Gmgm! In an effort to increase transparency around the process of establishing the new House of Stake, I’m going to post regular updates in this thread.

Here’s today’s update:

Delegate selection

We received ~30 applicants from candidate delegates. Thank you very much to everyone who responded to the Call for Delegates! We originally stated that we’d announce the set of endorsed delegates by today. It’s going to take a little bit longer, but not much longer. We’re still in the process of reviewing all of the applications. We’ll also share the composition of the Screening Committee, which is responsible for selecting the initial set of endorsed delegates. More soon.

HoS backend

The @fastnear team is leading the work to implement the backend contracts that will power escrow, delegation, and voting for HoS (per the governance proposal). The work in progress contracts are visible here: GitHub - houseofstake/house-of-stake-contracts. We expect it to be code complete by the end of this month, and we’re in the process of onboarding one or two teams of auditors to conduct an audit next month.

HoS frontend

We’re in discussions with three teams (Tally, Aragon, Agora) that are candidates to build the frontend for HoS, which will allow NEAR holders to escrow their coins in exchange for veNEAR (vote escrow NEAR), delegate veNEAR to endorsed delegates, and vote on proposals. All of these teams have also offered to provide ongoing governance consulting, design, development, and operational/maintenance support. We expect to make a decision and announce a partner at the end of this week.

Roadmap

As of today we’re still on schedule to begin rolling out the new HoS platform next month, and we expect the initial set of features (as described above) to be fully functional by the end of April. The next task is to finish the selection process for endorsed delegates, and to work with the delegates to define the initial scope of governance, the initial set of questions to be answered and decisions to be made, etc. We also need to decide and announce the composition of the Security Council.

Let me know what questions you have, if any.

Lane

Hi everyone, I hope you had a nice week. Here’s another weekly update.

Progress

I had a lot of very productive face to face meetings last week in Denver. I had the opportunity to spend a substantial amount of time with all of the partners who are candidates to help us build out the HoS frontend, and to provide some ongoing consulting as well, including Agora, Aragon, and Tally. I also had the opportunity to meet several of the organizations that submitted applications for the endorsed delegate role, and with many others who have deep expertise in governance and who were able to provide a lot of helpful advice and ideas.

Delegate selection

This process is ongoing, and my goal is to announce the initial set of delegates by the end of this week. I apologize for the delay, but it’s an important decision and we want to make sure we’re being thoughtful about the composition of the initial delegate council, that we’re including a diverse set of delegates with experience and expertise in many relevant areas (technical, social, economic, etc.).

HoS backend

The @fastnear team continues to make good progress on the HoS backend (the repository is linked above). Things are a little delayed due to ETHDenver, but we currently expect to be code complete, and to kick off the audit process, within two weeks. Two of the three smart contracts that power the HoS backend are more or less finished.

HoS frontend

We have proposals from all of the potential partners mentioned above, and our goal is to announce a decision by the end of this week. After this, we expect work to begin as early as next week, and to have an initial prototype finished with ~6 weeks.

Roadmap

No major changes to the roadmap shared above.

As always, let me know if anything is still unclear or if you have any questions. Expect to hear from me again within a few days.

Lane

I hope everyone’s had a great week and a nice weekend. Here’s the latest weekly update!

Progress

This week was all about due diligence: following up on conversations that started in Denver, making progress towards choosing a partner to build the HoS frontend, and reviewing delegate applications. As part of the process of choosing a partner to build the frontend, I reviewed code and checked references. I also continued to review delegate applications, and we compiled a short list of candidates that we’re considering for the endorsed delegate role. We also finalized the Screening Committee.

Screening Committee

The initial Screening Committee, which is responsible for picking the initial set of endorsed delegates and also for fast-tracking proposals, consists of the following seats:

• NEAR Foundation: 3 seats (senior leadership, legal team, and myself)
• NEAR One (core developers): 1 seat
• Gauntlet (governance/cryptoeconomics design and strategy): 1 seat

Finalizing this committee is important because it was a blocker to finalizing the delegate selection.

Delegate selection

As mentioned, we have a short list of candidates. The Screening Committee is in the process of reviewing the list, making sure we have all of our bases covered, etc. Some concrete questions we’re discussing include, do we have enough expertise in specific areas such as economics? How many initial delegates do we want to choose? How many professional teams do we want to include, relative to individual delegates? (If you have feedback on any of these questions, feel free to share it here.)

Again, I’m sorry that this process is taking longer than we initially thought, but we are making steady progress and we expect to be able to announce the initial set of delegates very soon. My goal is to begin contacting the endorsed delegates this week to make sure they’re still committed to the task, and once that’s done, to share the list here.

HoS backend

@fastnear informed that they continue to make good progress on the backend code. We have calls this week with potential auditors, and expect to be able to begin the audit process no later than the end of this month/beginning of April.

HoS frontend

We finished reviewing the proposals and conducting due diligence on the candidate partners. There will likely be a bit more negotiation involved in finalizing terms and signing a contract. I very much hope that happens this week and that work can begin this week or next week.

Roadmap

We’re probably a week to two weeks behind the initial roadmap shared above, due to the delays finalizing the items described here. Once the HoS backend is code complete, and once we’ve signed a contract with a partner to build the frontend, we should be better able to estimate when the work will be done and the system will go live. Stay tuned.

Hello,why are not all candidates allowed to participate if people are willing to delegate their tokens to them? Why is governance once again being restricted to a closed group? Why is there no one from the community on the screening committee?

@lane
For your information, she/he is waiting answer

Sorry for the slow reply. I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here, and I apologize if we haven’t communicated the design clearly enough.

why are not all candidates allowed to participate if people are willing to delegate their tokens to them? Why is governance once again being restricted to a closed group?

All candidates can participate permissionlessly. HoS governance is permissionless. Anyone can receive veNEAR delegation and vote on proposals, and users can also choose to self-delegate and participate directly.

Why is there no one from the community on the screening committee?

I’m open to this idea. How would such a person be chosen fairly?

Hi everyone, apologies for not posting here for a while. I actually only intended to update this thread until we announced the initial set of delegates, but I’ve had a few folks reach out and ask me to continue posting here. I’m not sure I can commit to posting here every single week, mainly because I won’t have any updates some weeks, but I can try my best.

Please note that there are already a number of different stakeholders involved in HoS (NEAR Foundation, NEAR One, the delegates including several organizations, Gauntlet, Agora, other community members and volunteers) and this list will continue to grow as the initiative matures. I can only share things as I see them from my perspective, but even at this early stage there are already many things happening under the HoS umbrella that I’m not even aware of!

Here’s what’s happened over the past month or so:

• we finalized the contract and announced our partnership with Agora to build the HoS frontend, and to study governance best practice and continue to improve the existing design.
• we held another X space to give the delegates a chance to introduce themselves.
• we got all of the delegates, and some supporters such as Agora, into a Telegram group. We’ve held a few calls and workshops with this group, including introducing them to the Agora platform, discussing governance best practices, and exploring the delegates’ priorities and preferences.
• setting up working groups for the delegates to focus on different areas of governance (Governance Infrastructure & Processes, Ecosystem Growth Strategy, Treasury Strategy & Management, Network Economics & Security)
• I personally have had a series of meetings with individuals and teams including Fireeyes and https://www.eval.science/ to discuss tokenomics, AI governance, and governance best practice more generally.
• the audit work of the HoS backend contracts is ongoing.
• the excellent Buidl Asia conference happened, where I had the opportunity to join a panel on governance and discuss ideas including Futarchy and their potential relevance to HoS. The video isn’t up yet, but I’ll share it when it is.
• at NF we’re in the process of interviewing several candidates to join the HoS team, including a candidate for a governance lead role and one for a comms/generalist role. If you’re interested in applying or if you’d like to refer someone, please reach out (DM me here or on X).
• we’ve begun exploring areas where work that’s currently being handled by NF, such as ecosystem growth, founder success, marketing, etc., might overlap with some of the work that HoS and the delegates do, and work that HoS might support. We have to be cautious as we spin up HoS to make sure work isn’t being duplicated and that we’re all rowing in the same direction, but over time, if it’s successful, HoS should be able to take on a good amount of this work and allow NF to focus on its core competencies. This will be an ongoing conversation.
• we’ve begun having conversations with NEAR-aligned supporters, investors, and other coin hodlers to understand their needs and desires, their thoughts about tokenomics, what a successful HoS looks like to them, and how to get them to transition from PoS to HoS. This work is ongoing.

There are several other initiatives and possible partnerships that are cooking, and I’ve been putting a lot of time and effort into those. I expect they’ll bear fruit and I look forward to being able to share them soon, but I’ll refrain from doing so until they’ve been agreed.

Here are the next milestones as I see them:

• we owe you a few basic items, for housekeeping: a roadmap with tentative dates, and a basic knowledge base/information hub/landing page with more information on HoS including the project goals, stakeholders, delegates, upcoming events, etc.
• we should have an initial, working prototype of the Agora frontend within a few weeks.
• the delegates have an initial proposal template from Agora and work should begin soon on the first few proposals.
• some sort of straightforward constitution and/or initial statement of principles and values, and maybe also a code of conduct - I think we can start with something very basic and iterate from there.
• we (screening committee, security council, NF, in consultation with the delegates and the community) need to set some basic guidelines on this first phase of HoS: initial goals and scope of initial proposals, and portion of the treasury that’s in play.
• we’ll kick off the AI governance work within the next few weeks, including building the governance assistant tool and designing the initial delegate actors.

Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to post your own updates, comments, and questions here as well. More soon. Happy weekend!

Lane

Hi @Diana_P, thanks for reading and responding with some questions. I’m happy to answer questions and I welcome constructive criticism.

That said, I don’t feel that your response is constructive or in good faith. I normally ignore responses that aren’t constructive or in good faith, and will do that going forward. The business of governance is difficult, and it’s very easy to snipe from the sidelines without contributing anything constructively, so to be frank I don’t have time to respond to such messages. I’ll always prioritize replying to folks who are actually, meaningfully contributing to this important, community-driven initiative.

All of the delegates and other stakeholders that I mentioned in my update have been engaging positively, constructively, and in good faith in HoS thus far, and I expect the same of community participants.

However, since House of Stake is a new initiative, I’m instead going to rewrite your message here the way I would’ve written it if I wanted to make a good faith effort to express the same ideas constructively. HTH.

