In collaboration, Meta Pool, Linear, Hot, and Gauntlet are sharing two draft proposals—HSP002 and HSP003—for open discussion. This post serves as a Request for Comment (RFC) to gather insights and feedback from validators, token holders, and the broader community. No voting will take place at this stage. The aim is to collect constructive input and refine the proposals before submitting them to the House of Stake for formal consideration.

Active community participation is essential to ensure these proposals align with the principles of decentralization and contribute to a resilient, transparent, and healthy ecosystem. Your perspectives help shape decisions that strengthen the long-term sustainability of the network.

Frontmatter

hsp: 003
title: veNEAR Holder Rewards Program
description: Establish competitive yield incentives for veNEAR holders to drive governance participation
author: Gauntlet, MetaPool, LiNEAR, HOT
status: Draft
type: Decision
category: Economic Governance
created: 2025-10-10
requires: HSP-002

Abstract

This proposal establishes an initial 3-month rewards program for veNEAR holders to incentivize governance participation in the House of Stake. The program implements a dynamic yield structure targeting competitive APY rates between 4.2% (leveraged staking) and 4.5% (post-reduction direct staking), with a budget of 280,682 NEAR to achieve our goal of migrating 60M NEAR to House of Stake. This proposal depends on HSP-002 (Validator Support Program) being implemented. Continuation of rewards beyond 90 days will require a subsequent proposal.

Situation

NEAR token holders face competing yield opportunities through leveraged staking (4.2% APY) and liquid staking tokens (LSTs) in DeFi protocols. With a future reduction in inflation from 5% to 2.5%, effective direct staking APY will decrease from approximately 9% to 4.5% (assuming 50% of supply remains staked). Without competitive incentives for veNEAR, adoption of the House of Stake governance system may lag, hampering NEAR’s ability to fund grants, protocol improvements, and community initiatives through collective decision-making.

The context of this proposal is fundamentally shaped by the NEAR Tokenomics Enhancement Package (HSP-002). A future reduction in NEAR’s inflation creates a new opportunity: the lowering of baseline staking yields to 4.5% makes it economically feasible to offer veNEAR rewards that are competitive without being excessive. HSP-002’s validator support program ensures network decentralization is maintained even as validator rewards are reduced by approximately 50%. Together, these create the conditions for a sustainable veNEAR incentive program.

Early momentum is critical when launching a new governance system in a mature ecosystem. Slow adoption could create challenges for new strategic initiatives including NEAR Intents, NEAR AI, and application growth. If House of Stake fails to attract sufficient participation in its first months, it risks becoming irrelevant before realizing its potential to enable effective, stake-weighted governance for the NEAR ecosystem.

Mission

Objectives:

• Migrate 60M NEAR to House of Stake within the first 3 months of launch
• Achieve competitive yield for veNEAR holders between leveraged staking APY (4.2%) and any future reduction in direct staking APY (to ~4.5%)
• Catalyze network effects by spiking momentum at launch
• Enable robust governance participation to fund ecosystem development
• Maintain financial discipline by optimizing reward expenditure relative to governance engagement
• Establish baseline metrics and learnings to inform future incentive proposals

Outcomes (3-Month Period):

• Month 1: 10M NEAR migrated to House of Stake
• Month 2: 30M NEAR migrated
• Month 3: 60M NEAR migrated (10% of staked NEAR)
• Reward efficiency ratio of 100-180+ NEAR gained per NEAR spent
• Comprehensive program evaluation to guide future proposals

Note: This proposal covers only the initial 90-day period. Any continuation or modification of the rewards program beyond this period will require a new proposal based on the outcomes and learnings from this pilot phase.

Approach

3-Month Pilot Reward Structure

This proposal implements a phased reward structure for the initial 90-day pilot period only. Based on learnings from this pilot, a subsequent proposal will be required to continue or modify the incentive program.

Month 1: Launch Incentive

• Fixed 7.5% APY on first 10M NEAR deposited
• Estimated monthly rewards: 62,500 NEAR
• Rationale: Strong launch incentive to drive initial adoption

Month 2: Dynamic Scaling

• Target supply: 30M NEAR
• APY calculated as: Rewards_APY = 198 / √(NEAR_supply) = 3.6%
• Estimated rewards: 90,374 NEAR

Month 3: Continuation of Dynamic Scaling

• Target supply: 60M NEAR
• APY: 2.6% (using dynamic formula)
• Estimated rewards: 127,808 NEAR

The dynamic formula is derived from research on comparable staking ecosystems and ensures rewards remain competitive with on-chain yield opportunities while preventing excessive dilution as adoption scales.

Future Phases (For Reference Only)

The sections below outline potential future phases to provide context for long-term planning. However, these phases are NOT included in this proposal and will require separate governance approval.

Potential Phase 3 (Months 4-6):

• Month 4 (90M supply): 2.1% APY, ~156,533 NEAR
• Month 5 (120M supply): 1.8% APY, ~180,748 NEAR
• Month 6 (150M supply): 1.6% APY, ~202,083 NEAR

Potential Phase 4 (Months 7-9):

• Month 7 (192M supply): 1.4% APY, ~228,631 NEAR
• Month 8 (228M supply): 1.3% APY, ~249,145 NEAR
• Month 9 (270M supply): 1.2% APY, ~271,123 NEAR

Longer-Term Considerations: At full adoption (500M NEAR), annual rewards could reach 29M NEAR, exceeding the 5M NEAR inflation allocation. Future proposals will need to address sustainable funding mechanisms, potentially including: allocating a larger portion of token inflation to veNEAR, implementing new revenue streams from ecosystem growth, adjusting reward formulas, or utilizing treasury reserves strategically.

Risks and Limitations

Yield Competition: NEAR holders can pursue alternative yields through leveraged staking (4.2% APY) and LP incentives using LSTs. However under a reduction of direct staking yields to approximately 4.5%, the competitive landscape becomes more favorable for veNEAR rewards. The proposed APY range (starting at 7.5% for the first 10M, then declining dynamically) positions veNEAR as attractive relative to all alternatives while remaining economically sustainable.

Behavioral Uncertainty: Token holder behavior in the early days is unpredictable. The proposed structure includes a cushion for fluctuating outcomes and will be continuously monitored for efficiency.

