[REDACTED] 2024 | Gauntlet on House of Stake

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   thanks for uh joining today uh our presentation is a partnership update on how the near Foundation has been working with gauntlet um to focus on new governance and new ecosystem growth through the house of stake uh our agenda for today is as follows we're going to start by taking a historical look at progress we've made looking back in the most recent months um making progress

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   towards a proposal implementation uh a look at the current state what's in Flight what we're working on right at this minute and then looking forward the progress we can expect to see in the next few months as we see an exciting future for near overall and within the house of stake as well first I'll introduce myself hi I'm Jake I'm a senior protocol strategist at Gauntlet I've been with gauntlet for about two years prior to Gauntlet I was

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   working in trafi and fintech and data science startups uh in the non- crypto world uh focusing on optimization of company infrastructure and intelligence um but now I'm here at gaunlet focusing on the protocol growth and ecosystem growth team uh if you don't know gaunlet we are an economic modeling and defi Services Company focusing on working with the best defi protocols and teams

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   and daps in all of crypto um so we try to work on providing infrastructure intelligence and incentive optimization as well as things like treasury management uh risk management for Perpetual protocols dexes and lending protocols uh for all of defi so we'll jump right into it looking back at our partnership so far let's talk about what golet's original scope was um so you guys might have seen in uh June of this year we put up our announ announcement uh for our partnership uh there's a lot of details that go into

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   the partnership but we'll just start with kind of the two high level themes being governance and ecosystem growth um so what does governance mean uh you know defi ecosystems as a whole both within defi than in the real world like the news most recently you'll see that uh governance is still something that needs to iterate and continuously improve um so what we were designed to do for near was work with the foundation to design a stake weighted governance framework and

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   propose an actual solution to the rest of the uh Community uh in parallel and in accordance with that proposal we want to focus on ecosystem growth uh utilizing our expertise with things like incentive optimization and incentive intelligence um to implement targeted initiatives to encourage onchain activity and actual organic user flow but why is that important um and why is that important not only to defi as a whole but also to the ne ecosystem specifically um so there's a ton of

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   context in here that the ne ecosystem has gone through a bunch of experiences that you know they would probably would have a much better job of uh explaining uh than this one slide but high level uh near was founded on a proof of humanity uh framework which means that one person gets one vote and it doesn't matter if it's Ilia proposing a code change or some uh new user uh they have the same

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   amount of power in executing a code or a grant proposal um this was a really you know nice and uh egalitarian idea that uh theoretically would be really great if it worked out but I think you know objectively there are a lot of issues that the UN ecosystem has experienced um which is what led this proposal and this partnership to come to be um just a high Lev overview of what some of those issues were is that when there's

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   onetoone voting it's really hard to get people to agree on things um which means that things like proposing uh funding for Grants and new apps and token launches and different uh Partnerships within the ecosystem it was very difficult to get those across um which led to a very low number of success rates for Grant proposals and execution within near compared to other big L1 ecosystems uh in the industry and as that happened there was not a ton of incentive alignment when it came to engagement and participation for the

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    governance ecosystem and the the voters themselves so you saw a dramatic decrease in NDC voting participation going from 500 votes to about 100 over the course of two years so pretty pretty dramatic drop off so what is the solution um again you guys might have seen this proposal online but our proposal was the house of stake this was developed in tight collaboration with the near Foundation coming from a lot of ideas that IL has proposed over the

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    years as well as tons of research that we've done both with near and you know within our defi experience looking at ecosystems such as arbitrum optimism ethereum Unis swap to understand what's been working for them and what hasn't and what we can apply to get some nice wise lessons for the new ecosystem as they get ready for their next chapter so in those recent months we did end up actually proposing the house of stake uh document and the house of stake blog post uh what this does to apply to the pains

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    that uh the New York assistant was facing was it implies the stake weighted voting which is again not a novel idea this is something that's used widely across defi it rewards people who are economically incentiv economic economically aligned within the ecosystem to have more of a say uh when it comes to things like protocol upgrades security measures or new launches um it also introduced The V near token this token allows to allows

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    users to be rewarded for engagement uh rewarded for locking themselves in to being committed to the new ecosystem um and gives you know more of incentive alignment that we didn't see in the previous uh framework and uh we also established a new flow of committees and organizations with their own roles and responsibilities um that all coordinate and collaborate together to make sure that proposals are actually secure that they're efficient and that they actually go through on chain so that uh things

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    can actually happen uh so then you'll see that there's a lot of you know comments and questions on this post it got a lot of uh attention which was really great for us we love the feedback we went through one iteration of feedback after a mechanism change was recommended To Us by the community which was extremely helpful um I'm getting a lot of questions this week from other near uh ecosystem members about when is this going to be live and then something we'll talk about later in the

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    presentation so again uh this presentation was you know many I mean sorry this proposal was any uh pages long I'm not going to dive into all the deep math that our data science team did happy to get into that uh if we have more time or you know in private discussion I'm just going to go over the high level flow of the proposed framework that we've that we've presented um so what you'll see here this is just the from the ecosystem

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    perspective not the user perspective um we have the start of the process being the proposal being made by any near member uh typical ways that you do this is you create a for post you do some community outreach you get feedback from people you take in comments maybe you update your proposal maybe you don't um but you do that on the forums and you make a proposal with specific actions contract calls um or you know

