How-To: Claim neurons for seed participants

You are a seed participant if you donated to the DFINITY foundation in February of 2017. At that time, 30 tokens per Swiss Franc of value donated were allotted to your key. These tokens are now called "ICP tokens" or, shortly, "ICP".

At Genesis Unlock your ICP were then disbursed to you in the form of a basket of 49 voting neurons (insert link "NNS" here). These neurons already exist inside the Network Nervous System (insert link "NNS" here). Your neurons contain the ICP you have been awarded, staked inside.

Your neurons have been configured to vote automatically and are already earning voting rewards for you. You do not need to do anything to initialize your neurons in order to continue earning voting rewards.

The 49 neurons created for you have dissolve delays (insert link "NNS" here) of 0 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and so on. Apart from the first neuron which has a dissolve delay of 0 days (which can be dissolved immediately), the other dissolve delays may have a small random number of days either added or removed.

We are pleased to inform you that your neurons have been pre-aged! At the moment of Genesis Unlock, their age was already set to 18 months old. This is important, because neuron age significantly increases your voting power and the voting rewards you receive.

To control your neurons you must use the same secret key that you generated when the donation was made. It was recorded as a 12-word mnemonic phrase. In order to control your neurons you need to first claim the whole basket. This article explains how to do the claiming. For how to control your neurons after claiming them see this article (insert link here).

Claiming with a Ledger Nano device

Coming soon. This will come with the next update of the IC's app for the Ledger Nano. The current release can manage neurons but cannot yet claim them.

Claiming with an air-gapped computer

Claiming requires access to your secret mnemonic phrase and to secret keys derived from it. It is highly advised that you use an air-gapped computer for the purpose of claiming. If you are not comfortable with such a setup or with any of the following steps then you have to wait for the next release of the IC's app for the Ledger Nano device.

As an air-gapped device you can use a Windows, Linux or MacOS machine. Linux includes Raspberry Pi.

Download the tools

To download the tools you need a second, networked computer. The tools are called keysmith and quill. We describe here how to find and download a binary for your architecture. If you want to compile the tools yourself then we provide more information for you at the end of the document (TODO).

Binaries are available for the following hardware architectures. Here, architecture refers to the air-gapped computer, not the networked computer.

Hardware	keysmith	quill
Mac, Intel silicon	darwin-amd64	macos-x86_64
Mac, Apple silicon (M1)	darwin-arm64	not available
Linux (x86)	linux-amd64	linux-x86_64
Raspberry Pi	linux-arm32	arm_32
Linux (arm)	linux-arm64	not available
Windows	windows-amd64	windows-x86_64

Download keysmith

Go to keysmith, choose the latest release (currently v1.6.2) and fetch the .tar.gz file that matches the air-gapped machine's architecture in the table above.

Download quill

Go to quill , choose the latest release (must be >= 0.2.12) and fetch the .tar.gz file that matches the air-gapped machine's architecture in the table above.

Copy to air-gapped machine

Copy the .tar.gz files from the networked machine to the air-gapped machine. For example, you can do so with a USB drive.

Verify the hashes

On the air-gapped machine, go to the terminal. Change the directory to the folder where the .tar.gz files are. Compute the SHA256 hashes with the commands

openssl dgst -sha256 keysmith-*.tar*

and

openssl dgst -sha256 quill-*.tar*

first unpack the .tar.gz achive.

Then verify the SHA256 sum of the .tar.gz file (insert instructions here).

Transfer the tools

Copy the binaries to your air-gapped machine.