Lane

–

Hi Lane, thanks for the hard work on the HoS initiative so far, and thank you for the recent update. In response I have a few ideas to share and a few questions to ask:

lane:

Here’s what’s happened over the past month or so:

First of all, with respect to funding, as we’re all aware many mistakes were made with the NDC initiative, which spent over $1M with very little to show. I’d like to make sure that the same mistakes aren’t made this time. To this end, I’d like to propose that we use the following tools to transparently track how the HoS treasury is deployed. I’ve seen these tools work well in other DAOs, such as X: [list of tools]. I’m also happy to help out with open source accounting for HoS. Could you share a bit more about how you envision deploying the treasury?

lane:

We got all of the delegates

As we all know it’s impossible to totally avoid conflicts of interest in governance, especially in a small ecosystem like the NEAR ecosystem. I appreciate that you required each endorsed delegate candidate to state potential conflicts of interest in their initial applications.

I’d like to go a step further here and propose that we adopt this conflict of interests policy, which I’ve seen work well in DAO X and Y. It requires delegates to restate potential conflicts of interest biannually, and provides for a comment period where community members can raise concerns about potential CoIs: [link].

lane:

I’m open to this idea.

Thanks for the transparency throughout the process of selecting the initial set of endorsed delegates. I’ve reviewed the initial set of delegates, as well as your stated criteria for how they were chosen. While I understand the constraints, such as on the limited set of applicants, and I think we’re off to a good start, I’m concerned that certain constituencies within the broader NEAR ecosystem aren’t well represented by the current set of delegates. This includes constituency [Q], which is important because [reason], and constituency [R], which is important because [reason].

You also stated that we may decide to expand the set of delegates in the future. Can you say more about what this process might look like? How do you think we might get more representation in HoS from the constituencies I just mentioned? I’d be happy to lead a working group to explore these ideas in more depth, and come back with a concrete proposal.

lane:

Setting up working groups for the delegates

Thanks for sharing this list. These working groups make a lot of sense! May I also propose that we consider additional working groups for [A], [B], and [C] going forward? Here’s my rationale: [explanation].

Since transparency is so important, it would also be great if the community could have some visibility into each of these working groups. I’d like to propose [A], [B], and [C]. What are your thoughts?

lane:

DM me

It’s great to see that the HoS team is growing. You must have a lot on your plate, and it’s important that NF and the community both recruit the best possible people to lead this project to ensure its success.

I’d like to nominate a few people for these roles: [nominations].

Also, again in the name of transparency, I’d be happy to help set up a HoS jobs board at [A], where the broader community could participate in writing job descriptions, posting nominations, and generally help out with recruiting.

Thank you very much for the effort to bring some transparency to the entire process. I understand that it’s easier to just make decisions behind closed doors, and I understand that transparency requires additional work. I’d like to help in the ways I laid out above, since this needs to be an ecosystem-wide effort.

Hey @lane, I understand that getting criticism isn’t always easy. But wasn’t decentralization and transparency something Illia wanted from the start?

I see just one real problem here - and it’s easy to solve.

Just add a simple, clear report that the community can read. I’m sure 95% of the questions will go away after that.

The format can be very simple:

What was done:
A
B
C

Partnerships with:
A
B
C

Value for the ecosystem:
A
B
C

Money spent:
$1 on A
$2 on B
$3 on C

People ask questions when they don’t see what’s happening.

lane:

Hi everyone, apologies for not posting here for a while. I actually only intended to update this thread until we announced the initial set of delegates, but I’ve had a few folks reach out and ask me to continue posting here. I’m not sure I can commit to posting here every single week, mainly because I won’t have any updates some weeks, but I can try my best.

Hi Lane!
Thanks for the great work you are doing with the HoS.
The fact is, the majority of the community are eagerly waiting for the HoS to go live. Hence, if you will sometimes have busy schedules, or little to no new updates, I think it’s a good time to have a particular person with you or from the NEAR MOD team who will CONSTANTLY share updates with the community without failure.

Amongst the other processes you mentioned, I understand the rigorous procedures that comes in play when roles are made public for everyone to apply. The criticism that comes after the selection. However, it will be beneficial if even with those ‘minor’ roles, you lost our criterias for those who would be interested and make such more public.

Thanks for all you do and I’m sure waiting to see the success of this initiative that will boost the community energy again.

Hey! Eugene here.

I would like to comment on the initial HoS contracts design. The most important part is that the voting system is weighted with stake. Every vote is someone’s stake.

When we designed and implemented the V1 of smart contracts, we used Gauntlet’s proposal as a design and made sure a few important things are implemented. As a token holder of NEAR you’re not required to delegate in order to vote. Once you lock your stake for voting, you will be able to vote on the approved proposals directly.
The pre-selected delegates are still required to acquire delegation from other token holders to be able to vote. So unless NF sponsors them (which I would be completely against), the delegation to them will be merit based.

In the V1, anyone can create a proposal, but it has to be approved by one of the reviewer. The reviewers group is not related to delegates. I hope that most reasonable proposals are approved into the voting process, but there will probably be guidelines initially.
Note, in the V1 proposals are in free text form. They will not be automatically will be executed once voted in. But I hope we’ll get there soon.

The end goal of HoS is to decentralize NF and move important decision making into the hands of NEAR token holders. It will take time to do so.

fastnear:

As a token holder of NEAR you’re not required to delegate in order to vote

Well, that’s actually a good thing — because so far, not a single delegate has earned that merit.

Yuen is quietly pocketing $4,500 a month for managing NEAR’s ghost town chats. Cameron’s team excels at the art of pretending to be busy, while NEAR AI has shown absolutely nothing over the past six months (though some say back in the day, he was known to collect kickbacks, I don’t know). NearWeek censors content and conveniently skips over any real news in the ecosystem. Aurora = NF

Maybe — just maybe — Slime, Alan, and James are the only ones who seem somewhat trustworthy. But even then, Slime is likely to dance to NF’s tune, and only Alan and James appear remotely independent.

Honestly, it might be time to just dissolve the NF altogether and hand governance over to actual token holders. Let’s just hope the NF didn’t secretly distribute tokens to these handpicked delegates — otherwise, we’re looking at one of the largest governance scams in Web3 history.

lane:

Hi Lane, thanks for the hard work on the HoS initiative so far, and thank you for the recent update.

Hello!

Based on the experience of previous initiatives in the ecosystem, it’s clear that transparency has always been a cornerstone of community governance. It seems reasonable that all delegate roles and opportunities should be publicly posted — both on the forum and on Jobs | NEAR Foundation Job Board — along with any related support initiatives. Currently, it’s unclear what kind of support is needed or available.

In general, if we already have 11 appointed delegates — many of whom highlighted their extensive experience in their introduction posts — it’s worth considering whether their skills could be voluntarily leveraged to support and fill some of the open governance roles. For example, as I recall, @Yuen served as a notetaker and generalist in the NDC and was involved in several DAOs. As for the Head of Governance role, the current team could potentially manage it directly or involve someone like James, who has strong governance experience.
It would also be helpful to understand how much funding is being allocated to this entire initiative and whether there are publicly accessible updates or reports regarding spending and progress. I believe significantly more has already been spent on this initiative than it cost to launch the previous experiment — which was up and running much faster.

Regarding the composition of the current delegate group, I was somewhat surprised that — out of 11 positions — there wasn’t broader representation from across the community. That said, it’s reassuring to see the inclusion of Meta Pool, Shitzu, and James, as well as several institutional delegates representing larger stakeholders. The remaining delegates appear to be closely aligned with, and largely representative of, the Near Foundation itself — which likely reflects the current design and intent behind the House of Stake governance model.

Dacha:

which was up and running much faster.

Iirc The NDC framework took almost a year to design and a little more than that for v1 to go live (Dec 23) so in terms of timelines HoS progress is somewhat faster.

Dacha:

Shitzu

I don’t think Shitzu is directly represented by any of the delegates.

I believe it’s already been a year, or almost a year (~11 months probably) since NDC shut down, and we’re not going to see the first proposal anytime this month, and most likely, next month too, so not sure how much faster HoS is. At least, not considerably faster.

I’m part of Shitzu btw.

Update: I just realized that it’s not public enough (not an admin in group or member of dao) but I am working closely on different stuff with Shitzu internally

fiatisabubble:

Iirc The NDC framework took almost a year to design and a little more than that for v1 to go live (Dec 23) so in terms of timelines HoS progress is somewhat faster.

First funding Jan 2023, v0 lauch June 2023

True. I however view this differently. NDC wasn’t live till Congress was elected and GWG dissolved.

fiatisabubble:

. NDC wasn’t live till Congress was elected and GWG dissolved.

NDC went live in June 2023 — at least in the version that was announced to the community. In fact, the Near Foundation began transferring — and effectively handed over — all funding-related initiatives to the NDC back in March 2023, starting with the creation of the treasury trusts.

You’re not wrong however it was still run under the stewardship of the GWG. We can agree to disagree on this nuance. For me, it was the formation of Congress and the disbanding of the GWG that marked the beginning of the NDC (how it was envisioned to be).

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. We’ll get something a bit more structured set up once things are rolling, but for now, this is more or less the intention of my updates here. Wouldn’t you say they check most of those boxes? What’s missing, and what would you like to see laid out differently?

Regarding funding, to be clear - as far as I am aware, the HoS treasury is not being touched at all, aside from some small payments to the old trustees, which will end soon.

Keep the suggestions coming.

L

I just fundamentally disagree with most of your premises here. I don’t feel like engaging with your questions is going to be productive. Happy to try again later some other way.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, as mentioned, we are working on onboarding someone into a full-time, focused “comms” role. Once this is done, you can expect more frequent updates, both from that person, as well as from other stakeholders and contributors, as facilitated by that person. Until then, you’ll have to bear with us, since we all have a lot on our plates and are doing the best we can.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask them here and I’ll do my best to find answers!

L

Valid point re: publicly posting job listings. The only reason this hasn’t happened yet is that I’ve been focused on other things, and don’t have final job descriptions that are ready to be posted. The Foundation has certain guidelines around the format for these, and I need to make sure they’re up to scratch before posting them. I’m also still figuring out in my own mind precisely what the right set of roles, division of labor, etc. should look like - the process so far has been driven more by serendipitously meeting folks that I thought might be a good fit, rather than leading with a formal job description. I’ll do my best to get these finished and posted.

Regarding hiring delegates to work for HoS, this feels like a conflict of interest to me. It’s important that NF remain as neutral as possible and have a very light touch on HoS governance. So far, IMHO we’ve done a good job here–none of the delegates have a direct NF affiliation (obviously, some are friends and folks the Foundation works with in various capacities, and I believe this has all been publicly stated in the applications). Having said that, of course I’d welcome support from the delegates, or anyone else really, with all of the things we need help with – but there is a fundamental difference between a full-time employee who reports to me, and an ecosystem volunteer. We need both.

Regarding funding, as I said here a moment ago, the HoS treasury isn’t being used yet. When that changes, we’ll establish new transparency guidelines around its spending. Right now, HoS is being funded by NF. I can’t speak directly to the transparency of NF spending as that’s not up to me.