Budget Constraints: As veNEAR supply grows beyond this 3-month pilot, annual reward requirements will increase substantially. Future proposals will need to address long-term sustainability, including potential treasury allocations or adjustments to the reward formula. This pilot will provide critical data to inform those decisions.

Technical Specification

Reward Program Parameters

3-Month Pilot Structure:

• Month 1: Fixed 7.5% APY on first 10M NEAR deposited
• Month 2-3: Dynamic APY calculated as: APY = 198 / √(Total_veNEAR_Supply)
• Total budget: 280,682 NEAR

Target Metrics:

• Month 1: 10M NEAR in veNEAR
• Month 2: 30M NEAR in veNEAR
• Month 3: 60M NEAR in veNEAR (10% of staked NEAR)

Implementation Details

The technical and financial details of the reward distribution mechanism (including smart contract specifications, distribution frequency, calculation methods, and claiming procedures) are beyond the scope of this proposal and will be addressed in a separate technical implementation proposal. This governance proposal establishes the policy framework, budget allocation, and success criteria for the pilot program.

Funding Source

All rewards will be funded exclusively from the NEAR House of Stake Foundation treasury. The Foundation has allocated sufficient resources to support this 90-day pilot program.

Monitoring Metrics

Primary Efficiency Metric:

Efficiency Ratio = Incremental_NEAR_Gained_per_Month / Monthly_NEAR_Incentive_Spent

• Target range months 1-3: 100-180+

Secondary Metrics:

• Total veNEAR supply
• Percentage of staked NEAR migrated to House of Stake
• Active governance participation rates
• Proposal submission and voting activity

Adjustment Mechanism

Gauntlet will provide monthly reports evaluating program efficiency during the 3-month pilot. These reports will inform the design of any subsequent incentive proposals, allowing the House of Stake Security Council to implement emergency adjustments during the pilot period. The Security Council will have the ability to unilaterally pause or adjust the incentive program at its discretion in the case of significant market shifts or a risk event.

Backwards Compatibility

This proposal introduces new reward mechanisms for the initial 90-day period and does not conflict with existing NEAR protocol staking. Users can continue staking NEAR through traditional validators while the veNEAR rewards program operates independently.

Critical Dependencies:

This proposal hinges on a concurrent or prior reduction in inflation by the validator set. The economic viability and the entire reward structure are based on a projected decrease in staking APY from approximately 9% to 4.5%. Without this inflation reduction, veNEAR rewards would be uncompetitive compared to standard staking, rendering the program ineffective.

To ensure validator decentralization is maintained despite reduced rewards, HSP-002 must be implemented. While not a direct technical dependency, HSP-002 addresses the economic impact on validators from inflation reduction, thus safeguarding network security within the broader tokenomics package.

No smart contract modifications to the existing staking infrastructure are required. The pilot phase will enable testing and refinement before long-term reward structures are finalized. Ideally, both HSP-002 and HSP-003 should be approved and implemented together as a unified tokenomics enhancement package.

Milestones

Budget & Resources

3-Month Pilot Budget (This Proposal)

Funding Source: NEAR House of Stake Foundation treasury

Reporting: Monthly efficiency reports by Gauntlet including:

• veNEAR supply growth
• Rewards distributed
• Efficiency ratio calculations
• Recommendations for future proposals

Extended Budget Projections (For Reference Only)

These figures are provided for context and long-term planning but are NOT part of this proposal:

Any rewards beyond the initial 3-month period will require a new governance proposal with updated targets, budgets, and mechanisms based on pilot results.

Team & Accountability

Responsible:

• Gauntlet: Modeling, monitoring, and monthly reporting during pilot
• NEAR House of Stake Foundation: Initial funding and program oversight
• House of Stake governance: Approval of any continuation proposals

Accountable to: House of Stake governance and NEAR community

Reporting Requirements:

• Monthly public reports on pilot metrics (months 1, 2, and 3)
• Comprehensive final evaluation at end of month 3
• Recommendations for continuation, modification, or termination
• Data and learnings to inform future incentive proposals

Pilot Governance:

• This 90-day pilot runs as approved; no mid-pilot adjustments without emergency proposal
• At month 3, rewards automatically cease unless a new proposal is approved
• Follow-up proposal should be submitted before end of month 2 to allow discussion time

Security Considerations

Economic Security

• Funding Source: The reward program is funded by the NEAR House of Stake Foundation treasury, ensuring clear accountability and no impact on protocol-level inflation mechanisms.
• Coordinated Package: This proposal is part of a two-part tokenomics enhancement. HSP-002 maintains validator decentralization, and HSP-003 (this proposal) ensures governance participation. Together they create a more sustainable economic model in the event of a reduction in protocol inflation.
• Budget Risk: At full adoption beyond this pilot, continued rewards would require either additional treasury allocations or alternative funding mechanisms to be proposed by the community.
• Market Impact: Large reward distributions could create selling pressure; phased distribution and declining APY mitigate this risk

Gaming Resistance

• Stake-weighted voting reduces incentive for Sybil attacks
• Minimum lock periods for veNEAR discourage short-term reward farming
• Monitoring systems will track anomalous behavior patterns

Smart Contract Risk

• Reward distribution contracts must be thoroughly audited before deployment
• Emergency pause functionality should be implemented
• Multi-signature controls on reward pool management

Governance Attack Surface

• Large veNEAR holders could theoretically influence reward rate adjustments
• This is inherent to stake-weighted governance and mitigated by transparent discussion periods
• Community can reject proposals that benefit small groups at ecosystem expense

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Disclaimer

Gauntlet is currently partnered with the Near Foundation to provide mechanism design and economic analyses. Our scope pertains to incentive design and infrastructure optimization, while other authors of this document drive the other scopes of work.

How do these APY’s compare in the market? Is it compelling enough to convert users/yield seekers from other protocols?

Why should we even incentivize people to participate in HoS?

I agree with HoS-002, but participation in governance is voluntary.
I don’t understand why we need to offer special rewards or push people to engage.
If someone doesn’t want to participate — they can simply stake their tokens elsewhere and earn APY.

