NEAR’s Decision-Making in the Best Interest of the Ecosystem
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About this video
House of Stake is NEAR’s token-based decision-making engine, designed to turn stake into stewardship. This talk explores why it exists, how it strengthens and secures the NEAR ecosystem, and how stakeholders can actively shape high-impact decisions that serve the network’s long-term interests.
NEAR is the unified commerce layer for assets and agents.
Website: near.org NEAR AI: near.ai Intents: near.org/intents Chain Abstraction: proximity.dev Sharding: nearone.org
For the devs GitHub: github.com/near Dev Docs: docs.near.org Devhub: devhub.near.page @NEARDevHub
Connect with socials Twitter: / nearprotocol Blog: near.org/blog Medium: / nearprotocol #NEAR #nearprotocol #NEARAI
Transcript
1,286 wordsCaptions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.
- 0:11
All right. Hello everyone. I'm Angela, House of Stakes, head of governance. And today I'd like to talk about power. So who decides how the nearest resources are used and how to make sure that these resources are used in the best interest of the ecosystem.
- 0:32
Today there's 30 million in protocol assets at treasury.n. So the question is not so much do we have resources, the question is how can we put these funds to good use? How can we use 30 million in the best interest of NA and not only today but in 10 years from now and how do we do this? If we look at for example nation states let's take the example of the new regions or in wealth
- 1:06
funds these decisions are made by a parliament. So we have legal structure, we have accountability, we have institutional guardrails but near is not a nation state. We govern a protocol. We govern a digital infrastructure. We govern an ecosystem that builds the foundation for an agented future. It's a tokenbased system. It's a permissionless system.
- 1:34
And the participants are global and decentralized and they are so enonymous. So the big question is how to govern a treasury in a decentralized system. House of stake is our answer. So house of stake is the independent tokenbased decision making treasury governance engineer.
- 2:02
It gives NEO token holders decision-making power. It's transparent. It's stake weighted. It's designed to resist capture and malicious takeover. And at House of St. any new token holder can lock near for receiving Veneer that grants you decision-m power and any token holder can put up a proposal forward. So this is not governance as a formality. its governance as coordinated action of all NEO token holders. Now the long-term vision of House of ST is ambitious. It
- 2:39
becomes NEO's treasury governance engine. So we put the protocol economics to work in the best interest of the ecosystem. Strengthening the protocol, supporting the builders, maintaining regulatory compliance, ensuring sustainability and positioning near to succeed long term. Now let me talk about what do we actually govern? House of stake focuses on four key areas of decision-m. It's number one economics.
- 3:13
We govern parameters in the protocol like inflation, fee structures and core economic parameters and these lead directly to the long-term ecosystem and economic health of the protocol. Second, we govern technical decisions, security, reliability and resilience of the protocol. anything that can't cannot be simply merged in GitHub.
- 3:42
Third, it's legitimacy, transparency, clear processes, checks and balances, and broad participation because governance only works if it's trusted. And finally, engagement. We believe that the decisions will be best if they capture the perspectives of all key stakeholders meaning the validators, the builders, the product teams and ultimately end users human or ite launched only in October 2025. So, it's
- 4:17
four months old and we have established voting procedures, checks and balances, token holder activation. That's all important. But most importantly, we've put funds to work already in three programs. Number one, a validator support program.
- 4:35
So, this is to maintain the network decentralization after the protocol inflation reduction. And the goal was to make sure that we have a sufficient diversity particularly in small validators that would suffer under the inflation reduction. This program started in October and ended in December 2025 and we had pretty good results stemming from it and it's a joint initiative from Metapool linear hot and gauntlet and house of stake.
- 5:09
Second, the veneer holder rewards program. This is a program to grow the number of near locked in the system. So the idea of the whole tokconomics at house of stake is you lock and commit tokens to the long-term success of the ecom system and can participate in governance.
- 5:32
And we've set up a first program to grow the number of near in the system. it's running until March and from there of course we evaluate to what extent um offering these rewards are have been successful and the last one is a brand new proposal that has just passed voting it's um a MPC node infrastructure financing program via protocol emissions so it's a way to reward MPC nodes for their contribution and value add to the
- 6:07
system and here I'd like to spend some time on this because it's a great example of how this treasury governance to the best interest or in the best interest of NIA can work NPC signers the idea of NPC signers started around 2019 uh proof of concept in 2020 23 and today this has grown into a core part of value proposition So MPC signers enable chain signatures. They are critical infrastructure and critical infrastructure must be profitable to
- 6:46
operate must be technically robust and must be distributed in terms of location so that we avoid a single point of failure in hardware in systems and in jurisdictions. And at the beginning of this program, NEA one near Foundation and Proximity collaborated in spinning up this program. And this made sense in the early days when when building up the MPC signer node um infrastructure and and responsibilities.
- 7:20
But long term this has to transition in a decentralized way to define the rewards to elect the MPC node providers. Now the new setup under this new program house of state takes on the role of the contracting counterpart. So we handle the token reward payouts. We manage KYC where required. We evaluate the outcome based on token holder vote. Meanwhile, the technical eligibility of the nodes is still defined by new year one because
- 7:56
they understand the technical requirements. They understand the strategic priorities and they understand how to further develop this core piece of infrastructure. And this is how this idea of progressive decentralization is driven not by optics but rather by a reasonable progressive collaboration and decision- making via token holders who evaluate and stakeholders who contribute in their core area of expertise. And
- 8:28
evaluate means we find out how such a program is increasing resilience of the system if it's improving and how it's improving ROI and how it's strategically aligned to the overall vision of NEO. And these insights feed back into the governance discussions and further iterations of the program. Again the token holds have this role of evaluation and optimizing and stakeholders contribute value and specifications requirements in this setup.
- 9:07
Now let me zoom out. The incredible work that has been done at NER over the past years has built the fundaments for NEO success no doubt and at House of Stake we are building on it responsibly. House of stake should be the platform that allows to deploy capital transparently, align incentives and protect the stakeholders in the system.
- 9:33
It introduces structure. It introduces accountability and checks and balances. But in fact, house of stake is only the platform. It's coordinated action of all stakeholders and particularly of stakeholders like me one running a program understanding what's needed understanding what's strategically relevant and house of stake as being the counterparty that takes care for funds distribution and decision-making optimization in a responsible way.
- 10:07
It's coordinated action in fact of all NEO token holders. So by you and if you see a challenge in the system it's open to come up with a proposal. If you want a say in the direction NEO takes lock NA. And if you care about the long-term growth then participate and govern because governance is not something somebody else does. Governance is what every NEO token holder can participate in. And this is the future of House of Stake, the future of NIA,
- 10:39
and we're building it together. Thank you.