Regarding the current composition of the delegates, I think we did a good job with the applications that we received through an open process. As I’ve said several times, we can expand the group in the future to include broader representation of other constituencies (AI comes to mind).

HTH.

L

fiatisabubble:

Dacha:

which was up and running much faster.

Iirc The NDC framework took almost a year to design and a little more than that for v1 to go live (Dec 23) so in terms of timelines HoS progress is somewhat faster.

We’ll take the time we need to get things right here. We’ll do it as fast as possible, but no faster - good things take time. The main blocker right now is the development of the Agora frontend, but rapid progress is being made here.

Hi folks,

Here’s another quick transparency update on what’s been happening over the past few days. I don’t have so much to report this week: I’ve been mostly focused on negotiating some research-related partnerships, which I alluded to in my last update, but I don’t want to say more here about them until they’re final.

Meanwhile, the delegate working groups have been quite active. We’re discussing the possibility of holding an in-person event soon, to get the delegates together face to face to build trust, review governance best practices, and draft the first few proposals together.

I’m happy to report that Agora is making rapid progress on the HoS frontend prototype. In fact, the first barebones prototype is already working. We’ll share it with the community as soon as Agora feels comfortable doing so.

The question arose on X about why the former NDC trustees are still being paid out of the HoS treasury. Here’s my response.

My top priorities at the moment are:

• finalize HoS job postings and post them publicly
• hire the roles mentioned above (esp. Head of Governance, and Comms). Thank you to everyone who reached out and expressed interest – your messages have been received and I’ll respond as soon as I can! Apologies for not being able to reply directly to all of them.
• finalize the set up of the new HoS legal entity, finish closing the NDC trust and transferring the treasury and assets
• finalize an initial proposed list of AI x governance research topics, and the plan for establishing a larger HoS research team, possibly including a third-party partnership

I’m attending a major conference this week. I’ll do my best on all of these tasks this week but progress on my end will be slow for a few more days. I appreciate your patience.

As always, feel free to post questions or ideas here.

Cheers,
Lane

Ultimately I’ve seen nothing to convince me that, “this time is different”.

We’ve seen vaguely community oriented approaches where users could vote themselves funds. We’ve also seen insider only approaches which delivered poor results.

The current approach appears to be a synthesis of both. I’m less interested in ideology and more concerned with seeing tangible results.

Empirically, both approaches have failed to deliver results. Reasoning from first principles, allowing the community to vote themselves funds has unresolvable malign incentives.

Typically firms with an economic interest in success would dish out consequences for insider graft or general poor performance. Here we see that some have been given another swing at the pinata, although we are assured that their intentions are not to once again eat the goodies. It is hard to believe this. Where are the observable changes?

Please excuse my ignorance of much of the insider lore and intrigue. I’m genuinely impressed by some of the comments here. They have been informative.

That said, I regard the question of NF as a firm with an economic interest in success as unresolvable under these premises. To understand it, I believe we would have to redefine success away from the stated terms.

Perhaps success in this context is better defined as the ability to raise VC funds, rather than deliver actionable changes which would result in robust, long-term ecosystem growth. From this perspective many of the decisions make sense.

Under these terms, modest ecosystem growth, apps with users and incremental wins are less valuable than selling the dream of hyper-growth. From this standpoint we can see how unimportant actual users are to the “success” metrics of NEARProtocol.

End users and messaging directed towards them becomes totally redundant. Similarly, completed apps become a liability. If it doesn’t fit the promised narrative of hypergrowth, then it is a distraction from the main product: raising money from VCs and institutions.

For me, this analysis fits much better. It offers a coherent explanation for the otherwise incoherent incompetence we’ve seen. Happy to be proven wrong.

Hi all

Excited to be here and to introduce myself. I am Maz, Head of Implementation at Agora, working with Lane, the NEAR Foundation team, endorsed delegates and other respective stakeholders on the development and implementation of the NEAR House of Stake Governance interface powered by Agora.

We are thrilled to be partnering with NEAR on this innovative approach to governance and see House of Stake as a evolutionary governance model that introduces two initiatives:

1/ Stake-weighted voting model
2/ Foundation for an AI-native agentic governance system

As you may know, Agora is the home for many DAOs in the ecosystem such as Optimism, Uniswap, ENS and more. We are true believers that good governance is a competitive advantage. Our team works closely with Foundations and Delegates to support the rollout of their governance strategy and community engagement.

Project goals

• Agora NEAR House of Stake governance front-end, UX and integration: we are working closely with fastNEAR engineers to integrate House of Stake contracts to a Agora governance frontend ensuring all functionality and UX meet the expectations as set out in the proposal by Gauntlet and the codebase to ensure NEAR token holders the ability to stake to vote. This includes:
  • Token staking, delegation, voting, and governance participation
  • Custom integration to the NEAR blockchain
  • Support for the HoS gov contracts and voting systems, including integration of NEP-141 smart contracts
• Developing proposal drafts and rollout strategy: we are working closely with HoS endorsed delegates to provide support on proposal creation and strategy. This will be executed on an ongoing basis pre and post gov site launch to ensure clarity on proposal draft writing (proposal template), proposal themes and goals. Alongside engaging in necessary delegate working groups to ensure a successful rollout proposals for clarity and community engagement.
• User engagement goals: our aim is to ensure user engagement at a healthy level with the help of stakeholders to support the House of Stake governance rollout. This would include success metrics as such:

Progress milestones and progress

Below is a high-level project overview of the key steps required for the Agora NEAR House of Stake governance implementation and engagement with HoS delegates. I will be updating this as the project develops.

Phase	Description	Status
Initial R&D	Study House of Stake contracts codebase, logic, gov parameters and proposal parameters
Agora intro presentation to HoS delegates	Agora product demo and expressing areas of support
MVP functionality	Develop a low design scrappy MVP to test staking, locking and proposal creation functionality
MVP functionality and data indexing	Continue to refine functionality and data infrastructure for real-time governance data
Agora product demo to HoS Delegates	First demo to delegates and to answer any technical Qs
Delegates workshopping proposals	Write-up proposal strategy, themes and drafts with endorsed delegates
MVP functionality, data indexing and UI/UX	Continue to develop MVP to reflect UI/X and NEAR branding and theming
NEAR Event @ ETHCC	Agora governance facilitation workshop	Incoming
MVP full integration with branded front-end	Full end to end interface and back-end integration for a working near complete app	Incoming
Internal testing	Internal testing for bug reporting and further iteration	Incoming
UAT	User Acceptance Testing for bug reporting and further iteration towards sign off	Incoming
Launch rollout	HoS governance interface rollout with first proposal deployed	Incoming

Feel free to post comments and questions, I will be happy to answer as best as I can. We are aiming to showcase a prototype to the community in the coming weeks. I will provide further updates in this thread as the project develops.

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a nice weekend. Here’s a quick update from my end! As usual, lots of things are cooking but they’re not all immediately visible.

As before, I’m continuing to work on negotiating and hammering out the details of several partnerships. I apologize for not being able to provide a ton of detail on them, but I promise that we’re making good progress on all of them and that all of them are very promising. For the sake of transparency here’s some more info:

• Initiative 1 is a research partnership with an interdisciplinary lab at a major research university. The idea is that we’d hire one or more postdocs to be focused on the AI x governance research questions and topics that are the most interesting and relevant to HoS. They’d be partially or, potentially, fully dedicated to this work, and the outcome here would be both running code as well as real academic research (paper(s), talk(s), etc.). The benefit for us is that we could hire world class researchers much more cheaply than we could otherwise, we could outsource a lot of the “admin” work of the project to the university, and we could leverage the university’s brand. The first project we’re contemplating is a “call for data” to collect as much governance-related data as possible to fine tune a model specifically for governance use cases, and to build a governance “assistant” on top of it (i.e., stage one outlined here: Three Stages of AI Governance - by Lane Rettig). We’re quite far along in the discussions here and we have in-principal approval. We’re hammering out details around how to start and sequence the work, the financial arrangement, etc.
• Initiative 2 is a partnership with a consulting and events company that’s focused exclusively on governance, and that has run large, successful, well-organized and well-marketed events for other major ecosystems, both Web2 and Web3. It’s likely that they’ll also help us expedite basically all of the HoS initiatives and provide some extra hands on deck while we work on hiring and building the team. We’re reviewing legal paperwork and finalizing the details here.
• Initiative 3 is a partnership with a team that’s focused both on making access to DAOs and governance more accessible for more community members who aren’t whales, as well as on using AI to make governance more efficient. This latter goal is highly aligned with one of our main goals at HoS. We’re relatively early in figuring out this partnership but it’s highly values-aligned and I think very high potential.
• Initiative 4 is with an open source, community-driven project focused specifically on sovereign use cases of AI. They’re in meetings and conversations with a number of big governments around the world, and what they’re finding is that existing AI solutions offered by the incumbent, large, for-profit companies simply don’t suit the needs of sovereign actors. They need more control over how models are trained and tuned, over how and where inference runs, etc. - in other words, exactly the things that NEAR AI is developing. This potential partnership is a little bit less about immediate deliverables for HoS and more about long-term potential and public goods work, to which I believe HoS could contribute meaningfully. This conversation is also in the early stages but, again, is very high potential.

There are a few other things cooking but these are the big ones!

In other news, we’ve confirmed that we’re hosting our first in person event in Cannes on July 1 (alongside EthCC). We’re planning to do a closed-door session with the delegates and a few ecosystem partners, and then we’ll open the doors later in the afternoon to the community and host a “meet and greet” style happy hour event where we can share some of our findings and progress. The happy hour is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend; I’ll share a sign up link shortly.

The delegates continue to be busy and to make good progress in the working groups. We’re still figuring out the best way for them to share that progress with the community for feedback. If you have ideas, feel free to share them here.

I’ve made some progress on the job descriptions for HoS. It’s my goal to finish and post these this week, and then formally kick off the hiring process.

On the transition from the NDC trust to the new HoS entity, we’ve made progress here as well. We’ve finalized the composition of the security council and the multisig that will govern the funds coming from the NDC trust. For security reasons I’m not 100% sure if we can share the members of these groups publicly, but if we can find a way to do so that doesn’t put anyone at risk, we will.

That’s about it from me for this week. I’ll do my best to keep these updates coming more often in the future. As always, feel free to post comments, questions, etc. here.

Cheers,
Lane

lane:

Here’s a quick update from my end!

Thank you very much for the detailed update — it’s greatly appreciated. I have a few follow-up questions.

Firstly, could you kindly confirm whether the NEAR Foundation Board has formally approved the funding for these research initiatives? Additionally, it would be helpful to know the names of the partner institutions and companies involved, as well as the general scope of the budgets allocated to each.

With respect to the upcoming event in Cannes, I wanted to raise a concern: given the availability of free virtual meeting tools such as Google Meet, sponsoring in-person delegate travel and events of this scale might be perceived by the community as a potential conflict of interest.