I’d think about maybe including this incentive in the tokenomics proposal instead of funding from the treasury. For example, reduce 5% inflation from 4.5% + staking 0.5% treasury to 4% stakers + 0.5% treasury for ecosystem development + 0.5% house of stake incentives. Or similar tokenomics with different numbers (the numbers above are just an example). The projected amount seems to be growing rapidly each month, and when incentives inevitably end (or decrease) without a clear continuation (by “alternative funding mechanisms to be proposed by the community“ I assume you have no plan on what to do after the incentives end), people just stop using the incentivized product.

I support having some sort of incentives, and believe that they are necessary for the first 3 months in order to facilitate the fair voting on the new tokenomics proposal(s), but after that I’d like to see a clear and sustainable continuation, instead of just giving more incentives for up to 9 months, not a fan of leaving our problems to the future generations. Can’t support this proposal though, since it depends on HSP-002. By the way, why does it depend on HSP-002, can’t it be executed without it?

Also, what do you mean by “annual rewards could reach 29M NEAR, exceeding the 5M NEAR inflation allocation“, are you assuming that the entire 0.5% inflation allocation should be used for veNEAR incentives? I believe the treasury is owned by Near Foundation, and they’re referring to it as “Ecosystem Treasury“, not “Governance Incentives Treasury“. I might be out of the loop, but I don’t remember them announcing repurpose of that treasury.

I don’t really care about Near Foundation’s money, they’re free to do as they want with it, just want to avoid any potential confusion between the NF-owned treasury.near (which collects the 0.5% inflation) and the House of Stake Foundation treasury (which allegedly “allocated sufficient resources”), as far as I know these are two independent treasuries. Makes even more confusion if you’re assuming the inflation reduction, which would make it 0.25% instead of 0.5%, so not sure where you got the 5M figure from.

Tbh I’d actually stop at ~60M NEAR locked in veNEAR, solid enough to be legitimate, but not too high considering that most users couldn’t care less about the boring governance stuff, including passive stakers who might prefer a ~12% APY at moremarkets or dewfinance or leverage staked near.

Hello,

This proposal was posted five days ago. After the seven day temperature check period, in about a day and a half, it’s eligible to become a canonical HSP proposal and to be put up for a vote.

As a next step, please submit it in markdown format as a PR to the proposals repository here: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub

Let me know if you have any other questions about the process.

Thanks!

Lane

slimedrgn:

I support having some sort of incentives, and believe that they are necessary for the first 3 months in order to facilitate the fair voting on the new tokenomics proposal(s), but after that I’d like to see a clear and sustainable continuation

Agree that more sustainable system is needed.

Ideally after treasury and inflation process gets fully transferred to House of Stake, this should be setup.

My general view - House of Stake can only have access to not more than the amount of staked NEAR in it. As it grows in legitimacy with amount of stake - more capital and parameters it can control (and more directly ideally).

So we need to bootstrap it with potentially less sustainable incentives to get to at least 25m NEAR. And even 25m seems low IMO.

slimedrgn:

Tbh I’d actually stop at ~60M NEAR locked in veNEAR, solid enough to be legitimate, but not too high considering that most users couldn’t care less about the boring governance stuff

Part of it is governance. Part of it locking funds for longer than 2-3 days of staking but 45 days. This has a psychological effect that people don’t rush to when market fluctuates and in turn should be rewarded.

Reducing short term reward to others and rewarding long term stakers.

There were 8 other proposals published as well. Why did you only accept this one?

Let’s not start this game of centralization and suppressing the proposals you don’t like.

You said the screening committee would not engage in censorship — correct?

No proposals have been accepted. I just pointed out that these, like your proposals, need to be posted onto Github before being eligible for a vote. You already did that, so you’re one step ahead

For the record, I’m taking “accepted” here to mean “merged as a draft into the proposals repository,” at which point a proposal becomes an accepted, canonical proposal that’s eligible for a vote. Yours will have to go through the same process - I’ll reply on github about next steps.

illia:

My general view

@illia, I hope you don’t mind me sharing this candidly. I wanted to kindly ask if you could refrain from commenting on proposals for now.

Because of your significant influence within NF — and the fact that many processes and decisions inside the Foundation naturally revolve around you — even a casual comment from you is often perceived as a signal or call to action by delegates or by teams that work with (or receive grants from) NF.

As a result, what may be intended as a personal opinion can unintentionally shape outcomes or create pressure, making it harder to maintain open and independent discussion.

You have already shown great leadership and neutrality during the NDC elections when you chose not to vote or comment in order to avoid influencing the result — and the community truly respected that decision.

This is especially important now, considering that the pre-screening of proposals - Screering Commitee is fully controlled by NF and NF contractors.

Here is the proposal to move toward an elected Screening Committee, in line with the HoS transition plan:

HSP-XXX: Transition to an Elected HoS Screening Committee Proposals

HSP-010: Transition to an Elected HoS Screening Committee Summary (TL;DR) This proposal transitions the House of Stake (HoS) Screening Committee from a NEAR Foundation–appointed body to an elected, community-approved committee. The current Screening Committee must approve and forward this proposal and cannot block it due to “conflict of interest.” Elections must occur within 30 days of this proposal being passed. Voting will be individual per candidate (not slate-based). Endorsed Del…

Once we have a larger number of truly independent (non-NF) delegates and decentralized Screnning Commitee, your open commentary will no longer create such an imbalance — but at this stage, the ecosystem is still too dependent on your voice.

Thank you for understanding.

its an interesting mechanism. without incentives it deters whales from large veNEAR unless the incentives of voting are much higher. meaning the outcome of proposals themselves incentivize them to vote.

imo lower emissions for near will be catastrophic.
primary reason incentive alignment unless house of stake can actually create real defi on near without the current easily botted metrics with incentives there is no reason to stake near nor have veNEAR. leaving defi the only option.

agreed. with Illia as CEO of NF and voting member of the NFC he should avoid direct engagement in HoS as a decentralized governance mechanism as he did with NDC. its overall a conflict of interest.

7.5% on top of staking rewards? What is the lockup period, not info here neither on HoS website.

But you know what, I’m out, I don’t care anymore. Don’t like swimming in shit.

