2022 Kicking Off with Controversy

Explanation of the 15M in "new" neurons

2022 has kicked off with a bang for the IC community… Christian Müller (@drmllr) pointed out that the voting power of the NNS increased by 90M vp yesterday, leading me to investigate what was going on. It appears that 30 early and seed round investor accounts went from Unclaimed to Claimed within seconds of each other, resulting in about 15M ICP being staked in 8 year neurons. The affect of this drove the staking rewards for a new 8-year neuron down to 21.8%. Here’s what we know, don’t know, and my opinion:

What we know:

• Genesis neurons (seed round and early contributors) occasionally go from unclaimed to claimed as their owners complete various steps (like KYC).

• An account going from unclaimed to claimed does NOT mint new ICP. The ICP for these accounts were minted at genesis. Rather the owner gets access to the neurons and the neuron creation date updates to the moment of claiming.

• From data on ic.rocks, it looks like 1 seed round and 29 early contributor accounts were claimed and staked for 8 years. In the past, these investors hadn’t typically staked for 8 years.

• These accounts are pre-aged by 18 months at genesis.

• There remains 35M ICP in unclaimed accounts (https://ic.rocks/genesis)

What we don’t know:

• Why voting power (as reported by the ICA’s dashboard) increased by 90M vp while the amount of ICP staked was 15M (as seen on ic.rocks)… something is missing with that math, even accounting for the pre-aged bonus.

• What event caused the claiming of these accounts at the same time.

• Why the neurons became staked for 8 years.

• Whether the remaining 35M ICP will become claimed and when.

My 2 cents

These account holders are rightful owners of their ICP and we should have assumed that these accounts would become claimed at some point, along with the remaining 35M ICP. Given this, the best case scenario is that these neuron holders stake for 8 years (remember how mad we, the community, were over the seed and early investors bailing on the project?!?) and so this is not an event to dread, but rather cheer, even if it requires us to recalculate our assumptions. I, for one, was not accounting for most of the unclaimed genesis accounts to be claimed after Nov. 10th, so I will need to re-think some of my assumptions and analyses moving forward.

Also, it’s possible there is an error in the ICA’s dashboard calculating the total voting power (and thus the 21.8% return). Let’s hold off on raising alarms until after the weekend when more information is known.