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Spawn new neurons

Intermediate
Governance
Tutorial

Once you are a bit more familiar with the NNS, you might want to use the NNS dapp to perform additional neuron operations.

For more background on neurons, including the concepts of voting rewards and what the different neuron operations do in details, refer to the Neurons overview.

Spawn your voting rewards into a new neuron

As you vote on proposals, either directly or by following the votes of other neurons, the maturity associated with your neuron increases, which in turn increases the rewards you earn for participating in governance. When the maturity for a locked stake reaches a minimum threshold of 1 ICP, you can spawn a new neuron. The spawn operation creates a new neuron that locks a new balance of ICP on the ledger.

For example, if you have a neuron that contains 100 ICP utility tokens and it has a maturity of 10 percent, you can spawn a new neuron that contains approximately 10 new ICP tokens. For the neuron with 100 ICP tokens to reach the minimum threshold for spawning, its maturity would need to be greater than 1 percent.

After you spawn a new neuron from an existing neuron, the maturity for the existing neuron falls to zero.

To spawn new neurons from an existing neuron:

  • Step 1: From the NNS dapp, select 'Neuron Staking', then click the neuron that has reached the minimum maturity required to spawn a new neuron.

  • Step 2: Click Spawn Neuron.