NNS neuron operations related to maturity

Background & goal

• Maturity is an attribute of a neuron; it is not a tradable asset. Neurons receive voting rewards in the form of maturity.
• Whenever you burn maturity to create newly minted ICP, maturity modulation is applied.
• Maturity modulation introduces uncertainty in the conversion process from maturity to ICP, depending on the ICP price trend.
• This article explains how the maturity modulation interacts with neuron operations related to maturity, in particular spawn maturity and stake maturity.
• For further background on neurons and the NNS, please see here.

Spawning maturity

• If a user triggers spawn maturity, a new neuron will be immediately spawned; however, this newly spawned neuron will have no ICP at start, only maturity.
• Spawned neurons have a dissolve delay of 7 days and are dissolving.
• After 7 days when the neuron is dissolved, the amount of ICP, determined by the maturity modulation function, will be minted and be available to the user.

Staking maturity

• A user can stake maturity which locks the maturity until the neuron is dissolved. Once a neuron is dissolved, staked maturity is unlocked and becomes normal maturity.
• Staked maturity contributes to the voting power of the neuron as determined by Voting Power = (ICP staked + maturity staked) x Dissolve Delay Bonus x Age Bonus
• No ICP is (or can be) produced from staked maturity until the neuron is dissolved and the maturity is spawned (as described in the section above), at which point it is subject to maturity modulation.

Auto-staking of maturity

• Daily voting rewards may be received either as staked maturity or maturity.
• This choice can be changed for future rewards at any time.
• If rewards are received automatically as staked maturity, voting rewards accumulate over time as voting power of the neuron increases with every reward event.

Outlook on maturity operations

• Merge maturity (which adds maturity of a neuron to the ICP stake) is deprecated in the NNS II UX, NNS hardware wallet and NNS quill.
• Spawn maturity is planned to be replaced by a new operation called disburse maturity.
  • This operation begins a 7 day clock that completes with a modulation of the amount of minted ICP to be received.
  • This final amount of newly minted ICP is then transferred into the account of a neuron holder.
• The community has requested to enhance the proposed disburse maturity functionality, to support automatic re-staking of the newly minted ICP. This would provide a similar functionality to the previous merge function , but with the 7 day delay & modulation applied. DFINITY is looking into how best to support this.

See Also

• The Internet Computer project website (hosted on the IC): internetcomputer.org