Finally, many in the community are eager to learn more about the delegates’ progress. To date, there has been very limited visibility across social channels or public communications.

Regarding the Security Council composition — while the intention to protect members is understandable, their identities are likely to become known via wallet activity. With that in mind, a proactive and transparent approach might ultimately serve the community better.

Thanks for the feedback and questions.

Dacha:

Firstly, could you kindly confirm whether the NEAR Foundation Board has formally approved the funding for these research initiatives? Additionally, it would be helpful to know the names of the partner institutions and companies involved, as well as the general scope of the budgets allocated to each.

I’ll share names once the deals are done. I don’t think it’s appropriate to do so while these are still in flight. I think we can share some info on the scope of budgets, though here I have to defer to NF and our legal team since NF budget transparency isn’t up to me. I’ll reiterate a point here that I made a few times before: when HoS is “up and running”, when it’s more mature and funds are flowing, NF can stop subsidizing these things, HoS can take them over, and the full HoS budget can and should be made public.

Dacha:

given the availability of free virtual meeting tools such as Google Meet, sponsoring in-person delegate travel and events of this scale might be perceived by the community as a potential conflict of interest.

The delegates have done a bunch of virtual meetings already. It’s not the same thing. You need both. My personal opinion is that you also need face to face meetings from time to time to build trust and have higher bandwidth time to discuss important topics.

I don’t see a conflict of interest. As always, happy to hear other ideas and proposals to accomplish these goals.

Dacha:

Finally, many in the community are eager to learn more about the delegates’ progress. To date, there has been very limited visibility across social channels or public communications.

Completely agree with this point. I know that some of the delegates are working on this. I’d personally love to see each working group begin to post public updates as well, but at the same time, the delegates are all volunteers and I’m hesitant to create more work for them. What do you propose?

Dacha:

a proactive and transparent approach might ultimately serve the community better.

I’ll give this some more thought. Open to ideas and proposals here, too.

L

I’ve yet to read a coherent argument for AI governance. If the humans framing the problem for the AI have been unable to identify suitable incentives to support ecosystem growth, why would we believe that they are capable of instructing an AI to do so?

In reference to “Project Cybersyn”, it was impossible from the beginning from the well known, “Economic Calculation Problem”. Without individual entrepreneurs acting towards their unique and subjective ends, price calculation becomes impossible or more accurately - the results of cybernetic price calculations were meaningless.

Similarly, the ecosystem will not be developed if insiders continue to pursue things which only resonate within their own echochamber. Incentives must relate to market forces and tangible performance, not toxic political connections and long debunked ideological baggage.

NEAR must pivot to developing a robust and active ecosystem. Projects which drive token consumption must be prioritized. If subsidies are to be deployed, active and released projects must be incentivized. If you’re not interested in driving NEAR token use and creating an active ecosystem, why are you here?

Proponents of AI governance should offer supporting arguments for their initiative. Afterwards, a vote should be held. Sidestepping this process from the beginning suggests that the the House of Stake will be yet another farce.

HI all,

Jumping in again with another update. Things seems to be developing well across the key work streams and I’ve personally been enjoying meeting with the delegates again to update them on the progress of product development and the overall project.

Before jumping into updates, wanted to share the demo snippet from our recent call with some of the delegates on May 9th where we covered:

• Basic user flow and functionality
• Key user behaviours like locking
• Product basic UI with data indexing resulting to a performing web app

Screenshot 2025-05-20 at 17.03.221812×978 119 KB

Three core workstreams

1- Product, technical and design

• Locking down core user flows ensuring we have considered all critical user personas
• Design UI/UX sprint in progress for the locking and staking flows alongside overall in line with our existing Gov Site design
• Front-end improvements interacting with staking contracts to display staking balances

2- Delegate Engagement and governance support

• Latest demo and engagement with HoS Delegates answering technical Qs on product and flows
• Setting up every 2 weeks product demo and Q&A drop-in session to ensure development is visible
• Support working groups and individual delegates leading on proposal creation and process flow alongside technical docs creation for better onboarding

3- NEAR House of Stake @ EthCC 1st July

• Co-organizing the event’s program with NEAR Foundation and Gauntlet
• Looking to organize panels and breakout sessions to ensure we discuss House of Stake Governance
• Show a more fleshed out product to attendees, we are positive to have an even further developed product with polished UI/UX by the event

As always would love to get any feedback if you have any and will also hold myself to updating more frequently. This post is a general update across current priority workstreams and looking to go deeper in my upcoming updates as processes progress across these areas. Thank you.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

I’ve yet to read a coherent argument for AI governance.

It’s an interesting question, thanks for bringing this up. I have to say upfront that the entire HoS initiative is predicated upon the idea that AI will play a significant role in governance, so if you disagree with this statement, you probably won’t be a fan of HoS. Having said that, I feel strongly that we should approach this in a scientific fashion: i.e., we should come up with some specific, falsifiable hypotheses and systematically test them, without assuming that AI is a panacea and will just “fix governance.” (Hence the research initiatives I described above.)

My perspective is:

• humans are just bad at governance. There are lots of reasons for this. Governance isn’t fun, it’s contentious, we have lots of biases (including prejudices and biases that we aren’t even aware of), we’re corruptible, we’re lazy, etc.
• AI agents have the potential to be more neutral actors in governance than humans. (I say potential, I don’t think this is guaranteed, and also, they obviously won’t be perfectly neutral, but they can be more neutral than human actors.)
• governance is simply a lot of work, a lot of that work is drudgery that isn’t fun (ex: reviewing proposals, voting, committees, researching prior art, etc.), and AI can relieve a lot of this load from human actors.
• in governance it’s borderline impossible to aggregate preferences from all of the human participants, even in a democratic system. That’s because a lot of human actors are disenfranchised by the system, don’t have coins to vote, or are just apathetic/busy. It’s theoretically possible to have one agent act on behalf of every human actor, to make sure their interests are represented in governance. This could be a breakthrough in governance, and IMHO it’s exactly the sort of hypothesis that HoS should be testing.
• Sybil resistance is also a huge problem in governance, as we saw in NDC (and in many other places in crypto). AI has the potential to give us novel Sybil detection and collusion resistance systems. This is another area I think we could research, and could lead to a more democratic system.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

If the humans framing the problem for the AI have been unable to identify suitable incentives to support ecosystem growth, why would we believe that they are capable of instructing an AI to do so?

I don’t think it’s so cut and dried, and these are not mutually exclusive. Including AI agents doesn’t mean we’re removing humans, human judgement, or human agency. See, for example, the DeepGov experiment run as part of the most recent Gitcoin Grants funding round. Projects can still submit suitable incentives with funding requests, and AI agents can play a role in distributing funding. There are still human experts in the loop. See also AI as the engine, humans as the steering wheel.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

In reference to “Project Cybersyn”, it was impossible from the beginning from the well known, “Economic Calculation Problem”. Without individual entrepreneurs acting towards their unique and subjective ends, price calculation becomes impossible or more accurately - the results of cybernetic price calculations were meaningless.

Project Cybersyn is fascinating, I’ve always been fascinated by it! I totally agree with this point. Nothing we’re planning here removes individual entrepreneurs acting towards their unique and subjective ends!

L

lane:

Nothing we’re planning here removes individual entrepreneurs acting towards their unique and subjective ends!

I’ve been around the NEAR ecosystem for 3+ years. I’ve watched millions of dollars in aggregate funding directed towards vaporware, meaningless initiatives and payments to clueless DAOcrats. Here your statement is nominally correct, because governance has never been centered around market performance. To remove something implies that it was present in the first place.

The entrepreneurial process requires that entrepreneurs put something at risk. It is a process of calculated risk. The previous initiatives failed because DAOcrats had nothing at stake. They had nothing to lose by granting funds to useless initiatives. Moreover, allowing individuals or factions to vote themselves funds or those aligned with them funds has obvious perverse incentives.

Using an AI model here doesn’t remove these conflicts of interest. Those training the AI will simply use it as a ventriloquist dummy to absolve themselves of responsibility. The AI has nothing at stake and no more to lose than the DAOcrats dictating the training data and interpreting the output.

It is cut and dried when we reason from first principles. Instead of pursuing more irrelevant projects from within the foundation’s echochamber, the DAO should respond to market signals. The market is and has always been the most effective, decentralized way to aggregate user preferences.

If we are not interested in market success, what is the goal? Why would we attempt to measure anything else?

Example: Funding unreleased vaporware has brought about even more unreleased vaporware. Unreleased vaporware has not benefited the ecosystem. Promotion and funding of vaporware has eroded trust among users and developers.

Solution: Fund active and released projects. Incentives should be directed towards the pointy end of the funnel. Incentivize builders to complete and launch their projects. Further incentivize projects with users.

This is so simple it that borders on tautology, yet it needs to be repeated again and again here. It doesn’t require research, AI, misdirection or further waste. This is immediately actionable.

The reference to the failed central planning project, “Cybersyn” is illustrative. There are direct parallels between the misallocation of resources in centrally planned economies and the previous failures of NEAR governance. In both cases, consumer and entrepreneurial preferences are overlooked in favor of political interests. After 3+ years of failure, the results speak for themselves.

Other chains have managed to cultivate vibrant and active ecosystems, while NEAR is appearing to retreat further into its self-congratulatory echochamber. If NF wants to look inward, look inward at the past failures. Show some accountability.

lane:

Nothing we’re planning here removes individual entrepreneurs acting towards their unique and subjective ends!

I would rephrase this: Nothing you’ve posted here demonstrates that (decentralized by definition) market signals will play a role. The problem isn’t in what you are removing, it is what hasn’t been added.

Nothing here convinces me that this iteration of governance will be any different from the previous failures.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

I’ve been around the NEAR ecosystem for 3+ years. I’ve watched millions of dollars in aggregate funding directed towards vaporware, meaningless initiatives and payments to clueless DAOcrats.

I don’t doubt this. But, from my perspective, none of what you’re saying here has anything to do with HoS. HoS is a novel initiative, from scratch, with a new design, new people behind it, etc. What you’re describing here is a lot of NDC PTSD. I’m sorry that you, and the ecosystem, had to go through that, but again: HoS is a new initiative, and hopefully we’ve learned something from the mistakes of the past. In any case, it’s unfair and disingenuous to accuse HoS of something like “pursuing more irrelevant projects” when HoS hasn’t distributed a single dollar of funding yet.

I’ve said it before, I’m sure I’ll say it again many times: HoS is brand new. Give things a chance. You (plural, as in, the community) need to have faith, and a more positive attitude, to give this a fair chance of success.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

Nothing you’ve posted here demonstrates that (decentralized by definition) market signals will play a role. The problem isn’t in what you are removing, it is what hasn’t been added.

