The Internet Computer Dashboard: Decentralization, Governance, Tokenomics, and More
A guide that explains how the IC dashboard provides transparency and visibility into core blockchain properties.
The Internet Computer (IC) is a public, general-purpose blockchain that can host hyperscale, decentralized applications completely on-chain. It was designed to realize the vision of Web3 by empowering developers to restore the internet to its open, innovative, and creative roots. The Internet Computer dashboard is a tool developed by the DFINITY Foundation that makes real-time network insights accessible and approachable, allowing users to monitor and search for current and historical information about the Internet Computer.
While the IC dashboard can be used for typical block explorer tasks, such as checking the status of a transaction, it’s also a window that broadly provides transparency regarding essential blockchain properties such as decentralization, governance, tokenomics, and more. This post is a detailed guide to various features of the IC dashboard and how they relate to these properties.
NOTE: The charts in this guide are for illustration purposes. To see current, real-time Internet Computer metrics, please refer to: https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/
Decentralization
Decentralization is one of the core properties of blockchain technology, and the IC dashboard documents how decentralized the Internet Computer is in real time. To see the node machines, data centers, or node providers for the entire network, go to the Node Machines page, Data Centers page, or Node Providers page.
The Internet Computer uses “deterministic decentralization” to greatly reduce the replication of computation and data that are necessary to meet the security and resilience requirements of a high-performance blockchain. Node machines for a subnet are carefully selected based on a decentralization score that takes into account a node machine’s node provider, data center site, data center owner, city, country, and continent. This differs from the decentralization of blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, where miners/validators are anonymous, and the hope is that if there are enough nodes, the network will eventually become decentralized across miners/validators, cities, countries, and continents, but where there is also the chance that a large number of nodes end up on cloud servers and/or controlled by mining pools.
The IC dashboard home page shows a map of the world with the locations of the node machines that currently compose the Internet Computer, as well as locations that will be added in the future.
You can interact with this map, scrolling and zooming to focus on specific areas. Hover over a location to see the data center owner and the number of node machines and node providers at that location.
To learn more about node providers, head to the Node Providers page, which shows a table of the node providers who currently provide the node machines that power the Internet Computer. This table can be sorted — by the number of nodes, for example, to see who the largest node providers are.
Click on any node provider in the table to go to a specific Node Provider page that shows details such as where a node provider’s nodes are located.
The Subnets page shows a table listing each of the Internet Computer’s current subnets. The table’s columns are also sortable — for example, the table can be sorted by the number of canister smart contracts that are running on the subnets.
Clicking on a subnet in the table or searching the subnet ID in the search box will bring you to that subnet’s detail page. For example, below is an image of the Subnet page for the Network Nervous System (NNS) subnet, which runs the Internet Computer’s on-chain governance system (see the Governance section below for more info). An interactive map shows where the subnet’s node machines are located.
The Node Machines table on this subnet page (see image below) shows the node machines that currently make up the NNS subnet. You can see the location (city, data center site), data center owner, and node provider of each node machine in the subnet. The table shows deterministic decentralization at work, with each node specifically chosen for the subnet in order to deliver a high degree of decentralization. For more detailed information, the fields of this table will direct you to the associated Node Machine page, Data Center page, or Node Provider page. You can also navigate to these pages by searching the node machine ID, data center ID, or node provider ID, respectively.
Governance
As a decentralized blockchain, all changes to the configuration and behavior of the Internet Computer are controlled by a governance DAO called the Network Nervous System (NNS). By staking ICP utility tokens within NNS neurons, token holders can participate in network governance and earn voting rewards. Internet Computer governance is a popular topic that the IC community actively discusses on the DFINITY Developer Forum and social media. The IC dashboard shows how NNS proposals play out in real time.
On the Governance page, someone who is considering participating in IC governance by staking ICP tokens in a voting neuron can estimate NNS voting rewards using the Estimate Rewards slider.
The DFINITY and ICA Voting Power chart shows how the respective voting powers of DFINITY and the Internet Computer Association have decreased over time as NNS governance has become more decentralized. The Voting Participation (Governance Topic) chart shows how adjustments to the NNS voting rewards system earlier this year resulted in increased voting participation for Governance proposals, which is now more than 50%.
The Proposals table shows a list of NNS proposals, and can be filtered based on proposal topic or status.
To see details about a proposal, including a full description of the proposal, click on a proposal in the table or search a proposal ID in the search box to see its Proposal page. For open proposals that are still being voted on, you can monitor the voting results in real time, see how much time is left to vote, and click a button that directs you to the NNS front-end dapp to vote.
Proposal 48623, “Compounding Maturity Proposal,” sparked a lively forum discussion. The Proposal page shows it was a close vote.
The Votes of Known Neurons table shows how known neurons (i.e., neurons listed for following on the NNS front-end dapp) voted on this proposal. It shows the proposal won adoption even with DFINITY and the ICA sitting out, and with the ICP Maximalist Network and cycledao.xyz voting no. The Voting History chart shows the timeline of voting, with the vote flipping between yes and no 8 times (the colored/numbered markers along the X-axis), which resulted in 8 extensions of the voting period (the corresponding colored/numbered bands). Using the IC dashboard, the community was able to follow these voting results in real time.
