NX Labs SNS Launch - Financial Applications on the ICP

We at NX Labs are excited to announce our upcoming launch of a suite of financial applications built on the Internet Computer (ICP). We are not seeking to raise funding via the SNS, but instead, we aim to leverage its powerful governance system and security model.

Our plan is to submit an SNS proposal with a 1 ICP funding target and 0 from the Community Fund in the coming weeks. Initially, all tokens will be allocated to our treasury and the developers.

Status Update: Our team is currently finalizing the alpha version of our yet-to-be-announced product. Upon successful completion, it should attract DeFi liquidity from various ecosystems into ICP. The application is entirely on-chain.

From day one, we want to provide provable security through the SNS system, without requiring external funding at this stage. Our approach allows us the flexibility to airdrop tokens to users at the full discretion of our team during the launch-promotion phase.

While we may consider raising funds or conducting a token sale in the future, we will develop our own token sale smart contracts by that time.

After a thorough evaluation of different options, we have identified three potential paths:
a) Launch SNS without raising money
b) Implement our own SNS-like governance system
c) Use a third-party solution

Ultimately, we have decided that option 1 aligns best with our goals and vision for the project.

We firmly believe that the NNS should not censor the launch of legitimate projects. As such, we kindly ask ICP community members to vote in favor of our proposal.

Thank you for your support!

Ken (twitter)
The NX Labs Team

4 Likes

My personal opinion is that the SNS should only be used to control decentralized projects. If all tokens will remain within the treasury and the team then it won’t be decentralized. If you will do your own token sale later on then the NNS is not able to vote on it’s tokenomics, which is a crucial part of deciding whether it should be under the SNS or not.

1 Like

In my opinion SNS should a governance tool for all projects. Otherwise each project would have to implement their own version of the SNS which is doable but also comes with a lot of on-going maintenance work.

NNS shouldn’t make any judgments about my tokenomics, because I’m asking for 0 ICP from the NNS. In my later token sale if people are not happy about my tokenomics then they can simply choose not to participate.

1 Like

I agree with @NathanosDev we don’t want to spam the NNS. Not saying your project is spam but without a filtering process it will just be an endless amount of projects for the SNS DAO to filter through. You can already create your own DAO and don’t need the SNS for most things.

“The SNS DAO” is a non-existing concept. There’s the NNS DAO, and a number of SNS DAOs that will be created. There is no “the SNS DAO” that governs all SNSs.

So I will be making an NNS proposal to create an SNS, which will be among the hundreds of proposals that the NNS decides on every week. I don’t think it’s spamming the NNS.

1 Like

While I can deploy my own version of the SNS (and we have seriously considered it in the option 2 above), we decided against it because we’re ultimately DeFi developers and not governance dapp developers, and don’t want to be burdened with the maintenance work of keeping our version of the SNS updated and secure. We would rather focus our developing our DeFi dapps, while still being able to benefit from the security offered by SNS. I hope this makes sense to you.

1 Like

Yea I meant the NNS. But the first idea still stands. Personally I would not approve anything that hasn’t had a level of work or dedication.

If the SNS were in a fire-and-forget maturity stage then it would be a more palatable solution for us. Unfortunately it’s not quite there yet.

I guess nothing is stopping you from making the proposal to create the SNS for your project. You would need to get support to get approved like all proposals.

1 Like

I think you shouldn’t have to create your own DAO, so I hope that either I’m only one of few that have this opinion, or that you can find a different solution that works for everyone.

What would you lose by waiting until you are ready to do your actual sale and to do this sale through an SNS instead of your own sale?

If you wanted to airdrop tokens in the meantime, other projects have already done something similar with NFTs and then owners of those NFTs are assigned a portion of the tokens generated during the SNS sale.

Otherwise, maybe it’s possible to create your ICRC-1 compatible ledger and distribute tokens as you wish and then allow the SNS to take control of this ledger as part of the sale.

I’m not working on the SNS team or anything so I hope someone there can weigh in on what’s possible, but would you consider alternative solutions? Or is there something else that you would be losing out on that I’m missing?

We want to provide an auditable trail of canister deployments and upgrades, to prove that our dapp canisters have never been tampered with. If we conduct the actual token sale first then no one would buy our tokens. If we launch on mainnet first then this audit trail would never be possible. This is very important for us, as well as for many other projects holding TVL. Without such security guarantees TVL simply would not come in the first place.

1 Like

I think you have a couple of options.

  1. You can deploy your own axon manger and launch an icrc1 compatible dao and mint/burn tokens. GitHub - icdevs/axon: DAO in a box

  2. The SNS code is open source, so I think you can launch your own instance of these canisters on your own. I wish there was a how to for this as I think it would be a great first step for most projects that think they need a formal SNS. It would give time to get used to managing via proposal and would keep the NNS out of managing and passing judgment on these things.

I could deploy my own SNS canisters but I don’t want to be burdened with having to keep my SNS up-to-date. The NNS has decided (or did it? but that’s how SNS works currently anyhow) that it wants to take on the responsibility of managing and judging SNS launches, so I guess my proposal would not be out of scope, and I see no reason why the NNS should reject my proposal since I’m not asking for anything in return.

I do see a few alternative solutions though:

  1. Make all blocks (including canister deployment/upgrade history) public, so that anyone can verify and audit the entire history of a canister.
  2. Make the SNS deployment process permissionless and the NNS would only vote to approve the usage of the Community Fund.

I feel that you are announcing your arrival and how it is going to be.

That seems more centralised Governance to me within a community that wants the opposite with a possible promise of throwing us a bone.

I think the voters here have the say on how the IC evolves and while the IC is Public and you should and could do as you say you may need us more than we need you!

So far you do not have my vote.