Great idea. I shared some very concrete ideas in my previous post. Why don’t you be constructive and share some concrete ideas on how to better factor in market signals?

L

Thanks for your response here.

lane:

HoS is a new initiative, and hopefully we’ve learned something from the mistakes of the past.

Firstly, hoping isn’t enough. We need results. What I’ve read so far doesn’t inspire confidence. To the contrary, it reads like more of the past, NDC or even before. It isn’t PTSD, but common sense observation. For the record, I spoke up and expressed similar concerns about the NDC before it launched. Don’t try to gaslight my criticisms or mischaracterize my intentions. Address the topic at hand, not the person.

Personally I’d be ecstatic if I believed, “this time is different” or the further leap, “this time is different, because AI”. We all hope for change, but hope alone isn’t enough. A coherent strategy is required. Action and a genuine desire to fulfill that strategy must follow from there. Simply going through the motions, playing to the echochamber (AI narrative) and collecting a check for showing up isn’t enough.

lane:

humans are just bad at governance. There are lots of reasons for this. Governance isn’t fun, it’s contentious, we have lots of biases (including prejudices and biases that we aren’t even aware of), we’re corruptible, we’re lazy, etc.

lane:

in governance it’s borderline impossible to aggregate preferences from all of the human participants, even in a democratic system

Even you concede here that the basic premises have unresolved issues. I believe at least some of the delegates are capable, if given a chance to start.

Your comments touch on the subjective nature of fallible man etc. The implication is that AI wouldn’t be? Again, this doesn’t inspire confidence.

Why are we going around to conferences to talk about governance and pontificating on what it might mean? Put the thoughts into action. Show us here in the NEAR ecosystem. Don’t go elsewhere to tell some other group about what AI might do. What end does this serve? How does it help develop the NEAR ecosystem?

The common theme here is AI gobbledygook. Meaningless hubris playing to the echochamber. Preemptive, coddling excuses for failure, speaking about the impossibility of the project. Framing the problem (poorly) in the theoretical instead of the practical. A lack of coherence and an inability to understand the basics. This isn’t about PTSD. This is like watching a school bus get stuck on a railroad crossing, again.

Let’s be honest here. AI is being shoehorned into an already poorly designed system, with faulty premises because it suits the current hype cycle. It suits what serial employees talk about in a collection of companies which have repeatedly failed to foster a vibrant ecosystem. Previous failures were also focused on the narrative du jour. If and when this initiative fails, employee-contractors will add it to their LinkedIn profile as a win.

lane:

Why don’t you be constructive and share some concrete ideas on how to better factor in market signals?

Firstly, dump all of the voting where possible. Just forget about the DAO concept.

Secondly, end all of the existing subsidy programs, including the ones paying for github churn or other employee-contractor metrics. These ideas do not serve the market.

Hire a team of aggressive recruiters/developer advocates who work on commission. Pay their bonuses only when they on-board builders who can deliver results for the ecosystem.

Metrics shall include:

1. Releasing the project on the mainnet
2. Acquiring active users
3. Acquiring paying users
4. Multivariate testing and optimization of mature products
5. ..And other tangibles.

Incentives will be weighted towards the pointy end of the funnel. Recruiter bonuses and developer incentives will be screened harshly. Failure to perform will result in termination. No more coddling. No more culture of failure. No more vapid narratives where performance is needed. Keep that nonsense directed towards outside marketing efforts. It should not govern internal decision making.

After this process is ironed out and effective - and only after, you may consider an AI integration for the least valuable rung of the funnel. Here the previously collected metrics can be used to automate the process. Think lead generation for new developers or unserious developers who talk endlessly.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

Firstly, dump all of the voting where possible. Just forget about the DAO concept.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. If this is your perspective, though, you’re not going to like House of Stake very much. It sounds like you don’t like decentralization very much.

To be totally honest - and I’ve said this before - I’m also deeply skeptical of DAOs, and of decentralized, community-led governance. I’ve been part of a number of DAOs that were epic failures. But I’ve also seen a few successes, most notably projects like Linux and Python. I decided to work on House of Stake in spite of this skepticism because I believe we can learn from the mistakes of the past (including NDC), and that we can do better and be better, and learn from more positive examples of open source governance and from ideas like rough consensus and commons-based peer production. Also, because - unlike you I suppose - I believe that AI will make a big difference here, and that we’re the right community to build that.

Mayor_of_Pumpopolis:

Secondly, end all of the existing subsidy programs, including the ones paying for github churn or other employee-contractor metrics. These ideas do not serve the market.

Hire a team of aggressive recruiters/developer advocates who work on commission. Pay their bonuses only when they on-board builders who can deliver results for the ecosystem.

Metrics shall include:

Thanks for sharing this as well. While I disagree with a lot of your points, this is constructive and worth discussing. I’m also skeptical of subsidy programs, and a lot of the ones that have been tried to date (in NEAR and elsewhere) have definitely been ineffective, you’re right about that.

This is precisely what House of Stake should be discussing, and now is a great time to do that, since the first ideas for proposals are just now being discussed. But I don’t think this forum thread is the right place to do that. I’d suggest starting a new forum thread on this topic, and/or sharing a draft proposal to this effect.

Hi folks,

Time for another update. There’s a LOT going on in the HoS ecosystem, and things are definitely accelerating, so I’m not entirely sure where to start. I’ll break things down by workstream:

• Delegates: The four working groups are all making good progress in their respective areas and have begun to produce insights and actionable results. See the below slides for concrete examples of progress. I’ll encourage the working groups to also post updates, including some of these deliverables, here and/or in the public Telegram group. The delegates have begun to discuss topics including proposal process flow, constitution, and what the initial set of proposals should be.
• Hiring: I’ve onboarded two contractors to fill in the gaps while we continue to work on growing the team. @haenko has also generously offered to help out as a volunteer. All of these individuals are already adding value and helping me focus on the areas where I have the most to contribute; that said, they’re still onboarding and we haven’t fully decided what their respective areas of responsibility will be going forward. I’ll encourage them to also introduce themselves here. I apologize for the delay in getting those job postings up. It remains a top priority, but I’ve continually been pulled into more time-sensitive tasks over the past few days and haven’t had the chance to finish them yet. I intend to do so ASAP. In the interest of transparency, here is a draft of the Head of Governance job posting.
• AI work: I began personally reviewing the source code for the Cami assistant from NEAR AI, to assess whether we might be able to repurpose it for our HoS governance assistant. Unfortunately, this code isn’t open source yet so I cannot share it - that’s up to NEAR AI. @haenko also identified several other open source repositories that we may be able to rely on. We shared that we’re planning two initial, concrete initiatives here: a global call for data to create a governance-related data set (that we can use to build an assistant, an AI delegate, etc.), and one or more AI agents/delegates that can help with public goods funding. Progress here will continue to be slow until we have full-time technical staff working on this; reach out if you’re interested.
• Community: There were a couple of open AMAs on X spaces, including one with me that was recorded. Summary and takeaways here. There are more Spaces and AMAs planned by the community in the coming days. NF is working with an experienced social media consultant, whom I’ve personally really enjoyed working with and have learned a lot from. I asked him to run a workshop with the endorsed delegates on social media strategy, something that’s in the process of being organized. Delegates having a bigger social media profile will help raise the profile of House of Stake and of NEAR more generally; it will help the world understand what we’re doing and why, and why they should pay attention.
• Events: We have a final agenda, and some preliminary swag designs, for the in-person HoS activation that’s happening in Cannes on July 1. As a reminder, we’re going to have a one day workshop for the endorsed delegates and a few partners, followed by a happy hour (co-hosted with NF) that’s open to the public. I’ll also be giving a talk on HoS and AI at EthCC.
• Partners: Gauntlet continues to make great progress on the HoS 2.0 design: i.e., on the impact that HoS will have on overall protocol economics. Most recently, they delivered sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis on the impact on network security of things like changes in the NEAR price, changes in total validator rewards, changes in the amount of NEAR staked, etc. This work is ongoing.
• Agora continues to make great progress on the HoS frontend. @mmazco shared updates here previously, and I’ll let her do so again rather than speaking on Agora’s behalf.
• I’m very excited to announce that we’ve signed a contract with Hack Humanity, an experienced team of systems thinkers led by @KlausBrave that brings a wealth of expertise in governance and group dynamics from both Web2 and Web3. We expect that they’ll work with the delegates on things including building trust, ecosystem mapping, and proposal identification & acceleration. They’ll be participating in the Cannes event as well, and we plan to run an open GovHack event with them later in the year
• Research partnership work (mentioned previously here) is a bit stalled. We’re still working out what sort of partnership would make the most sense, and what the initial set of research tasks will be.
• Entity setup: Finalizing the setup of the new HoS legal entity is blocking on setting up a multisig to receive and custody the inbound NDC funds from the old NDC Trust. We finalized the composition of the multisig, and one of the signers asked that we use the Fireblocks MPC solution for signing. I have a call with Fireblocks tomorrow to better understand their product as a next step. In parallel, I also worked with the HoS delegates to come up with a list of questions for the NF legal team to better understand the entity setup, governance, and processes around executing proposals and disbursing funds. We’re still waiting for answers.

That’s all I can think of for now. As always, feel free to post questions or comments here!

Lane

–

Updated roadmap. This does NOT include all initiatives or everything that’s going on but it gives you a rough idea:

image1289×725 85.7 KB

Working groups:

image1289×725 101 KB

One concrete example of progress from each group. There’s a longer status report from @haenko coming soon.

image1289×725 82 KB

House of Stake Working Groups Update May 2025

As part of the House of Stake initiative, four working groups are actively shaping strategic direction and operational frameworks for the NEAR ecosystem. Below is a summary of key outcomes in May and plans for June.

1. Ecosystem Growth Strategy Working Group

Focus
Aligning on the key objectives and KPIs for NEAR’s ecosystem growth strategy, to help prioritize the initiatives our working group will focus on

Participants
Tané, Areta, Aurora, NEARWEEK, Charles Garrett, Slime, Cameron Dennis

May Highlights

• Held 4 interactive workshops that surfaced 7 key opportunity areas
• Developed an almost-final matrix of goals and KPIs (user growth, dev retention, TVL growth)

Ecosystem Growth WG Key Metrics Drafting

June Plans

• Publish the Key Objective/KPI matrix and open a 7-day async feedback window
• Present the refined strategy for feedback and iteration during the next House of Stake community call

How to contribute:

• Review and comment on the KPI matrix when it’s published
• Share any ecosystem initiatives you’re involved in that align with the growth goals

2. Network Economics & Security Working Group

Focus
Assessing the impact of potential validator issuance reductions on decentralization and long-term sustainability.

