not have their neuron following set up shortly after launch.

How: Currently, there is a threshold named minimum_yes_proportion_of_total. This is the percent of total eligible voting power required to vote ‘yes’ for a proposal to pass. Currently it is set to 3% for all proposal types.
Our suggestion is to set minimum_yes_proportion_of_total to 50% for high-impact proposal types.

We propose to consider the following proposal types as high-impact:

  • transfer_sns_treasury_funds that allow an SNS to transfer tokens from the SNS’s ICP or SNS token treasury to another account.
  • The new minting proposal described later in this post that allows SNSs to mint new SNS tokens.
  • deregister_dapp_canisters proposals, that allow an SNS to hand the control of some SNS-governed canisters over to some principals.

API changes: For each proposal, the minimum_yes_proportion_of_total would be added to the ProposalData, ensuring that all clients have access to this information on a proposal-by-proposal basis.

Enabling SNSs to Mint New Tokens

Background: There already exists a proposal that allows transferring SNS tokens from the SNS’s SNS token treasury and ICP tokens from the SNS’s ICP treasury.

Proposed change: As requested in this forum post, we propose allowing SNSs to mint new SNS tokens…

This would grant more flexibility for SNSs in managing their token ecosystem. It opens up possibilities for new kinds of airdrops and allows SNSs to fund projects by minting new SNS tokens.

How: The feature will be introduced via a new proposal type that resembles the current SNS treasury proposal. However, in this case, the tokens would be minted on the SNS ledger (which is technically realized by a transfer from the minting account that is owned by the SNS governance canister) rather than transferred from the SNS token treasury.

Next steps

We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these changes and any other questions, comments, or concerns you have. If there’s agreement here, we plan to implement this change and propose it to the NNS community through the normal release process.

Thanks,

Andre Popovitch

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Hi !!! Great initiative, with your permission I can comment on something that perhaps can be reviewed as well.

The other day with Hot or Not’s proposal to test transfer 1 ICP from the treasury, I realized that now, as shown, there may be a malicious proposal in the future and we must be attentive.

I’m going to put 2 images and tell me if you see it quickly and see it.

NNS 1
NNS 1792×738 40.1 KB

NNS 2
NNS 2800×785 40.7 KB

Really, if one is not attentive, it is difficult to realize quickly and not vote “Adopt.”

The proposal would be to put the amount of ICP in parentheses without having to convert from e8s to ICP. The other question, how to realize that the proposal was made by the sns organization and not by anyone?

Sorry if I got off topic a little. Thank you!!

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Hey Andre,

I appreciate the efforts in refining the proposal process. However, I have a few concerns regarding the 50% absolute majority voting requirement. There’s potential risk if we can’t achieve that threshold simply because many Neuron holders missed voting on vital decisions.

Might I suggest considering a dynamic threshold based on average participation over the past three months, yet never dropping below 30% of the actual total voting power? It seems a fair compromise.

Also, perhaps introducing a penalty mechanism for Neuron holders who remain inactive during pivotal votes could be effective. For instance, deducting from their maturity might incentivize participation. It may sound stringent, but ensuring active and beneficial participation in the Network Nervous System could be crucial.

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Hi @EmrahCoskun.

Those are some options that could be worth considering in the future.

The largest problem, however, of securing the SNSes, is solved by raising the threshold to 50%, and prevents some pretty catastrophic outcomes (like draining the treasury, or minting massive amounts of tokens to some party, or stealing control of the dapp).

Taking this action now does not prevent a more sophisticated mechanism from being developed in the future, and given that SNSes can be upgraded with the normal threshold, those new capabilities could be given to an SNS in such a predicament.

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@FranHefner That’s an excellent idea, thank you for suggesting it! The next version of SNS Governance that DFINITY proposes will render treasury transfer proposals like this:

# Proposal to transfer SNS Treasury funds:
## Source treasury: ICP Treasury (ICP Ledger)
## Amount: 1.00000000 ICP
## Amount (e8s): 100000000
## Target principal: bg4sm-wzk
## Target account: bg4sm-wzk-msokwai.1
## Memo: 0

Notice the new Amount field. Hopefully that will cut down on the mental math voters need to do :smiley:

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Wow, thank you very much!! I know that they are details along with other updates, so thank you twice for reading me and being able to apply it, it is a pleasure to be able to contribute with at least small things to improve the sns. A hug to the whole team!

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If the thousands separator were shown for integers across the board, that would help.

Screenshot from 2023-10-03 21-19-16

Of course, for finance some special formatting would be better but formatting all numbers would be a good start.

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I’ve noticed recently that a number of very important ideas that require NNS governance voting have been getting posted in the Developers category instead of the Governance category on the forum. Why is that a new trend? Shouldn’t we make an effort for all proposals that require NNS voting be grouped together in a common spot on the forum?

When they are posted in the Developers category, their significance is diluted by the fact that there are 7x more Developer posts than Governance posts and almost all Developer posts are people talking about how to do this or that coding solution on the IC. It’s a lot more difficult to find NNS governance discussions in the Developer category than it is in the Governance category.

image

I know most people, especially developers, don’t like politics. I also realize that many posts in the Governance category are just people complaining about things they don’t like. However, politics is a necessary evil for ICP because code change occurs via governance voting. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable sometimes. Shouldn’t posts like this one or major changes to SNS parameters or all the System Canister Management proposal topics or anything else that will ultimately come up for voting in the NNS be posted in the Governance category? What do you think @lara @Andre-Popovitch @Manu @diegop @bjoernek @Ang? Do you think this is an important consideration or is it no big deal to use the Developers category?

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@wpb thanks for the suggestion!
While it is useful to bring this up here to have a concrete example, maybe this overall topic would better be discussed in a separate thread to not distract to much from the main discussion?

Here my initial thoughts:
I do agree that things tend to get a bit lost with the “Developers”-topic.
I wonder however if “Governance” is the right topic here. Personally, I was interpreting this topic more as the “IC Governance”, i.e., NNSs-related topics. So for posts about SNS-topics, I am sometimes not sure if it is a good fit. Obviously this is also a governance system, but I think some users might expect under the “Governance” topics that might be voted on under “NNS governance proposals”.
My suggestion a while back was to maybe introduce a new topic “DAOs” or “SNSs” so that interested users can select in a more differentiated way what posts to follow / read. If the community would find that useful, I can look into what would be needed to make this happen.

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Boom DAO, ICX, what’s the third? Are you talking about Sonic taking a reasonable amount for their team over the next quarter?

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@wpb there is now a sub-topic SNS Project Governance under Governance. It might take us a bit to get used to this / edit existing forum posts (not sure yet to what extent this is possible for very old ones), but I hope this will help finding forum users what they are interested in going forward!

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Hi all. I wanted to give a quick update on this. As described in this post from Lara, DFINITY is now going to propose something more flexible than the original plan. The new proposal will be that: “Critical proposals” are only adopted if at the end of the voting period ⅔ (67%) of the used voting power votes in favor of the proposal and at least 20% of the total voting power voted yes.

In addition, several other security measures are planned for critical proposals. (More details are available in the linked thread.) The NNS team is actively working on this, so stay tuned!

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Good news! The proposal that implements this feature for SNS governance has been adopted by the NNS:

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