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    recommendations to the ecosystem themselves there is then a temperature check phase of around seven days this is again pretty standard with other major L1 ecosystems um to give the community time to provide feedback to make sure that this proposal is sound and then there is a pre screening committee which is a new committee that we've recommended in our framework this committee is going to be made up of you know experienced near members who are

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    vested in the success of the near ecosystem as well as potentially new elected members who are responsible for reviewing the proposal in detail and making a recommendation to the community about if this proposal is one that they would move forward with the real effect of that committee you know is to allow for either a majority or a super majority for the community to then vote on so if the screen Community were to say hey this looks like a good proposal

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    we reviewed it at length here's our recommendation to move forward then it would only require 51% for the community to pass this proposal via non-chain governance vote uh if they were to reject the proposal for any number of reasons that you know they think this proposal might not be successful for the near ecosystem um then it would have to be a super majority meaning that over three out of every four people would have to accept this proposal as

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    something that they think is is an improvement for following that uh decision by the screening committee there is a actual onchain vote which allows anybody with ve near stake tokens to weigh in on the ecosystem's future and decide if this vote is something that they want to execute on chain so that means anybody with vener tokens whether you have one or a thousand you can submit your vote of course the more tokens you have the

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    more voting power you can contribute um that phase is uh 14 days that allows again for more vetting by more people um it allows voters to provide more discourse on the forums or elsewhere maybe through a spaces to understand if this post is something that they all want to agree on and post the successful uh approval of that vote the onchain the onchain contract calls within that proposal will be executed um so what that might look like is it might look like a security upgrade it might look like an you know funds being sent

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    from you know one contract to another or it could look like a you know a fundamental change for the near L1 um as that passes you know things break things happen uh a normal uh or a standard approach for most of these ecosystems is to have some sort of emergency implementation flow in place things like Crisis management uh things like you know avoiding a hack um to hedge those things from happening you have things like a security Council which is another new committee that we've recommended which will have

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    members that the near foundation and gaet suggests with expertise uh in security and chain security to make sure that things like hacks or protocol freezes um can only happen uh when they need to from a voting perspective uh there we also recommended endorsed delegates this is something that arbitr and optimism have also uh dabbled with uh what that means is that they'll be just like in

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    the voting in your you know of the US with senators and representatives they will be kind of larger parties with more responsibility to contribute to the new ecosystem with specific expertise um they will be endorsed by both the foundation and the community there'll also be regular delegates so you can self-d delegate you can recommend a non- endorse member to to delegate to um and what this allows for is that you know

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    people like me who I I don't have Smart contract auditing experience uh I might not trust myself to to look through every line of code for near but I can trust someone like open Zeppelin or you know other smart contract Auditors that near you know has used in the past and I can delegate my vote for those those sorts of decisions so what this all looks like you know as a whole flow you guys can see here

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    proposals will come in voters will provide their input and then as the different security measures and committees give their own input uh these proposals will either be ejected uh accepted or rejected so what does this look like in the current state what's going on right now we are building building building uh we are in collaboration with fast near another uh seasoned veteran in the near ecosystem to actually implement the

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    proposal and framework that we've recommended so they're in the process of building this and getting it audited right now we put some tweets up to give you guys some timeline of expectations but of course some things take faster or some things take slower than expected we're also doing uh some of that ecosystem growth that we talked about in our initial proposal uh initial partnership proposal um where we talk

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    about uh and focus on in incentives for ref Finance that's the major decks on year right now we're seeing pretty strong results so far uh We've distributed around a quar of a million dollars in incentives for ref which means that we're basically incentivizing people to provide liquidity for all the most important token pools on the number one decks in near right now uh we're seeing pretty strong uh results be our

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    kpis we're we're incentivizing volume so we want people to actually trade these tokens and we're rewarding pools that do get that volume while ref took a small hit in the past month as there was some Market volatility we're still seeing good growth for pools that we are actually targeting and we are seeing a really interesting Trend with bridged assets having the highest Roi um within our strategies when and when you think of things like chain abstraction this is

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    a good indicator that you know people are bridging assets to near uh which is very very important so looking forward House of stake go live and Community enablement um so we're really excited for the house of stake to go live we're really excited for the community to get a chance to participate uh and you know submit proposals uh what can anybody in the ne eal system do to help you can get those proposals ready uh if you have a recommendation to the ecosystem if you want to get your project funded out of the near treasury

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    uh start to write those proposals if you haven't already and start to get some Community feedback uh within you know the appropriate near channels um be prepared to stake your near and vote so a lot of people are staking their near through you know things like stake near Alternatives or you might just be holding near but you have to be ready to get those you know those wallets ready get those ledgers ready and make sure you can get V near to actually be a contributor and then think about who you

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    want to delegate to um so we have not disclo you know we've not published our call for delegates yet but we are getting ready to indor delegates or recommend Endor delegates and we want to make sure that you guys have as much time as you need to vet them yourselves ask questions and of course suggest your own here are our next steps we're hoping for the complete complete contract development complete uh deadline of end

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    of year we are hoping to start establishing delegates and endorse delegates within the beginning of q1 and we're hoping to see the first proposals go live for end of q1 so we have a very busy next few months coming up wasting it in touch uh that's my Twitter and telegram absolutely love any and all questions there's a lot of uh deep math and data science that I had a lot of trouble you know processing on my

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    own time so if you guys have any questions please please please come and ask if you want to uh get uh better understanding for what Lon does overall or what we're continuing to do for near again please reach out we love questions and uh thank you for your time today