Participants
Slime, Alan, Takeshi, Rika Goldberg (404 DAO)

May Highlights

• Launched a community survey on inflation and staking
• Compiled a list of ~40 NEAR-native projects (validators, DeFi, AI, wallets, games, etc.) to receive the issuance survey
• Assigned outreach owners using NEAR Catalog and ecosystem mapping tools

Full list

June Plans

• Publish anonymized survey results and raw data

How to contribute:

• Take the staking/inflation survey (if you haven’t yet)
• Share the survey within your community circles
• Provide feedback or ideas on how to improve the long-term network economy

3. Governance Infrastructure & Processes Working Group

Focus
Designing scalable and transparent governance processes for House of Stake and the wider NEAR ecosystem.

Participants
Tané (Takeshi and Shoji), 404 DAO (Cole), Slime, Alan, Cameron, James

May Highlights

• A draft forum post was prepared to introduce the governance submission process and collect initial proposals (draft link)
• Explored directions for AI-assisted governance. James (james.near) is currently studying HoS contracts in order to build an assistant with these potential capabilities:
  • helping users lock/stake NEAR to get veNEAR and delegate it
  • reviewing or summarizing proposals with recommendations
  • participating in governance discussions
  • creating proposals
  • voting autonomously

Community-built multi-agent proposal generator

June Plans

• Publish the forum post and begin accepting community proposals
• Continue testing AI-based governance tooling (community testers welcome)
• Implement UI/UX improvements in the governance portal

How to contribute:

• Submit your proposal once the forum post is live
• Volunteer to test AI-based governance tools
• Share UX feedback or ideas to improve the governance portal

4. Treasury Management Working Group

Focus
Creating clear guidelines for how NEAR’s treasury is used to maximize impact, manage risk, and support sustainable ecosystem growth.

Participants
Yuen, Slime, Cole

May Highlights

• Reviewed treasury management initiatives from Arbitrum and ENS
• Assessed legacy NEAR DAO treasury practices and gaps
• Discussed legal entity structure with Lane

Summary of May 21 call

June Plans

• Align with Growth WG on funding priorities
• Launch community survey on treasury goals and risk preferences
• Begin draft of initial budget and allocation framework
• Meet with NF counterparts (Founder Success, Strategic Initiatives) to discuss guidelines, respective areas of focus, preventing overlap, etc.

How to contribute:
Fill out the treasury goals & risk survey (when released)
Share examples or ideas for effective Web3 treasury management
Reach out if you have legal, financial, or operational expertise to offer

4 posts were split to a new topic: House of Stake: Transparency Thread Off-topic Posts

I’m getting very tired of this back and forth. Guys, what you’re discussing has literally nothing to do with House of Stake, and it’s not at all constructive. Take it elsewhere.

I’ve locked this thread for now. If you cannot participate constructively in forums like this going forward, it’s going to be harder for me and the others working on House of Stake to provide updates and answer questions. That hurts everyone.

L

I moved these posts to a separate thread, feel free to continue the conversation there: House of Stake: Transparency Thread Off-topic Posts

Hi everyone, we’re overdue for another update here. There’s more and more happening in the growing HoS ecosystem, so I’m going to try to structure these updates a bit more going forward.

Hiring

See House of Stake: Open Roles and the additional information I shared at Telegram: View @NEAR_HouseOfStake, and thanks for your patience as I’ve owed you these JDs for some time. None of these roles have been filled yet, and you’re welcome to apply yourself or refer someone else. I hope to fill most of these roles soon, and will continue to post updates here as that process continues. As I describe in the linked thread, these roles are all full-time roles at NF for now, but some will transition to the HoS Foundation.

Entity Formation

As I previously explained, the blocker to completing the setup of the new HoS Foundation is the Fireblocks vault that will be used to receive the incoming NDC Trust funds. I’m happy to report that over the past few days, the paperwork was completed and the fees have been paid, so I expect this vault to be set up this week. With any luck, it should only take a few more days after that to transfer the funds.

I previously shared a list of questions from the delegates and the community about the new HoS entity. I’m also happy to report that we have answers to all of these questions, thanks to Bianca @ NF Legal. These are undergoing a final review process internally and I expect to be able to share these this week. Bianca has also kindly agreed to join an AMA on a X space next next week to review the answers and cover any remaining questions; @fiatisabubble and his team will update with details about when this will happen.

As a sneak peek, the answer to most of the questions is, “It’s up to the community.” This is exciting, but it also means that HoS will have to develop operational expertise - or recruit experts to help - with things like treasury management in the near future. Something to begin thinking about!

Economics

Gauntlet continues to make progress towards a final set of proposed economic parameters for “HoS 2.0”, which is the next iteration of the HoS project beyond this initial locking/delegating/voting stage. We expect this work to be substantially complete within the next week or two. This includes things like the proposed mechanism for calculating yield for staking and locking NEAR/veNEAR under House of Stake.

Governance

@KlausBrave ran some initial “Mission-Vision-Values” workshops with the delegates last week, and collected a lot of very valuable feedback on these topics. He’s in the process of reviewing and distilling this feedback; expect to hear more from him this week.

Gauntlet also has a draft proposal with more details around the role of the Steering Committee and, in particular, how to add, remove, and replace delegates. I expect this will also be shared soon.

Delegates

I defer to the delegates to directly share their progress and that of the respective working groups, but from my perspective I see progress being made on several fronts, including Network Economics & Security, Ecosystem Growth, and Gov Infra & Processes.

The Network Economics & Security working group ran a survey to collect community feedback on inflation and issuance, and shared the results. I found this, especially the visualizations, very insightful and informative. This group also hosted a successful AMA to discuss these results.

Ecosystem Growth has been in touch with the NF Founder Success and Partner and Infrastructure Success teams, and also with the data & analytics team at NF to put together an ecosystem dashboard for HoS. They’re working on benchmarking current metrics as a way to track progress once HoS goes live.

And the Gov Infra & Processes group has been as active as ever, reviewing relevant research, sharing ideas, and discussing relevant AI tools.

I can’t possibly do justice to everything happening here. I can only share the things I’m aware of! So again, I encourage the delegates and others to share other updates here.

AI/Product

Metapool previously built some AI tooling for their own governance system, that they’ve kindly agreed to adapt for the HoS use case. I’m not sure how much of this has been shared publicly and I don’t want to post any spoilers here, so I encourage @claudioac & co. to share more, but this should be up and running very soon! I expect this will be the first end-to-end, functional AI governance tooling for HoS.

@jlwaugh has also built some really cool, prototype AI-tooling, and along with @Cameron, is helping coordinate with a few other third-party builders that we expect will contribute to helping us ship AI governance tooling. Again, I don’t know how much of this is already public and don’t want to over share, but I encourage James and Cameron to share more here about what’s cooking!

Research

I reviewed a second and final draft of the proposal from our candidate research lab partner, and it’s in great shape. I’ll share an executive summary internally at NF this week for final approval, then we can kick off the partnership, including finding postdocs/faculty/undergrads/etc. to contribute to this research effort. The first project we intend to pursue is a “Call for Governance Data”, to build the world’s largest governance-focused data set, which we can then use for all of the AI applications we intend to build. More soon.

–

As always, let me know if I’ve missed anything. I’ve re-opened this thread, so feel free to share comments or questions, but please keep things on topic.

Cheers,
Lane

GM NEARians,

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Cannes for an amazing day of House of Stake. We are humbled to be building in such a thoughtful and action oriented communities.

Some highlights from last week:

Alpha site: https://agora-near.vercel.app/

• Feel free to go in and create some test accounts and play around. I will create a new proposal each day, so you can see those voting mechanics at work.
• We will put together a process for collecting feedback soon
• Site will be open sourced by mid next week. Just removing all the //HACKs

Contract Update

• The FastNEAR team has fixed the undelegation bug and we will be deciding if we need to get these contracts audited by the end of the week.
• See the PR here: Fix rounding issue by evgenykuzyakov · Pull Request #37 · houseofstake/house-of-stake-contracts · GitHub

Roadmap

• We have published a tentative roadmap here that is byy no means official but enough to start the conversation: https://agora-near.vercel.app/info.

Goals for the next few weeks

• Publish new contracts and ensure delegate and undelegate work as expected on Testnet
• Open source the application
• Add support for Endorsed Delegates and advanced delegate filtering
• Speed up the site
• Launch on mainnet, locking in a date now with the Foundation.

Find me on https://x.com/kentf if you want to reach our directly or find me on Telegram @kentfenwick.

Looking forward to getting this live with all of you. Have a great week.

Hi folks! As usual, there’s tons of things going on lately. I’m recently back from Cannes for EthCC and our HoS event, and a week of holiday, which means that I’m still deeply in message debt and still catching up everywhere (X, this forum, TG, etc.). Please bear with me, and thank you for your patience.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s going on, from my perspective:

Events

See my recap of the Cannes event:

Cannes Event Recap House of Stake

Hi everyone, First things first, a massive thank you to everyone who participated or otherwise had a hand in helping make our first in-person event a reality: the NF events team, Gauntlet, @kent and the Agora team, @KlausBrave and Hack Humanity, the Metapool team, @bearmans, krystof from L2Beat, the delegates who attended, and of course everyone else that I’m forgetting. I consider the event a big success, and I think it was a great first opportunity to get to know one another, build trust, sha…

In that post, I included a list of questions, reflecting on this first event and considering the next one. We don’t currently have any concrete plans to do another in person event, but IMHO we should keep up the cadence on these and, ideally, do them roughly quarterly. (I explained why in that post, and in the substack article I linked there.)

It might make sense to meet face to face in Buenos Aires around the time of Devconnect in November. We’ve also talked about doing an event in North America, or another one in Europe, in the autumn. Now would be a great time to weigh in here if you have an opinion (but, please, not in this thread–feel free to use the Cannes Event Recap thread, or we can start a new one).

Website

@KlausBrave and I have been working on putting in place a barebones HoS landing page. We acquired the domains houseofstake.com and houseofstake.org a few weeks ago, and we put up a barebones, Docusaurus-based landing page here:

GitHub - houseofstake/houseofstake.org: House of Stake Landing Page

House of Stake Landing Page

(Note that we’ll rename this houseofstake.org and switch it to that domain shortly.)

This all lives in a public repository on Github, so all are welcome to contribute, submit PRs, etc. For now I expect this will host the following:

1. A high-level description of the project, its goals, etc.
2. The list of delegates
3. Some foundational documents: mission/vision/values, CoI, CoC, etc.

What else do we want to add?

The goal is to keep this barebones and simple for now, using basic markdown, with as little vendor lockin as possible so that we can migrate or upgrade to a more sophisticated hosting platform in the future. To that end, we’ve chosen Docusaurus for now. If someone in the community wants to take it upon themselves to help build a better landing page, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hiring

Unfortunately, none of the full time roles that I listed here last month have been approved by NF or posted on the official careers page. I don’t have full transparency or understanding of why this is the case, but it appears to be due to a combination of two things:

1. NF just last month introduced a new “compensation committee” and a new process by which all roles must be reviewed and approved. This process is happening now for the HoS roles, but it may take some time for some of the roles.
2. There’s still some lack of clarity in terms of which roles will migrate from NF → HoS, at which point in time, and exactly what that process will look like. We’re figuring this out too.