This is the first step toward raising the value of Near’s token, I agree.

I think this 90 day incentivization could attract mercenary participants that disappear once the incentives go as well. This is a band aid fix imo. If this prop is there for the community to buy time and reorganize further I can understand the reasoning for it. I find that more participation comes from heavy governance marketing (which NEAR is doing) & focus on economic proposals like inflation rate changes. That tends to bring a diverse set of stakeholders to the table. The HoS should be prepared for an influx of activity then. Participation is one aspect to assess (good metric you mentioned there) but there also needs to be a means of assessing quality of participation as well.

I feel the proposal should clarify how the tokens will be distributed:

• Will it be distributed based on NEAR locked or veNEAR (which grows)?
• I assume the delegation will not affect the reward, is it correct?

I don’t understand why people say it’s not democratic when the turnout is low. Now is the time for the CEO’s bold action. If the participation rate is low even if you write or vote, then you can’t do anything, right?

I voted abstain…

I have some questions about the distribution strategy. We’re going to use 280k NEAR here, so we should be way more clear with our strategy. How are we getting this out publicly and to the right circles? We need people who actually do this work - Farcaster influencers, Twitter KOLs, actual marketers who know how to move markets.

We should learn from what’s worked before. Plasma (Tether’s chain) and Katana (L2 from Polygon) had pretty good launches. How did they market it? How did they do so well in the right circles and on Twitter? We should be studying these launches and copying what worked… granted at a smaller scale. Monad seems to be copying some of what Katana did actually.

Without a real distribution strategy, we’re just enriching the same people that already have NEAR… Of course we should support our core community, but we always need to be looking for growth. We need people competing for these opportunities from outside NEAR. That’s how we build momentum. Let’s make this somethign that grows our audience!

Also, can someone clarify the inflation math here? We’re reducing inflation but then adding these 2 proposals. Where do these numbers actually put us compared to before? Are we still net reducing inflation or are we back to the same levels? If we’re still reducing overall, this could be interesting. But if these proposals make us inflate more than before, we should really rethink the numbers. Also, what happens if the validators don’t update their nodes thereby vetoing the inflation decrease? Is this proposal and the other one scrapped? They probably should be right?

If we’re spending 280k NEAR on incentives, this is a real opportunity to make this a MAJOR marketing event. Let’s turn this into a massive marketing push that gets in front of new people and makes real noise. Otherwise this will be an expensive user retention exercise without much to show for it.

IMO we should make this an event that brings fresh blood into the ecosystem, not just pay existing holders to do what most of them would do anyway.

Again I’m abstaining instead of voting against mostly because I just need to get more context, as I might be missing something.

Makes sense overall, I agree with others that a short bootstrap phase is useful to kickstart engagement, but it really needs a clear sustainability path after the first few months.

Instead of continuous treasury spend, it’d be great to see incentives gradually integrated into tokenomics or tied to ecosystem growth.

Supportive of the pilot as a way to gather data and test behavior, but the long-term goal should be a self-reinforcing governance economy, not a temporary subsidy.

I voted In Favour of the HSP-003 proposal.

With the recent successful inflation reduction, the staking APY on NEAR has dropped from 8–9% to 4–5%. This is the right time to introduce veNEAR incentives to encourage more users to lock their NEAR for veNEAR in exchange for the higher reward.

To be transparent, governance is often seen as “uninteresting” by many token holders but higher APY acts as a strong incentive for users to lock their NEAR, and over time, this naturally encourages them to pay attention to House of Stake governance. This proposal can serve as the first wave of onboarding, bringing more users through the “governance door,” while simultaneously increasing long-term locked NEAR from the usual 3-day unlock to a 45-day lock cycle.

This proposal also fairly rewards the early supporters who locked into veNEAR before incentives were introduced, ensuring that those who believed in the system early are recognized and empowered with greater voting influence and rewards.

However, I acknowledge as mentioned by others that this model is not sustainable long-term. The community and HoS team should work together over the coming quarter to design a more sustainable incentive framework. Monthly data reports should be reviewed to understand what works and what doesn’t, so we can refine the program into a balanced, long-term veNEAR incentive model.

I’ve voted No, with the intent to support a revised version that couples veNEAR incentives with concrete implementation details and ecosystem-growth criteria.

I’ve voted no because I’d prefer to contribute to a proposal that focuses incentives to the users of dApps which bring new staked Near into the system. The current proposal rewards anyone who locks NEAR into veNEAR, which means existing, engaged early adopters could lock large positions for a short window and earn high APY with no new user or validator growth. Also, I’m not convinced that we should incentive people to participate in governance. People should participate in governance because they care about the problems being addressed and want to take part in crafting the solutions that meet their needs.

The current proposal treats veNEAR holders as the reward target, but the goal of catalyzing network effects by spiking momentum at launch would be more sustainably achieved if we targeted the building of growth flywheels that 1) increase the quantity of staked Near, 2) facilitate their users to earn even more rewards by acquiring veNear

I’m interested in helping draft a proposal that offers incentives to dApps that activate users, to encourage wallets and client apps to drive staking inflows and governance participation by offering the proposed APY bump as incentive to their users.

veNEAR is a governance primitive, and as I understand it, our primary economic driver is still staked NEAR volume. By tying rewards to staking inflows via partner dApps, we could:

• target improving validator decentralization (HSP-002’s goal), and
• use a fan-out approach across multiple dApps, versus gov.houseofstake.org alone, to expose a diverse set of users to governance participation

Perhaps I’m getting too into the weeds on how this program will be implemented, but I do feel that the implementation of these rewards is as important as the higher level goal and success criteria.

Griff:

Also, can someone clarify the inflation math here? We’re reducing inflation but then adding these 2 proposals. Where do these numbers actually put us compared to before? Are we still net reducing inflation or are we back to the same levels?

To clarify the economics, HSP-003 does not result in any net new inflation. The funding for this is coming out of the HoS treasury, which is funded from two pre-existing sources: funds being transferred over from the old NDC trust, and new issuance that’s been flowing into treasury.near (0.5% of total issuance) since genesis.

