Neuron Dissolve Analysis
An update on neuron dissolves, by request
ICP has been buzzing recently and with that buzz has come a plethora of requests for updates to some of my previous analyses, most notably the Supply Analysis I performed early 2022. That analysis produced the below chart, which has made its rounds across social media. The chart displayed ICP dissolving off the NNS and introduced the concept of Dissolving Zones. At the time of the previous writing, March 2022, we were on the cusp of entering Zone 2. At the time of this writing, we are on the cusp of entering Zone 3, so let’s take a look at how things stand today.
Below is the chart I posted back in March 2022 that showed the amount of dissolving and locked ICP by the minimum date it could dissolve.
Changes In Dissolving Neurons
Much has changed since March of 2022. Some neuron owners have started to dissolve their previously-locked neurons, while others have decided to re-lock previously-dissolving neurons. New ICP has been staked (a lot of it, in fact). To keep this update focused, let’s look at the current state of dissolving and locked (aka non-dissolving) neurons separately and compare to the above chart from March 2022.
Below is how dissolving found neurons looks today.
Very surprisingly, there isn’t much change relative to the 2024+ dissolving picture in the chart from 2022. For the most part, I very similar amount of ICP is dissolving in 2024 and 2025 as was dissolving in those two years way back in 2022.
There are a few key differences between the chart from 2022 and today’s chart:
March 2024 has an increase of 1.05M ICP dissolving.
July 2024 has an increase of 1.18M ICP dissolving.
What would cause this lack of change? Quite frankly, it suggests that locked neurons in 2022 have not decided to dissolve in the past 18 months AND that newly staked ICP has been staked and set to dissolve. That is to say, of all the new ICP that was staked on the NNS in the past 18 months, very little of it is dissolving in the next few years. This is surprising because over 41M ICP has been added to the NNS since March of 2022. In fact, as the dashboard shows, over 28M ICP has been added to 7+ year neurons in that time. All of this to say, almost all of new ICP to the NNS is highly committed for a long period of time.
If you want to split hairs, I guess you could move the “official start” of Zone 3 from May 2024 to August 2024. <shrug emoji>
Change in Locked Neurons
High level, there hasn’t been much change in dissolving neurons in 2024 and 2025 relative to how it looked in 2022. That’s definitely not the case for locked neurons. Below is the picture for locked neurons as it stands today (with the x-axis being the earliest these neurons could dissolve if they started dissolving today).
There are two major changes in 2024/2025 locked neurons relative to the 2022 picture. First, across the board there is a reduction in the amount of locked neurons for each month, with most months seeing a decrease near 50%. Second, there are two exceptions: June 2024 and December 2024. These two exceptions represent neurons that are currently locked and have a 6-month or 1-year dissolve delay. Note - this does not mean that June and December 2024 will see massive dissolving neurons… these neurons are currently locked and I haven’t seen any trend that suggests their owners will start dissolving.
The two differences above can be explained in two ways:
Some neuron owners who were locked in 2022 with dissolve delays less than 4 years have increased their dissolve delays. This shows a strengthening commitment from those owners into the governance of the Internet Computer.
Newly staked ICP tends to be staked in locked neurons of 6-months, 12-months and 7+ years. In fact, some back of the envelope calculations show that those three buckets make up almost all of the newly-staked behavior (with 8 year neurons being the plurality of newly staked ICP).
Conclusions
For the most part, you could argue the near-term ICP NNS picture has gotten slightly worse in some ways (extra dissolves in March and July, locked ICP at 6-months and 12 -months) and better in other ways (longer dissolve delays on locked neurons). But the bigger picture is this: that in 21 months since I last looked at this analysis, the picture hasn’t changed much at all. This means as we progressed from Zone 1 to Zone 2 (and progressed almost to Zone 3), the concept of those zones has remained consistent. And I think there’s reasons to believe the next time I look at this analysis in the future, it still won’t have changed much.
In terms of what it might mean for the the picture to remain the same as we move from Zone 2 to Zone 3 in 2024 and from Zone 3 to Zone 4 in 2025… I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Thank you for taking the time to put this together and sharing it.
Sincerely,
A Dumb Sh*t