Recently we saw more questions on the forum regarding NNS voting rewards. Therefore, we would like to recall a few core concepts of how NNS voting rewards work, including some practical tips around recent features and changes.
Some quick reminders on how rewards work
- A proposal goes through the following lifecycle: Submission > Voting > Decision > Execution > Reward distribution.
So after a proposal is in a final state of either executed, failed, or rejected, the governance canister will take it into account for the next reward round. There is one reward even each day.- Practically, this means that proposals’ rewards can get settled up to 1 day after they are decided. So if you newly get rewards you have to wait for the first proposal you participated in to be executed (4-8 days) and potentially wait 1 day until the rewards for the proposal are settled and you see maturity. This is true for a new neuron as well as for existing neurons that haven’t received any rewards and you now took action to fix this for the future.
- There can be days where no rewards are distributed: If there are no proposals that reach a final state between two reward events, then there are no proposals to be settled on a given reward event. In such a case, neurons’ maturity would not be increased on that day.
- This has for example happened last week.
Here some practical tips
- Following settings: If you follow multiple neurons, it is advisable to ensure that all of them vote on all the proposals of the topic you follow them on. Your neuron only votes to adopt a proposal if more than half of the neurons within the followee-group vote to adopt the proposal and a neuron only votes to reject a proposal if at least half of the neurons within the followee-group voted reject. Followees that abstain can therefore also contribute to your neuron not voting.
See here, paragraph “Following / vote delegation”, for the rules that are applied. In particular, recall the following warning:
Your neuron will cast a vote when there are enough followee votes to make a decision whether it is a ADOPT or REJECT. For example, if you follow 10 neurons on a topic:
- Your neuron only votes to adopt if at least 6 out of the 10 neurons vote to adopt.
- Your neuron only votes to reject a proposal if at least 5 out of the 10 reject the proposal.
- If less than 5 neurons (out of your 10 followed) vote at all, your neuron will not cast any vote
This should be considered when choosing to follow multiple neurons on a topic. It might be better to follow fewer neurons, and it can be more beneficial to follow an odd number of neurons than an even number.
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Neuron 28 is inactive: The Internet Computer Association (ICA) neuron, with neuron ID 28, might not vote anymore. See here for the announcement that the Internet Computer Association neuron will disappear after March 2025, paragraph “What to do to maintain a chosen voting following”.
- If you only follow neuron 28 your neuron will not vote and you will therefore not get any rewards.
- Due to the above following rules, if you follow neuron 28 and other neurons, you might never reach a majority among the followees’ decision and your neurons would also not cast any votes.
- In particular, I saw on a few screenshots, that people follow neuron 28 and one other neuron: If the other neuron votes to adopt a proposal, since this is 1 followee out of 2 followees and thus not more than half, your neuron will not vote.
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In general, it is advisable to regularly double-check the following-settings and whether the followed neurons are actually regularly voting. To see if a followed neuron votes, you can for example look for the neuron on the dashboard or vpGeekds.
- This page on the dashboard shows neuron 28 and show that the last proposals that this neuron voted on is a proposal from early April 2024 - you can conclude that since then the neuron hasn’t voted. This only works for public neurons, but one can argue that it is a good to follow a neuron that is willing to make its votes public so that you can regularly see if you still agree with its directions.
- You can also check out this vpGeeks page to see all known neurons and their vote participating rate to get an idea of whether some neurons vote on all proposals.
- If you would like to change following, you might find this tutorial useful.
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Periodic confirmation took effect: If your neuron hasn’t voted directly, set following, or confirmed following, your neuron has adjusted voting power and get adjust or no rewards. See here for a summary of how periodic confirmation works and what you can do as a neuron holder to reset the neuron’s timer and get back to the full rewards for the upcoming proposals with just one simple action! You can also find a tutorial on thow to do this here.
I hope these tips are useful and wish everyone a great day!