–

I appreciate the feedback on marketing as well here, that’s an interesting perspective. It feels a little orthogonal to the purpose of this proposal, however, and I’d encourage a fresh proposal that speaks specifically to a marketing budget.

lane:

To clarify the economics, HSP-003 does not result in any net new inflation. The funding for this is coming out of the HoS treasury, which is funded from two pre-existing sources: funds being transferred over from the old NDC trust, and new issuance that’s been flowing into treasury.near (0.5% of total issuance) since genesis.

Treasury spend will create inflation, as it is new NEAR entering the economy. I’m down for making the spend, but we should still be aware that every spend lowers the NEAR price, so there needs to be strong upside somewhere too. Which there is here.

lane:

I appreciate the feedback on marketing as well here, that’s an interesting perspective. It feels a little orthogonal to the purpose of this proposal, however, and I’d encourage a fresh proposal that speaks specifically to a marketing budget.

The purpose of the proposal, as I see it, is to get people to stake into veNEAR, for a variety of reasons.

The only way they will do that is if they know about it, marketing is the MOST critical function to make that happen. Good marketing will be required in fact! Of course we need to do the mechanical change here to raise the APRs to compete with defi APRs… but without good marketing, we are being inefficient with the spend.

That being said, I’m going to abstain in this vote for now, I do think this proposal will be good for the community, and probably there will be some coordination with the main marketing team for NEAR to promote this… I just wish there was a clear marketing plan in place to go along with it.

Marketing is critical in this industry, and we have a lot of great things to talk about! But look at meme coins! Tokenomics is less powerful than marketing in this industry.

We vote FOR this proposal.

We support the proposal because we believe it’s difficult to organically bootstrap the delegation without such initiatives based on experience in other DAOs that we’re involved in. It also strategically leverages the recent reduction in NEAR staking APY to make veNEAR incentives competitive. By offering a clear, time-bound rewards program, it aims to bootstrap participation in the House of Stake, potentially increasing governance engagement and long-term locked NEAR. The proposal is structured as a pilot, allowing for community feedback and adjustment before any long-term commitment, which aligns with prudent governance experimentation. However, we also believe this should be a temporary measure and more considerations to achieve a long-term solution to the governance token delegations.

The Decision version of this proposal passed a few days ago. I just updated the status of the canonical copy from Voting to Final: proposals/HSPs/hsp-003.md at main · houseofstake/proposals · GitHub

Meta_Pool:

Month 1: Launch Incentive

• Fixed 7.5% APY on first 10M NEAR deposited

will it work for stNEAR/LiNEAR/rNEAR as well?

The migration of 60M NEAR into veNEAR to strengthen decentralized governance could be highly effetctive! However, as people mentioned before me, the distribution mechanics is unclear and mercenary participation is not insignificant. For this reasons, more metrics should be integrated for the “Delegation Selection” (e.g: Ecosystem Footprint Score: ISSUE: Delegate Selection Transparency and Metrics )

I believe that these metrics can help to migrate these 60M NEAR with more accuracy and thus properly strength the decentralized governance !

Update on program progress below:

TLDR:

• HoS Rewards tracking is now available using this dashboard! Results are updated daily at 12:15am Pacific Time.

• Progress is being made with incentives driving new participants and NEAR locking into HoS.

• Room for improvement is evident, program would benefit from greater efforts to incrase large holder adoption and engaging proposal activity in HoS.

  Program owners are working together to improve the program, and more updates will be posted to update the community on strategy of veNEAR adoption. More details below:

Background

House of Stake (HoS) went live on October 13th, 2025, introducing a new on-chain governance and delegation framework for veNEAR holders. Following the launch, HoS rewards (HSP-003) went live on December 19th, 2025.

At the start of the rewards program, HoS had the following:

• 341 participants
• 3.677M NEAR locked

This update provides a brief overview of how the campaign has progressed since launch and highlights key metrics.

Impact Summary

Since the launch of the rewards program, incentives have generated:

• 103,508 additional NEAR locked, bringing the total NEAR locked in HoS to 3.78M. This represents a 2.8% increase in NEAR locked.
• 31 new accounts participated in HoS, bringing the total number of HoS participants to 372. This represents a 9% increase in the number of participants.

Key Stats

To date, 20,755 NEAR are claimable as rewards to accounts that have locked NEAR in HoS (not necessarily claimed). The table below highlights the accounts with the largest rewards by locking their NEAR in HoS.

ROI

Total claimable rewards can be used to calculate a return on investment (ROI) by dividing the new NEAR locked by the claimable NEAR rewards. The ROI remains positive, but modest at 499%. Assuming an incentive budget of 280K, ROI would need to increase 4x to reach the critical target of 10M locked NEAR in three months.

Rewards Claimed Versus Total Claimable Rewards

Total claimable rewards sum up to 20,755 NEAR but only 43% of these rewards have been claimed, yet. This means that once users have locked their NEAR into House of Stake, they do not return to the platform to claim rewards.

Insights

Retail vs Whales

Whales are defined here as users who have locked at least 25,000 NEAR into the House of Stake. Using this definition, 20 whales are currently participating in HoS.

As previously noted, incentives resulted in an additional 103,508 NEAR locked and 31 new participating accounts. While the number of accounts increased meaningfully (+9%), total NEAR locked grew by only +2.9% Of the 31 new accounts, only 2 qualify as whales under the definition above. The recent growth has been driven primarily by smaller holders rather than large holders.

Furthermore, the total NEAR locked in HoS represents less than 1% of total NEAR supply, providing additional evidence that large holders (whales) have yet to participate meaningfully in HoS. This highlights a key opportunity for the program: expanding participation among larger holders will be critical to increase total NEAR locked in HoS meaningfully.

Proposals to Drive Activity

A large portion of claimable NEAR rewards is yet to be claimed. One potential explanation for this is that users are not engaging with the HoS website to claim their rewards after locking their NEAR. Historically, user engagement with House of Stake has been closely tied to governance proposal activity.

As shown in the chart below, NEAR locking spikes in the periods leading up to proposal end dates. This correlated behavior makes sense; the more opportunity that is interesting to the ecosystem being routed through HoS, the more HoS adoption will occur. Should this correlation continue, high-value proposals will act as a key catalyst for growth and participation.

