Warning This repository is a proof-of-concept only. It has not been extensively tested, and is not "production-ready". Use at your own risk.

If you want liquid staking for your ICP, without doing these steps yourself, see: https://stakedicp.com

Canister-Owned-Neurons - Beta

Proof-of-concept for a canister to directly own a neuron on the IC via Threshold ECDSA.

Architecture

This proof-of-concept has two components.

• A fork of the quill command-line tool to create and submit messages to the NNS.
• A signer canister which makes Threshold ECDSA requests to sign messages on behalf of quill.

The quill fork uses the signer canister to sign it's messages. This means that the private keys which actually own any created neurons belong to the canister. Quill then forwards the signed message onto the NNS.

Flow Diagram:

┌───────┐ Request    ┌─────────────────┐
│       ├───────────►│                 │
│ Quill │            │ Signer Canister │
│       │◄───────────┤ (Private Key)   │
│       │ Signed Req └─────────────────┘
│       │
│       │ Signed Req ┌─────────────────┐
│       ├───────────►│                 │
│       │            │ NNS Canister    │
│       │◄───────────┤                 │
└───────┘ Response   └─────────────────┘

Usage

Install Dependencies

This repository depends on a special fork of quill, which adds a new CLI flag. The new cli flag is called --canister-id, and enables quill to use a remote canister to sign messages via Threshold ECDSA.

You can download the needed version of quill by running:

./scripts/install_quill.sh

Local Setup

To test this repository locally, first we need dfx running.

$ dfx start

Then, we need to deploy the signer canister, which will own the private key.

$ ./scripts/deploy.sh local

Then, we can use the provided quill wrapper script:

$ ./quill local public-ids

IC Setup

First, we need to deploy the signer canister, which will own the private key.

$ ./scripts/deploy.sh ic reinstall key_1

Then, we can use the provided quill wrapper script:

$ ./quill ic public-ids

For the rest of this document, anytime we use: ./quill local ..., use ./quill ic ... instead.

Creating a neuron

To create a neuron, we first need to transfer some ICP to the key owned by the signer canister. We can ask it for it's address, like:

$ ./quill local public-ids
Principal id: j2nlo-qsl7k-2dydm-2t74w-dtpe2-gbhkl-dsvon-fngvp-r3i7k-6ygiy-bae
Account id: ab15a718e7732da6d6db09bf71a4a923445f21980aca1aefd33a808d549013ff

Then, we can transfer some ICP to that Account ID. Note, we must transfer at least 1.0001 ICP to pay for the new neuron, and the ICP transfer fee. An example using dfx to transfer some from our local wallet is:

$ dfx ledger transfer \
    --memo 0 \
    --amount 1.00010000 \
    "ab15a718e7732da6d6db09bf71a4a923445f21980aca1aefd33a808d549013ff"

At this point we are ready to stake a new neuron. Note, the amount we stake excludes the extra 0.0001 ICP we sent above for the fee.

# Save the stake message to stake.json
$ ./quill local neuron-stake --amount 1 --name test > stake.json

# Send the stake message to the network
$ ./quill local send stake.json

You can also use any other quill functions.

Future Work

• Use HTTP outcalls so the canister can call into the governance canister itself.
  • I had a look into this using the rust ic-agent crate. However, it has some dependencies which make compiling it to wasm (so it can run in a canister) very difficult. This approach might be the cleanest, but would need some heavy reverse-engineering.
  • It might be worth trying the Javascript @dfinity/agent library. That would probably be much simpler to get compiling into wasm, but would mean we need to use Azle to write the canister.

** Ideas and pull-requests are welcome! **