Advanced neuron operations
Once you're more familiar with the NNS, you might want to explore additional neuron operations using the NNS dapp.
For more background on neurons, including voting rewards and detailed explanations of available operations, refer to the neurons overview.
Maturity disbursement
As you vote on proposals (either directly or by following other neurons), your neuron's maturity increases. This maturity represents your accumulated governance rewards.
When you have at least 1.05 of maturity that is not staked, you can disburse it. This operation burns the maturity and schedules the minting of new ICP tokens. After 7 days, new ICP will be minted to the selected destination address.
For Ledger devices, spawn neuron is available. Support for disburse maturity will be added in the future.
Disburse maturity
Step 1: In the staking page of the NNS dapp, navigate to the neuron whose maturity you want to disburse. Click Disburse in the Maturity section.
Step 2: In the form that opens, select both the percentage of maturity to disburse and the destination account.
You can choose one of your associated accounts or enter any NNS account identifier manually. Manual input is available either as plain text or via QR code (found by clicking the Receive button on the wallet page).
You can copy the account identifier from the account page.
Step 3: After clicking Disburse, you'll be taken to an overview step where you can review and confirm the disbursement parameters.
Step 4: When a disbursement is in progress, a View Active Disbursements button appears in the Maturity section.
This opens the Active Disbursements window, which shows all disbursements in progress, including their start time, destination address, and the amount of maturity being disbursed.
You cannot have more than 10 ongoing disbursements. If you have 10, you need to wait for at least one disbursement to finish before adding another.
Spawn new neurons
The old way of converting maturity into ICP utility tokens is via spawning the newly minted ICP into a neuron from where you can extract the ICP after 7 days.
It is recommended to only use spawn maturity for neurons controlled by Ledger devices. For all other cases, it is recommended to use disburse maturity (not yet supported by the Ledger device). Going forward, spawning neurons might be deprecated.