I received a couple of applications for the Head of Governance role, and one for the AI Product Lead. Luckily, I was able to get the AI Product Lead role approved as a contractor position with NF, and we’re planning to onboard someone to this role later this month.

Please feel free to continue to refer candidates to me, or to apply yourself, with the caveat that these roles shouldn’t be considered final or official until they’ve been approved and posted on the NF jobs board. That may take some more time, and I’ll keep you posted here.

Entity Formation

The Fireblocks account that I mentioned in my last update is now active, and all of the keyholders have set up their accounts. Unfortunately, we’ve run into problems with the MPC setup for one of the keyholders, which is a blocker on finishing “structuring the vault” (i.e., configuring the required number of signers, etc.) and receiving the NDC funds. Resolving this will probably require talking to Fireblocks. Sorting this out is one of my top priorities for this week.

We also have a call with the NDC trustees scheduled for next week to finalize the transfer.

Economics

Gauntlet shared their final Q2 deliverable, which lays out their plans for transitioning from “HoS 1.0” (what’s already been built) to “HoS 2.0”, where HoS plays a deeper role in protocol economics, validator compensation, etc. They’ll be presenting this plan on a X space in a few hours.

Governance

Expect an update from @KlausBrave on his work here (as described in my previous update) very shortly. We also still owe you Gauntlet’s draft proposal with more details around the Steering Committee, adding, removing, and replacing delegates, and delegate compensation.

Delegates

I haven’t personally been very active in the working groups the past few weeks, so I defer to the delegates and the working group leads to share updates as they see fit.

AI/Product

Metapool shipped an AI copilot prototype in time for Cannes. Very exciting stuff! We got a demo of this at the HoS workshop, and I also included it in my EthCC talk, where I laid out my personal vision for what the HoS AI product roadmap might look like, driving towards a form of “swarm intelligence.”

@KlausBrave and I kicked off work on a prototype with the Deepgov team, which you can see here. This is a super early prototype of a “deep listening” tool that allows us to use AI to consume a torrent of information (this forum, telegram, social media, etc.) and produce straightforward, structured reports to understand the sentiment of the community, what issues people care about the most, etc.

@KlausBrave also shipped a really exciting prototype “Code of Conduct agent”, which he may be able to share here. The general idea is that we want to put our money where our mouth is, dogfood our own tooling, and lean heavily into the use of AI in governance, especially to remove the drudgery and busy work often associated with things like policing a CoC.

I know that @jlwaugh , @Cameron and others have also had a hand in shipping some AI-related prototypes over the past few weeks, so I encourage them to share more here about what they’ve been up to.

Finally, I expect all of this work to accelerate, and for us to massively increase coordination - e.g., putting in place proper project roadmaps - when the AI Project Lead starts in a matter of days, as mentioned above.

Research

I’m excited to report that just this week we finalized terms and language with our new research partner, the lab at a major research university that I’ve alluded to here several times. Once all of the paperwork is signed and everything is final, we’ll announce this partnership and explain more about our plans and goals - hopefully in time for my next update here.

–

If any of the above work sounds interesting or exciting, and if you’d like to contribute, please reach out. As always, let me know if I’ve missed anything. Feel free to share comments or questions, but please keep things on topic.

Cheers,
Lane

lane:

We also still owe you Gauntlet’s draft proposal with more details around the Steering Committee, adding, removing, and replacing delegates, and delegate compensation.

Thank you! Looking forward

lane:

we finalized terms and language with our new research partner, the lab at a major research university that I’ve alluded to here several times.

It’s unfortunate that this was yet another selection made without an open and transparent competition.

Dacha:

lane:

we finalized terms and language with our new research partner, the lab at a major research university that I’ve alluded to here several times.

It’s unfortunate that this was yet another selection made without an open and transparent competition.

I hear you. Thank you for the feedback. In an ideal world, all such decisions would be made, and funding disbursed, in this manner. The reality is that negotiating a deal like this is a great deal of work - it took nearly six months end to end to get this done, and I don’t personally have the bandwidth to do this sort of negotiation with a bunch of potential partners (that alone would be a fulltime job). If we were to attempt to do a deal like this in a decentralized, community-driven manner, realistically I just don’t think it would ever happen, at least not at this stage in HoS’s maturity - hopefully that will change.

I and other stakeholders who have been part of the conversation have a high degree of confidence in, and feel a strong values alignment with, this partner, so I feel totally confident moving forward. As with everything else that’s happening now, this is initially being funded by NF, not out of the HoS treasury. And, as with everything else happening now, this will eventually also fall under HoS oversight, so HoS will be able to decide to continue the relationship, or terminate it, or evaluate other potential partners.

In the interest of expediency, I think it’s best that we kick off now and reevaluate in a few months in a more public fashion.

L

GM Nearians!

Quick update from Agora as much has been happening since our last post.

House of Stake v1.0.1 Contracts in Audit

As we mentioned previously, we had a bug in the original HoS contracts and those are changes are currently fixed and waiting to get audited by Halborn. That audit will start on July 28th and will end on August 1st, 2025.

New Test Site Address

As we move our infra to proper production readiness we have a new staging site up at:

NEAR Agora

Home of the NEAR House of Stake governance

This will act as our staging site and then once the new contracts are done and deployed, we will move everything over to production.

New Date for Launch

Assuming all goes well with the audit, we are aiming to launch on August 7th, 2025! We will keep the thread updated if that date has to move.

What you can do to help.

Continue testing the staging application and submit improvements, bugs and feedback here: HoS Alpha Feedback.

We will post again after the audit and confirm the final delivery date!

Hi everyone,

Quick update from my end as well. We’re planning to go live in a week, on August 7. I won’t be able to update this thread until the launch is done, since we’re heads down focusing on the launch, but in lieu of updating this thread, please check the following resources:

HoS Core Team and Adopting a Product Methodology Governance

On behalf of the HoS Core Team, I want to acknowledge that we’ve been inconsistent in our delivery of certain promised deliverables, including things like sharing documents we said we’d share, sharing a proposal template, suggesting workflows and policies, mission/vision/values, a clearer roadmap, etc. There are various reasons for this, but ultimately as the team lead I take responsibility and ownership of fixing it. I’m grateful for everyone’s patience and understanding - please keep in mind t…

Final HoS Launch Tasks Governance

In the interest of transparency, you can keep an eye on the final set of remaining tasks, required for the planned launch next week, on this public project dashboard. I’m keeping this updated on a daily basis. The idea here is that, once everything on this list (up to the launch task) is marked complete, we have a green light to launch.

Thanks everyone!

L

GM! Kent here from agora.xyz, we are excited to announce the Alpha Release of House of Stake at https://gov.houseofstake.org/.

What to expect in the Alpha Launch

During this time we will be getting some final production polish done, and we will be encouraging the endorsed delegates to create their delegate statements.

The official launch will be coming next week on August 14th.

We would love your help

Go and explore the site, click around, report bugs and overall, get excited about what is to come. The public roadmap can be found here: 📯 NEAR House of Stake | Agora. Please use it to submit ideas, bugs, vote on roadmap items. We will be using this to keep the roadmap as open and transparent as possible, while being community driven.

Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and helped get us to this Alpha launch. More to come next week!

Hi everyone,

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! As I’m sure everyone has seen by now, @kent and his team shipped the alpha version of the HoS frontend a week ago (see previous message). If you haven’t had a chance yet, I encourage you to help us test it out! You can report bugs and issues using the “Report bugs & feedback” link at the bottom right corner, and you can use the public roadmap Kent linked above to submit ideas, feature requests, etc. Shoutout to Kent & co. for already incorporating and shipping a number of feature requests, including support for more wallets!

What follows is a brief personal update, as previously promised on the part of the core team.

Note: you can see my work in a different format on the Core Team Kanban. Here’s a link that’s filtered on my username:

HoS Core Team Kanban • houseofstake

High-level task roadmap for the Hos Core Team.

• My primary task these past couple of weeks has been project managing the launch. This includes coordinating work among NF (esp. Finance and Marketing teams), Gauntlet, Agora, Hack Humanity, FastNear, and other ecosystem stakeholders. In addition to the Kanban, you can also track progress in this public dashboard. This included daily preparatory standup calls last week.
• I also spent quite a bit of time improving transparency and project management for the Core team, including setting up the Kanban and launch dashboard, and authoring this post on my philosophy for working in public and why it’s so important that we do so. I spent some time teaching my team how to use Github effectively for project management.
• I authored a draft blog post announcing the launch. Thank you to the others who have contributed. I also authored a comprehensive marketing brief for the NF marketing team (not public). I also reviewed the content on the houseofstake.org website prior to launch and helped with the launch (although Klaus and his team get 99% of the credit for this!).
• I worked with Bianca to get the Head of Governance role listed on the NF careers page and began reviewing the inbound applications.
• I prepared House of Stake updates for NFC (internal) and for the Ecosystem Collab. call today.
• I finalized and announced the composition of the interim Screening Committee, and of the Security Council. I reviewed draft charters on these and other topics from Gauntlet.
• I worked with Gauntlet and Agora to finalize the parameters for the HoS 1.0 launch.
• I created an updated HoS budget for NF (internal) and began the process of review and approval internally.
• I helped review and finalize the legal terms & conditions for the HoS frontend and houseofstake.org website.
• I generally did my best to stay active and up to date on multiple communication forums, including Telegram and this forum, although I am admittedly somewhat behind on this forum. I’ll continue working on getting caught up.

That’s all for me, for now! More soon.

L

Hi all,

This is my first transparency update since starting in this role.

So far my time has focused on:

• Onboarding
• Supporting the HoS launch
• Drafting the AI governance product roadmap Product roadmap draft · Issue #4 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub

My work on the AI governance product roadmap went through several rapid iterations, and included key supporting work such as:

• Reviewing NEAR AI’s roadmap and the work of other teams in the NEAR ecosystem to identify technologies we can leverage and potential build partners
• Researching AI governance teams and identifying potential build partners
• Holding calls with prospective partners to validate alignment
• Getting up to speed on AI governance tooling in our pipeline (e.g. the work James described above) to ensure continuity
• Meeting with James (in person and in follow-up) to understand his work with Bitte and identify where I can support
• Distilling the roadmap into a preview for NEAR’s State of AI blog post, which helped refine the roadmap itself
• Exploring public roadmap tools for community engagement (including enrolling our org in the Project Dependencies beta), which also helped to informed the roadmap’s structure

h/t Klaus who helped me with understanding the Near ecosystem, roadmap ideation and sensechecking, build partner calls, and evaluating public roadmap tools

The current roadmap draft will be published as a Google Doc by EOD Monday to collect feedback from the broader NEAR ecosystem. After incorporating that feedback, the roadmap will move into a public Kanban board (backed by GitHub) where it will continue to evolve through community input.