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To date, the following experiments have been observed:

• Changes to NEAR locked with proposals, but absent incentives
• Changes to NEAR locked absent proposals, with incentives

Changes to NEAR locked in the absence of proposals suggest that incentives alone are not effective at increasing NEAR locked. Recently, a proposal was introduced to establish a sustainable financing program for MPC node infrastructure. This creates a period over the coming weeks during which both proposals and incentives are active simultaneously. This period can be used to evaluate whether incentives drive incremental growth in NEAR locked beyond what is observed during proposal-only periods.

The hypothesis is that proposals act as a catalyst, giving users a reason to engage with House of Stake. Incentives are expected to increase NEAR locked only when paired with an active proposal, meaning incentives amplify proposal-driven demand rather than creating demand on their own. Gauntlet will continue to monitor response to incentives during this period with active proposals in HoS.

Next Steps

• Gauntlet to revisit program effectiveness and methods of improvement with the Near Foundation and the House of Stake owners to inform program strategy. This includes efforts to understand feedback from larger holders better to increase whale adoption.
• Gauntlet will continue to publish the performance of this campaign monthly to the forums.

Gauntlet:

The hypothesis is that proposals act as a catalyst, giving users a reason to engage with House of Stake.

Thank you for the analysis. I would like to add some additional context that may be relevant when interpreting the recent changes in NEAR locked.

First, the recent increase in the number of delegates was largely driven by a task initiated by the NEAR Foundation for NEAR Legion degens.. As a result, this increase appears to be campaign-driven rather than organic growth caused by incentives.

Second, I believe that a meaningful and sustained increase in staked veNEAR is unlikely until House of Stake demonstrates a higher level of decentralization. At the moment, governance influence and operational control appear to be highly concentrated around the NEAR Foundation. This concentration may limit the effectiveness of both incentives and proposals in generating long-term, trust-based participation.

For these reasons, changes in NEAR locked during this period should be interpreted cautiously, as they may reflect coordinated actions rather than structural demand for participation in House of Stake.

Very helpful thank you for the analysis.

I’m new to House of Stake. Recently I locked and staked a meaningful amount of NEAR and stNEAR (meaningful for a regular person, anyway). I’ve supported NEAR for years and I’ve never stopped stacking. I also delegate across a range of validators, and I’ve got mates who’ve done the same for a long time.

Bear with me I’m a bit tired but here’s my main point:

It can sometimes feel like NEAR doesn’t fully embrace the “buy, stack, and stake” crowd. There’s a big, untapped group of supporters like me who aren’t builders or devs. We’re busy living life, we’re not trying to become contributors in a technical sense but we’re committed long-term and want to support the ecosystem from the sidelines in a meaningful way.

With HOS, I only moved over a fraction the portion that made sense for me to unstake, withdraw, and lock with you. But I genuinely think you’d attract a lot more capital (and more long-term whales) if incentives and onboarding felt more open and community-friendly.

Related to that: I’d love to see more endorsed delegates and a clearer path for new delegates to join. When it feels like an insider “boys club,” it can be off-putting even for people who have plenty of tokens and want to bring others in. For example, my friends would delegate to me… but if there’s no realistic path to becoming an endorsed/recognized delegate, what’s the point?

That’s my two sats.

Much love to everyone building and shipping — I appreciate every person who makes NEAR better day after day. Keep going.

Dacha:

First, the recent increase in the number of delegates was largely driven by a task initiated by the NEAR Foundation for NEAR Legion degens.. As a result, this increase appears to be campaign-driven rather than organic growth caused by incentives.

Yeah, most of this so called NEAR-Legions Degens is driven by the task, and would unstake if they had finished it, without actually participating in forums or any form of discussions.

The task only encourage ppl to “Delegates your veNEAR, or announce oneself to be the delegates”, where most of this degens opt the first options.

Currently we have less than 1% coversion for this activities for new delegates to speak out on behalf of the House of Stake, but i hope it would be a good step for a better decentralizations on NEAR.

Gauntlet:

The hypothesis is that proposals act as a catalyst, giving users a reason to engage with House of Stake.

I really don’t like what it sounds like, but I really want clarity proposal needs to be discussed first before the actual send as Proposal, or there are certain metrics/ kuorum that need to be fulfilled for a proposal to be announced.

Ill be learn more regardings this matters, i might missed out many things on HoS.

Background

House of Stake (HoS) went live on October 13th, 2025, introducing a new on-chain governance and delegation framework for veNEAR holders. Following the launch, HoS rewards (HSP-003) went live on December 19th, 2025.

At the start of the rewards program, HoS had the following:

• 341 participants

• 3.68M NEAR locked

This update provides a brief overview of how the campaign has progressed since launch and highlights key metrics.

Impact Summary

Since the launch of the rewards program, the following changes have been observed:

• 1.12M additional NEAR locked, bringing the total NEAR locked in HoS to 4.79M. This represents a 30% increase in NEAR locked.

• 45 new accounts participated in HoS, bringing the total number of HoS participants to 386. This represents a 13% increase in the number of participants.

Key Stats

To date, 30,852 NEAR are claimable as rewards to accounts that have locked NEAR in HoS (not necessarily claimed). The table below highlights the accounts with the largest rewards by locking their NEAR in HoS. Rewards are earned by the account that locked the NEAR, regardless of where voting power was delegated.

ROI

Total claimable rewards can be used to calculate a return on investment (ROI) by dividing the new NEAR locked by the claimable NEAR rewards. Currently, the program ROI is 3,580%.

Rewards Claimed Versus Total Claimable Rewards

Total claimable rewards sum up to 30,852 NEAR but only 49.6% of these rewards have been claimed. This indicates that most users do not return to claim their rewards at the moment.

Insights

Proposals Continue to Drive HoS Activity

In the HSP-003 program update published on January 23, 2026, Gauntlet highlighted an emerging relationship between user engagement on House of Stake and governance activity, noting that NEAR locking consistently spikes in the periods leading up to proposal voting deadlines.

Since that update, HSP-007 has been introduced, with voting opening on February 5, 2026. In the week preceding the start of voting for this proposal, newly locked NEAR increased by more than 1 million NEAR. This behavior is consistent with prior observations and provides additional support for the hypothesis that governance proposals act as a primary catalyst for user engagement and NEAR locking on House of Stake.

