NEAR Issuance Cut To 1.6% Is Live In A House Of Stake Vote

NEAR holders are voting right now on a NEAR issuance cut. The proposal, HSP-029, would lower maximum annual issuance from 2.5% to 1.6%. At the time of writing the House of Stake page shows 13 votes in favour and 1 against. The poll stays open until November 2, and passing it would only start the process.

What the proposal changes

Sal Ternullo of SVRN wrote the proposal and posted it to the NEAR governance forum on October 7. It changes one parameter. The ceiling would slide down over 24 months, about 3.75 basis points a month. The existing 90/10 split between stakers and the treasury stays as it is.

Nothing moves straight away. The text puts a 90-day grace period before the first basis point comes off, so wallets, exchanges and custodians can update their disclosures. Activation comes one full quarter after ratification.

The House of Stake page for HSP-029, showing the vote count, quorum and closing time. Source: House of Stake, HSP-029.

Why a NEAR issuance cut and why now

The proposal explains its timing. It says Illia Polosukhin withdrew a separate Sovereign Fund proposal on August 20. His reasoning, as the text quotes it, was that a fund allocating capital swaps an algorithmic security budget for human discretion. He called those risks the protocol should not internalize and asked for alternatives to be proposed on their own terms.

HSP-029 is presented as one such alternative to the fund. The author lists what it leaves out: no new emissions mechanism, no redirected validator rewards, no new spending program and no oracle or administrator. Only the issuance ceiling changes, which is why it is described as the simplest option on the table.

The vote itself

The proposal sits in the supermajority category, so a bare majority is not enough. The page lists a quorum of 1,846,160.804 vNEAR against a total of 1,928,564.611 vNEAR. Voting closes on November 2 at 4:48 pm UTC. The five largest voters on the list hold between about 300,000 and 400,000 vNEAR each.

A passed vote also does not rewrite the chain on its own. The proposal says validators must adopt the change independently through the standard protocol process. Developers still have to build and release the upgrade, and each validator operator decides for itself when to run it.

What the author's model says about the NEAR issuance cut

Every figure in this section comes from the proposal's own modelling, not an independent audit of the NEAR issuance cut. It says the ramp would avoid 11.8 million NEAR of issuance over two years and 66.1 million over six. That would leave supply 4.36% smaller than under the current schedule.

The proposal's summary of expected effects. Source: House of Stake, HSP-029.

Stakers would give something up. The model has gross staking yield falling from 4.80% to 3.93% and then 3.07% across the first two years. A holder who stakes 1,000 NEAR would end year two with about 20 fewer tokens than under the current regime. People who do not stake, 57.3% of supply by the author's count, would see no offset at all.

Validators are the real cost. The author says 24 of 405 pools would stop being economically self-sufficient at the target rate. The document argues that issuance was never what kept the long tail going. It also points to Solana, where it says a similar change was ratified on August 28 with 67.001% of stake behind it.

The forum thread has run to 55 posts and carries the full proposal text. Anyone who stakes NEAR can read it there before the poll closes. A NEAR issuance cut would reach every staker, and the tally can still change before November 2.