The Neurons page has charts that show how much ICP is staked at various dissolve delays, from 0 to 8 years, which reflects the time until a dissolving neuron is dissolved and the tokens are unlocked. The Total Staked chart shows the entire amount of staked ICP, currently 55.7% of the total supply. The Staked: Not Dissolving and Staked: Dissolving charts further break down this staking data. It shows that the amount of ICP in neurons with a state of Not Dissolving has risen over time, while the amount of ICP in neurons with a state of Dissolving has fallen. Neuron holders are increasingly choosing a state of Not Dissolving, and the vast majority of Not Dissolving neurons have chosen the maximum dissolve delay of 8 years.
The Neurons table on this page shows a partial list of neurons (there are plans to expose the full list of neurons), which can be filtered and sorted. For example, we can filter by a neuron state of Dissolving and sort by the dissolve delay in order to see neurons that will soon finish dissolving.
Or sort by staked ICP to see the largest neurons in the list.
Clicking on a neuron in the table or searching on a neuron ID in the search box brings you to the Neuron page for that neuron.
Let’s take a look at the Neuron page of a neuron with 10,000 staked ICP, a state of Not Dissolving, and a dissolve delay of around one year. It’s estimated that this neuron receives daily rewards maturity of around 3.25 (11.9% annualized return). This estimate assumes that all neurons vote on all proposals, which is often not the case, so actual rewards may be higher than the estimate.
Have you ever wondered what rewards your neuron would receive if you increased its dissolve delay? Current neuron holders can find that out by using the Estimate Rewards slider. Using the slider to increase the dissolve delay to the maximum of 8 years shows that this neuron’s estimated daily rewards maturity would go up to around 5.76 (21.0% annualized return).
You can learn more about how rewards are calculated by reading the help text of the various fields.
The Neuron page also shows the recent voting history of a neuron, as seen below for the ICP Maximalist Network known neuron. When researching what neurons to follow for voting, this Voting History table can be used to see how a neuron voted on various proposals.
For neurons that have submitted NNS proposals, such as the DFINITY Foundation’s Neuron 39, a Proposals Submitted table will also be displayed, showing all of the proposals submitted by that neuron.
Tokenomics
The Circulation page provides full transparency regarding the ICP token’s supply, inflation, and deflation.
The Voting Rewards Inflation chart shows how voting rewards are reduced over time, starting at 10% of the total supply per year when the risks surrounding the network were greater, and gradually decreasing to 5% after 8 years to reflect lower risks as the network stabilizes over time.
The three charts — Voting Rewards (Maturity), ICP Converted from Maturity, and Node Provider Rewards — show NNS voting rewards and node provider rewards, which both contribute to ICP inflation.
The Voting Rewards (Maturity) chart shows undisbursed NNS voting rewards, rewards accumulated in neurons as maturity.
The ICP Converted from Maturity chart shows disbursed voting rewards, rewards that have been minted as ICP by disbursing the stake of neurons, or “merging maturity.”
The Node Provider Rewards chart shows node provider rewards, which represent just a small fraction of total rewards.
The Total ICP Burned chart shows ICP burned by:
- ICP transactions of type Burn, and
- ICP transaction fees (0.0001 ICP per transaction),
both of which contribute to ICP deflation. ICP transactions of type Burn represent either the conversion ICP to cycles, which power computation, or the reject costs of rejected proposals (currently 10 ICP).
It’s still early days for the Internet Computer, and as expected, ICP inflation is higher than deflation. As the ecosystem grows and more DeFi and other dapps are created, these charts can be used to track inflation vs. deflation over time.
The last chart on the Circulation page is the ICP Supply chart, showing the total supply and circulating supply of ICP over time. We can see that the circulating supply has risen significantly since Genesis, due to factors such as the dissolving of seed-round and early contributor neurons that are on vesting schedules.
Additional Features
Let’s touch on a few more things you can do with the IC dashboard.
The ICP Transactions page table shows all ICP transactions since Genesis. This table can be filtered and sorted.
Click on the transaction hash of any transaction to go to the ICP Transaction page and see the details of that transaction. If you transfer ICP to or from a cryptocurrency exchange platform, a link to the corresponding IC dashboard ICP Transaction page is often provided by the exchange.
Click the From or To account address on either the ICP Transactions page or ICP Transaction page to go to the Account page of that account. The page will show its balance and a table of all ICP transactions to or from that account, which can be filtered and sorted, and provides the ability to export the account’s transactions to a CSV file.
You can also use the search box to search by transaction hash or account address.
The Releases page shows all replica version releases since Genesis. The Releases chart shows how hard the DFINITY team has been working, improving the Internet Computer and releasing replica versions on a consistent basis, and the Subnet Upgrades chart shows that the pace of subnet replica version updates has been relentless. You can scroll through the release history and read the release notes, getting a feel for the speed and quality of development.
For each release, you can also see a table of the subnets upgraded with that replica version, and when they were upgraded.
The Canisters page shows a table containing all canister smart contracts on the Internet Computer. This table can be filtered and sorted.
Clicking on a canister ID in the table or searching the canister ID in the search box will bring you to the Canister page of that canister, which provides detailed information about the canister. If the canister exposes its Candid interface, that interface is displayed, along with Motoko, Rust, JavaScript, and TypeScript bindings generated from the Candid interface. Canister methods can be called by expanding a method, specifying the method arguments, and clicking the Call button.
The IC dashboard home page also offers a variety of metrics and charts that support the monitoring of real-time and historical information about the Internet Computer.
This guide has illustrated how the IC dashboard provides transparency and increases visibility into core blockchain properties such as decentralization, governance, tokenomics, and more. The IC dashboard will continue to evolve and improve alongside the Internet Computer, with new features being consistently added over time.
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