Now that my onboarding is complete and the roadmap is in a good place (pending ecosystem feedback), I’ll be providing more frequent updates here and on GitHub.

Current focus areas for my next sprint:

• Governance Copilot PRD · Issue #37 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub
• Proposal Screening Agent PRD · Issue #38 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub
• Coordinate copilot integration with Agora · Issue #39 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub
• Process roadmap feedback · Issue #36 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub
• Public roadmap tooling · Issue #40 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub

[Draft] AI Governance Product Roadmap House of Stake

I’m excited to share with you all the first draft of our AI governance product roadmap! This is a starting point and will continuously evolve with your feedback. If you would like to leave feedback privately, feel free to make a copy of this Google Doc and share with [email protected]. Framework The road to superintelligent governance progresses along three interdependent dimensions: Progressive Legibility: improve information about stakeholder preferences Progressive Alignment: …

Hi all!

First time posting to this thread after a couple months of work, sorry to take so long getting in here.

My work since starting a couple months back has fallen into three main buckets: governance/AI/AI governance research, some BD intros/further discussions with potential partners (incl. our major research partnership which we should formally announce soon), and currently a lot of outreach to the individuals, projects, and small groups with large holdings of NEAR to assess willingness to participate & delegate in the HoS veNEAR lockup.

• Research: I know many people who’ve worked extensively in governance and have also worked to expand my network here since my start. Much of my time here was spent researching success stories (with ‘success’ being very vague here) in governance and finding the people who helped to architect that success. AI governance too has proven to be something more people have been working on than I initially expected, and some of those people are much farther along than expected.

• • I’ve produced a lot of half-baked reports based on my work here and a handful of finished ones, I’ll try to get a few more finished and in such a state as they could be shared publicly.

• BD: Nothing very specific to share here as of yet as nothing is finalized. However, we’ve had outreach and intros from a variety of groups, including those already doing something involving AI governance or onchain agents that could be used for things like treasury management; as part of our mandate, we’ll continue to explore these partnerships as ways to expand our AI tooling and cement ourselves as a top AI-focused ecosystem.

• (more recently) Stakeholder Outreach: It’s always a little challenging to get ahold of every person I need to talk to (often timezones make this take longer than it should), but after some effort managed to get ahold of most of the major stakeholders we wanted to talk to and gauge their interest in HoS participation. Long story short, most were very open to participating, but many expressed reservations around the details, particularly the current lock-up minimum duration (3 months). I’m working with Gauntlet and the NF to finalize details of a proposed incentive structure for lock-up participants, and we are also exploring the possibility of shortening the lock-up during some launch period to help reduce friction of adoption.

I also attended the Science of Blockchain conference in early August and got to discuss AI governance with a lot of the attendees- people are overall quite bearish on governance at the moment, but the possibility of AI governance was interesting to some and I was able to make some very interesting connections there, as well as build some more rapport with face time with our research partner & team.

(as an aside for the benefit of certain community members I’d like to note that my costs visiting this conference were extremely minimal and I will not be invoicing any reimbursement for travel costs attending SBC.)

I just completed a cross-country move and therefore only worked pretty minimally (<10 hours) over the last ~10 days or so, so I’m catching up on as much as I can this week. If any community member has input on any specific things I’ve done they’d like me to share publicly, please feel free to flag them and I’ll prioritize finalizing those reports for public consumption.

Thanks for reading, and shout-out to anyone who I’ve pinged who’s helped me out over the last couple months! Really hoping to make the HoS a standout success.

bearmans:

any community member has input on any specific things I’ve done they’d like me to share publicly, please feel free to flag them and I’ll prioritize finalizing those reports for public consumption.

Honestly, if the plan is 50M veNEAR, it won’t be possible without support from NF. They left you to handle this outreach on your own, but in reality, you don’t have much to offer the whales — especially since every proposal will first need to go through NF’s filter, starting with the Screening Committee and then the Security Council. Who would really be interested under those conditions?

If I were you, I’d just take it easy and spend the last few days before the school season begins with family.

bearmans:

) Stakeholder Outreach: It’s always a little

@lane Regarding outreach, I have a proposal you could suggest to Illia: NF employees should lock the NEAR tokens they sell every month on exchanges into veNEAR for 5 years and delegate them to @illia That would be a true demonstration of their commitment to Near Ecosystem —much more meaningful than posting pictures of themselves touching Illia’s backpack. And of course, the NEAR price would only benefit from this.

Would you be able to float this idea in the NF Slack and share results here?

GM all,

Kent here from Agora with a House of Stake Platform Update.

Audited Runbooks for the NEAR Community

As you remember the last time we spoke, we are launched the Alpha site but quickly took parts of it down due to how the contracts were deployed. We have since been working closely with the NF Security Council and Halborn (NEAR Auditors) to ensure that we have a bulletproof runbook for deploying those contracts from the NF Security Council vs. Agora. We will also be making all of those deployment guides public so that the rest of the community can learn from them too.

Have a look at them here: Agora + Halborn’s NEAR High Value Contract Deployment Runbooks and Security Best Practices.

The NF Security Council will be reviewing these this week, and then we will perform a Testnet deployment, validate all is running well. Then move to production.

Governance Rewards

While we have been waiting for the audited runbooks and working back and forth with FastNEAR and the NF, we have been working with Gauntlet on how the Governance rewards will be generated, claimed within the HoS Platform.

Adding support for rNEAR

We are happy to announce that we are looking to add support for rNEAR as a new LST in the core locking and staking flow.

The goal in the first few months of House of Stake will be to maximize the amount of veNEAR possible, so adding more ways to get veNEAR will be a top priority for everyone. We are also going to document this flow so that more LSTs and staking tokens can submit a PR and add themself.

The goal is to make House of Stake a thriving platform when all is done.

Know that Agora and the other House of Stake partners are hard at work getting everything ready for launch. Thank you for your patience and feedback. I am looking forward to hearing from you in the Telegram or here.

Hi folks - another quick update here, since I know this is overdue. It’s been an extraordinarily busy period. As always, you should consider the HoS Core Team kanban as the source of truth regarding the current set of tasks and their status. I just reviewed it, and it’s pretty well up to date - and will be even more up to date tomorrow once we kick off a new iteration.

• HoS full launch: see update here. Tldr: Agora has delivered the code and the launch runbook to the security council. This is in their hands now. We’re hopefully a few days away from this being complete.
• Hiring a Head of Governance: see update here. Tldr: we’re in the final stages of this process and I’m hopeful it’ll conclude next week.
• NDC funds transfer: see update here. Tldr: this is also almost complete.
• Comms and policy docs: we released a number of important communications and draft policy documents over the past few days, with more coming soon. See:
  • House of Stake Mandate
  • Transition plan to more decentralized governance
  • NEAR House of Stake - Vision, Attributes, Mission & Principles (VAMP) - draft for community review

I’ll encourage the other team members to share updates here on other aspects of HoS including product, outreach, etc.

Lane

lane:

NDC funds transfer: see update here. Tldr: this is also almost complete.

The legal framework of the Near Digital Collective (NDC) establishes that any significant transfer of funds from the NDC Treasury — including transfers to other funds or organizations — must be approved by the community (Near Consent). Trustees are obligated to obtain such approval, and during the transitional period, they may authorize only limited expenditures that strictly align with the defined purposes of the trust (near.org/blog/near-digital-collective-legal-framework).

NEAR Community consent (Near Consent) is a mandatory requirement for any transfer of funds from the NDC Treasury. Decisions are made through the Voting Body and on-chain voting, while trustees act merely as executors of the community’s will and are legally bound to operate in its interest.

Hi folks,

I realize that it’s been a while since I posted an update here. I’m not sure if this thread is the best place to communicate what’s happening in House of Stake going forward, given that we have multiple other places where we’re sharing updates including the core team kanban, the product team kanban (and various Github issues more generally), @AK_HoG’s Community Governance Calls, and of course forum threads for individual projects like this one: HSP-002, HSP-003: next steps.

However, for now I’ll keep posting updates here on occasion.

HoS has grown and matured quite a bit since we started a few months ago. As I mentioned before in this thread, we’re at a point where it’s impossible for one person, including me, to know everything that’s going on. This is even more true today. So I can only share updates as I see them from where I sit.

Here are a few of the things that are going on right now:

• Angela (@AK_HoG) joined us as Head of Governance last week, and @KlausBrave, I and others have been helping onboard her. She’s rapidly assuming ownership of all of the governance-related work. See, e.g., this recent announcement: Ratifying Our Constitutional Documents: Upcoming Proposals Dec 2025.
• We’re in the process of bifurcating the team along the lines of Governance and Product, with Angela taking ownership of Governance work going forward. For updates on Product work, see the newly-created product tag (Topics tagged product), the roadmap that @jacklaing shared previously: AI Governance Product Roadmap, and the first AI governance product: AI Governance Dashboard (Alpha) – We’d Love Your Feedback. Jack and @jlwaugh have made great progress on this AI-powered proposal dashboard, and your feedback is super helpful at this stage.
• @bearmans and I were in Buenos Aires for Devconnect last week. We participated in a number of governance-related events and workshops, and were able to share a lot about our work and learn from what other projects and protocols are up to (including Sky, Stellar, Hats Protocol, Cardano, Ethereum Foundation, Solana, Octant, Morpho, Canton, Tally, and a bunch of others).
• We’re working super closely with Agora, Gauntlet, and @HackHumanity to launch rewards for HSP-002 and HSP-003. These are coming soon. For more information, see HSP-002, HSP-003: next steps.
• We’re planning to do another in person GovHack-style event in Q1. More info on this soon.
• We’re still in the process of setting up the Fireblocks vault for HoS Foundation and receiving the first inbound transfers. For updates see HoS Foundation Fireblocks vault setup · Issue #9 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub.
• @HackHumanity has built a really cool, working prototype of a “Citizens’ House” app that allows one person one vote. For updates see Build Citizens House app · Issue #98 · houseofstake/pm · GitHub.
• @bearmans is working with NF Marketing on an announcement of our research partnership, and separately, is in the process of making whole our earliest alpha users (Addressing users of the August 7th alpha launch) and launching non-economic incentives for early HoS participants.
• I’m thinking a lot about team composition, about how the team fits into NF’s product-centric pivot, and about how we can put product more firmly at the center of our work. I’m also thinking about a research roadmap.

As always, feedback is warmly welcomed.

L