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Voting Windows Trigger Concentrated Locking Activity

Voting for HSP-007 began on February 5, 2026. As noted in the previous section, the amount of locked NEAR increased by nearly 1 million in the days leading up to the start of the voting period. This increase was driven by two accounts:

Together, these accounts locked approximately 999K NEAR in new stake prior to the vote. One of the accounts belongs to SVRN, the author of the HSP-007 proposal. Both accounts ultimately voted in favor of the proposal. By contrast, several large pre-existing holders of voting power, including vote.mob.near, hos.slimedragon.near, and vinibarbosa.near, voted against the proposal.

This highlights an important pattern: proposals can drive concentrated deposits rather than broad participation from existing stakeholders. The increase in locked NEAR appears to have been strategic and vote driven, rather than organic network wide growth.

Whale Update

There are 18 accounts in NEAR House of Stake that have locked more than 100K NEAR. This is 4.6% of the total HoS users. This number needs to go up, and Gauntlet has identified key NEAR holders to address using the below logic.

• Top token holders for liNEAR and stNEAR

• Excluded contract addresses and filtered the wallets that are owned by external users

• Checked if there are any transactions done by the account in the last 90 days

• Ranked based on the total balance (primary) and transaction count (secondary)

Expanded Proposal and Incentive Cycles Enable Formal Impact Testing

With observed data spanning periods of (i) no proposals and no incentives, (ii) proposals without incentives, (iii) incentives without proposals, and (iv) both proposals and incentives active simultaneously, we are accumulating enough data to statistically evaluate the marginal impact of incentives relative to governance activity.

This structure enables a quasi-experimental comparison of locking behavior across distinct regimes. Specifically, we can estimate baseline locking trends, isolate the incremental effect of active proposals, measure the standalone contribution of incentives, and test whether incentives amplify proposal driven participation when both are active.

By comparing changes in locked NEAR across these states, we can statistically assess whether incentives generate meaningful additional locking beyond what is driven by governance engagement alone. If incremental locking during incentive only periods is limited or statistically indistinguishable from baseline behavior, this would suggest that House of Stake growth is primarily proposal driven rather than incentive driven.

Next Steps

• Gauntlet to enable statistical framework to evaluate marginal impact of incentives on HoS growth

• Gauntlet to revisit program effectiveness and methods of improvement with the NEAR Foundation and the House of Stake owners to inform program strategy. This includes efforts to understand feedback from larger holders better to increase whale adoption.

• Gauntlet will continue to publish the performance of this campaign monthly to the forums.

HSP-003 Incentive Effectiveness & Rewards Program Close

TL/DR

• The HoS veNEAR rewards program (HSP-003) went live on December 19, 2025 and since then, provides participation incentives for governance-locked NEAR.
• Roughly 83% of total locked NEAR in this program originates from just 15 large locking events, nearly all occurring during active proposal periods.
• Average daily locking is materially higher when proposals are active, regardless of whether incentives are live.
• Incentive only periods (no active proposals) do not show higher locking intensity than comparable non-incentive periods.
• Structural product constraints (conversion friction and fragmented staking integrations) limit the addressable supply of NEAR that can seamlessly enter House of Stake, reducing the potential impact of incentives.
• Recommendation: In the absence of empirical evidence that HSP-003 independently increases locked NEAR, incentives should be suspended in their current form and only reconsidered if redesigned to directly reinforce governance driven locking.

Background & Context

House of Stake (HoS) went live on October 13, 2025, introducing a new on-chain governance and delegation framework for veNEAR holders. The HoS veNEAR rewards program (HSP-003) went live on December 19, 2025 and since then, offers governance participation rewards on locked NEAR.

Prior analyses by Gauntlet identified governance proposals as a primary driver of increases in locked NEAR. In periods without active proposals, incentives alone did not appear to meaningfully increase the amount of NEAR locked in House of Stake.

Since launch, the system has moved through four distinct operating regimes defined by the presence or absence of incentives and active governance proposals:

• No proposals active, no incentives active
• No proposals active, incentives active
• Proposals active, no incentives active
• Proposals active, incentives active

The existence of these regimes creates a natural framework to evaluate the marginal impact of incentives while controlling for proposal activity. With sufficient time now elapsed in each state, a structured comparison across regimes is now feasible.

The purpose of this document is to determine the effect of HSP-003 incentives on changes in locked NEAR, distinguish that effect from proposal-driven locking behavior, and assess whether continuation of the incentive program is justified based on observed outcomes.

Proposal Activity as A Driver of NEAR Locked

For this analysis, an active proposal period is defined as the time between when a proposal is first posted to the forum and when voting concludes.

HoS participants must have their NEAR locked before voting begins in order to be eligible. However, users can lock NEAR either in anticipation of an upcoming vote or in response to a proposal once it has been introduced. As a result, changes in locked balances during proposal windows may reflect deliberate strategic positioning around governance activity rather than routine participation.

There are currently 5.29M NEAR locked in HoS. Of this total, more than 4.3M NEAR, representing roughly 81 percent of all locked supply, originates from just 15 large locking events. All but one of these events occurred during an active proposal period.

The concentration and timing of these large locking events indicate that growth in locked NEAR within HoS is not gradual or continuous. Instead, major increases in locked NEAR are closely associated with live governance periods, suggesting that proposal activity plays a central role in driving large scale participation.

The table below summarizes the number of observations in each regime, along with the total and average daily change in NEAR locked. The average daily change provides a normalized measure of locking intensity across regimes with different durations.

Periods with active proposals exhibit substantially higher average daily increases in locked NEAR than periods without proposals. When no proposals are active, daily locking is modest, and the presence of incentives does not correspond to higher average increases. In fact, the average daily change is lower during incentive-active periods than during periods without incentives.

This pattern reinforces the view that proposal activity, rather than incentives alone, is the primary driver of meaningful increases in locked NEAR.

While the table summarizes average differences across regimes, the time series visualization provides additional context. Visually, all material step increases in total NEAR locked occur during active proposal periods. Periods without proposals show comparatively limited movement, reinforcing the conclusion that governance activity coincides with the largest increases in locked balances.

