Analysis

A Guide to the Service Nervous System (SNS) on the Internet Computer

Service Nervous Systems (SNS) are algorithmic DAOs that allow developers to build decentralized, token-based governance systems for their Dapps.

The Internet Computer aims to enable a new generation of blockchain, based on true decentralization, empowering developers, entrepreneurs, and investors in Web3 to join hands together to build the next iteration of the internet as a whole.

If you do not yet know about the Internet Computer Blockchain, it was created to turn the concept of a ''world computer" into reality, enabling smart contracts to run on chain at web speed. This blog post discusses a different approach to creating innovative blockchain projects enabled by the Internet Computer vision.

The Internet Computer hopes to give a much more decentralized effort to creating services on its Blockchain, which will allow these services to innovate relentlessly and fearlessly on a grand scale, and raise funds directly from the users of these services.

What is the SNS?

Service Nervous Systems (SNS) are algorithmic DAOs that allow developers to build decentralized, token-based governance systems for their Dapps. Decentralized control and tokenization allow new incentive systems and use cases to exist that give the potential to set these Dapps apart from their traditional counterparts.

The goal of the SNS on the Internet Computer Blockchain is to eventually provide open governance solutions with the simple press of a button for developers who are not able to implement it themselves. The first proposal for the SNS went out in October 2021 and received some critical feedback from the community which forced reconsideration, ensuring DFINITY came up with the following new approach to integrate the SNS into the Internet Computer Blockchain:

Release the different building blocks in multiple stages, so that the community can make use of intermediate deliverables (e.g., single canisters) as soon as they are ready.
Evolve these single building blocks to arrive at a concrete implementation that can be used without engineering efforts.
Make the concrete implementation modular and the single components configurable so that each SNS can be tailored for the Dapp that it governs.

The new SNS proposals were sent out to the community on 2022-06-20 and closed on 2022-06-24, you can see the results here, 39.997% of people voted Yes on the proposal with only 2.705% voting No. The Open Governance Canister for SNS Design Proposal was started on 2022-02-01 and closed on 2022-02-05, this proposal received 11.428% of the votes for Yes and only a 0.037% for No.

You can read about how the FrontEnd of a Dapp running with SNS will look, here. You can also try out the FrontEnd live on the Testnet here.

If you want to know more about the pilot projects that will be utilizing SNS and the timeline and roadmap of how SNS will be integrated you can read about it here.

The initial token swap went live recently, here's how it went.

Also, the NNS is live here for anyone to access for governance and staking.