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Recommendation

Taken together, the event level concentration, regime level averages, and time series evidence point to a consistent conclusion: increases in locked NEAR are overwhelmingly concentrated in periods with active governance proposals. The largest step changes in locked balances occur during proposal windows, and average daily locking intensity is materially higher when proposals are active.

Importantly, this does not imply that incentives can never influence locking behavior. However, within the observed sample, there is no empirical evidence that HSP-003 incentives generate a measurable incremental increase in locked NEAR on their own. Periods with incentives but no active proposals show comparatively modest changes, and incentive active periods do not exhibit higher average daily locking than comparable non-incentive periods.

In addition to the lack of measurable impact, there are structural and product level constraints that likely limit incremental locking irrespective of incentives:

• User flow complexity within the House of Stake application may reduce conversion efficiency. The pathway between staking, acquiring LSTs, and locking for veNEAR introduces multiple onchain actions and steps that can increase friction.
• Fragmented staking integrations constrain addressable supply. Users who have staked NEAR into contracts that do not issue transferable tokens cannot directly route their position into House of Stake. They must first unstake (subject to time delays), then restake or lock within House of Stake. This creates additional operational and financial friction likely suppressing marginal participation.

These structural constraints suggest that even a well calibrated incentive may struggle to produce measurable incremental locking if the conversion pathway is operationally complex or inaccessible to a significant portion of staked NEAR.

In the absence of empirical evidence that standalone incentives drive incremental locked NEAR and given the presence of identifiable product level frictions, incentives should be suspended in their current form. Governance proposals appear to be the primary driver of governance participation growth within House of Stake, and continuing incentives without measurable incremental impact risks deploying rewards without measurable governance impact.

Before reconsidering incentives, priority should be given to addressing structural constraints: simplifying the locking pathway, improving UX clarity, and expanding integrations so that staked NEAR across major contracts can be seamlessly routed into House of Stake without requiring full unstake cycles.

Future incentive programs could then be redesigned to directly reinforce governance participation, align incentives dynamically with proposal activity, or target specific participation behaviors. However, based on the evidence to date, locked NEAR growth appears proposal driven rather than incentive-driven, and incentive programs should remain paused until both structural frictions are resolved and clear incremental impact can be demonstrated.

Following this analysis, Gauntlet won’t propose continuing the veNEAR rewards program in its current form. The program will conclude as originally scheduled on March 19, 2026, marking the end of its three-month testing phase.

After March 19, 2026, no new locking rewards will be available for collection.

Participants who locked NEAR for governance participation may claim any outstanding programme rewards until June 17, 2026.

veNEAR Rewards Funding plan vs. actual rewards paid

Note: These figures reflect governance participation rewards, not financial returns

Resources:

Rewards Contract: rewards.hos-dao.near

Clarification on Claim Window

This post is to clarify until when rewards are eligible to be claimed.

Below are the current campaigns and their claim windows:

Campaign Id   Claim Start                     Claim End
1             Jan 03 2026 03:58:46 GMT        Apr 02 2026 12:31:23 GMT
2             Jan 19 2026 23:41:02 GMT        Apr 16 2026 13:15:28 GMT
3             Feb 02 2026 09:43:30 GMT        Apr 29 2026 21:34:15 GMT
4             Feb 14 2026 21:58:01 GMT        May 14 2026 15:04:19 GMT
5             Mar 20 2026 00:00:01 GMT        Jun 18 2026 00:00:01 GMT

Each campaign has two parts:

• a reward window (when rewards are earned)
• a claim window (shown above, when rewards can be claimed)

For example:

• Campaign 1 rewards were earned between Dec 18 → Jan 2
• These rewards can be claimed between Jan 3 → Apr 2

If you locked in early (e.g., before Jan 2), you earn rewards across all the above campaigns given in the table.

Important: Campaign end dates are claim deadlines.
You should claim your rewards before the deadline to avoid forfeiting any unclaimed rewards.

The data here is clean and the conclusion is hard to argue with, it is clear that proposals drive locking, incentives don’t.

The concentration numbers confirm the structural concern. 15 locking events account for 83% of all locked NEAR. The pilot successfully attracted capital but failed to attract participants. Those are different things, and any redesign needs to optimize for the second.

The regime analysis is the most useful part of this report. The four-regime framework (proposals x incentives, on/off) gives HoS a repeatable evaluation methodology for future experiments. The counterintuitive finding (incentive-only periods performed worse than non-incentive periods) this deserves deeper investigation. One hypothesis: the incentive signal may have attracted passive yield-seekers during quiet periods who locked small amounts and never participated in governance, while the non-incentive period locking was driven by stakeholders with genuine governance intent. If that’s true, the incentive mechanism was selecting for the wrong behavior.

On the UX friction point. Gauntlet correctly identifies conversion complexity (staking → LSTs → veNEAR lockup) as a bottleneck. But I would push further: even with a seamless UX, the fundamental question is whether there are enough consequential decisions flowing through HoS to justify the opportunity cost of locking capital. Right now, most proposals are constitutional documents (important, but not economically meaningful to individual stakeholders). The moment HoS starts making funding allocation decisions, treasury deployment, or protocol parameter changes, you’ll see a natural uptick in locking because the governance power has real economic value. The UX matters, but the decision pipeline matters more.

We can learn three very important things from these findings.

1. Tie rewards to governance actions, not just locking. Reward voting, delegation activity, proposal authoring, and forum participation. A locked token that never votes is deadweight, not governance participation.
2. Reduce the minimum lock duration or offer tiered options. Some stakeholders want to participate but won’t commit to long lockups. A 3-month lock with lower voting weight alongside a 12-month lock with full weight would expand the addressable participant pool.
3. Publish a governance decision roadmap. If people can see that HoS will be making material funding decisions in Q2-Q3 2026, they’ll lock NEAR in advance to have a seat at the table. The incentive is the decision power itself. Rewards should be a bonus, not the primary motivation.

The 81,814 / 280,682 spend ratio is actually a positive outcome from a treasury perspective, you got data without burning the full budget. The question now is whether HoS uses that data to build something better.