NEAR Protocol’s House of Stake is voting on HSP-029, a proposal to lower the network’s maximum annual issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months. The vote opened at 16:48 UTC on 19 October and closes at 16:48 UTC on 2 November, according to the House of Stake proposal page. Its author, Sal Ternullo, chief executive of the Nasdaq-listed NEAR holder SVRN, first posted it on the NEAR governance forum on 7 October.
If the cut goes through, the proposal’s own model puts gross staking yield at 3.372% after two years, against 5.268% today, a drop of about 36%. In exchange, about 11.8 million fewer NEAR would be minted over two years and 66.1 million fewer over six, a supply 4.36% smaller than if the 2.5% cap stayed in place.
Nothing changes on 2 November, whatever the result. The cap is a protocol parameter, so a yes vote in House of Stake is only the first step: validators then have to adopt a network upgrade that carries the new schedule, and the first reduction would only come after a grace period of one quarter. Mainnet issuance is still capped at 2.5%, the level set by last year’s halving from 5%.
NEAR traded near $4.98 at 06:04 UTC on 21 October, up about 4.4% over 24 hours and down 2.2% over seven days.
HSP-029 changes one number: the issuance cap, from 2.5% to 1.6%
The proposal, posted on 7 October and filed as a Super Majority decision under Economic Governance, touches a single parameter. The cap would fall in a straight line from 2.5% to 1.6% across 24 months, interpolated epoch by epoch, which works out to about 3.75 basis points (0.0375 percentage point) per month. There are no step dates, so no single day on which issuance drops by a visible amount.
The split of new tokens stays where it is: 90% to stakers and validators, 10% to the protocol treasury. The proposal says it measured that split on chain at 10.13% for the treasury, and notes that realised gross issuance runs at 2.45%, slightly under the 2.5% cap, because transaction fees are burned.
In daily terms, NEAR mints about 89,517 new tokens at 2.5%, by the proposal’s count. At the 1.6% target that would fall to 57,291. The text also rules out any automatic trigger that would raise issuance again if the security budget looked thin: going back up would need a new proposal and a new vote.
| Point on the ramp | Issuance cap | Gross staking yield (proposal model) |
|---|---|---|
| Adoption (month 0) | 2.500% | 5.268% |
| Month 6 | 2.275% | 4.622% |
| Month 12 | 2.050% | 4.320% |
| Month 18 | 1.825% | 3.847% |
| Month 24 (target) | 1.600% | 3.372% |
These yields hold the staking ratio at 42.71%, the level the author measured on 22 September. If fewer people stake, yield per staked token rises, and the reverse is also true, so the table is a model rather than a forecast.
Who votes on NEAR’s issuance cut: House of Stake first, validators second
House of Stake is NEAR’s on-chain governance system. Voting weight comes from NEAR locked in it, counted as veNEAR, not from the stake a validator runs. On 13 October, six days before the ballot opened, Ternullo asked holders on the forum to lock their tokens in House of Stake so that turnout would be high. The proposal page gives the vote threshold only as Super Majority, with no percentage. A KuCoin market note dated 10 October, summarising a post on X, says more than two thirds of the vote must be yes; neither official page confirms that number.
Turnout so far is thin. At about 06:20 UTC on 21 October, 16 accounts had voted, 13 for and one against, with about 1.93 million veNEAR cast. That is just above the quorum of 1.85 million veNEAR shown on the page, and a small fraction of the 558 million NEAR staked on the network.
The second step is the one that makes the change binding. In the proposal’s words, House of Stake ratification is necessary, but validator adoption is ultimately what makes it binding. NEAR One would ship the upgrade and each validator operator would decide whether to run it.
Some operators have already said where they stand. Polkachu wrote on 9 October: “We will support by adopting the corresponding protocol upgrade as a validator.” The Tie’s validator team said it would ask its delegators first. A holder asked how to find out his validator’s position; Ternullo replied that delegators can ask, and move their stake to a supportive validator if the vote passes and theirs refuses to upgrade.
The 2025 halving went through after a failed vote
This is NEAR’s second issuance cut in a year, and the first one did not pass its own ballot. In early July 2025, HOT DAO and LiNEAR Protocol proposed halving the cap from 5% to 2.5%, with a rule that two thirds of stake had to vote yes. The community validator vote held in August fell short of that bar, and Brave New Coin reported that it technically failed, even if most of the validators who did vote backed the cut.
The change came back through the node software. NEAR One released nearcore v2.9.0 on 21 October 2025 with the new cap; validators signalled by upgrading to protocol version 81, and activation needed 80% of block-producer stake. About 68% had upgraded by 28 October, Brave New Coin reported, and the bar was cleared later; the halving went live on 30 October 2025. The HSP-029 text cites 68.41% as the approval the halving passed at, but that was a mid-vote reading. No source we found gives the final share.
Chorus One, a large staking provider, objected to the route rather than the cut itself, saying on X that it “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the integrity of NEAR”, as quoted by Brave New Coin. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin answered that the upgrade followed rules in place since launch, under which nothing changes unless 80% of validators adopt it. NEAR fell about 8% to $2.10 after the announcement, Brave New Coin reported, during a broad market decline.
HSP-029 puts the House of Stake vote before the upgrade, which its author presents as an answer to the concern that House of Stake turnout alone is not a mandate over protocol economics.
The proposal’s data, and where its own page disagrees
Every simulation in HSP-029 rests on a snapshot of NEAR mainnet at block 216,701,043 on 22 September 2026, when NEAR traded at $4.30 according to the author.
| Metric (22 September 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Total supply | 1,306,946,399 NEAR |
| Staked | 558,165,227 NEAR (42.71%) |
| Active validators | 406 (100 block producers, 306 chunk-only) |
| Candidates waiting for a seat | 459 |
| Minimum stake for a seat | 9,428 NEAR |
| Gross staking yield | 5.268% at 2.5%; 3.372% at 1.6% |
| Issuance avoided | 11.8M NEAR over 2 years; 66.1M over 6 years |
The page does not always agree with itself. Its summary gives a yield path of 4.80% to 3.07% and says a staker needs NEAR to rise 1.66%, or 7.9 cents, to break even; the tables use 5.268% to 3.372% and 1.827%, or 16.2 cents. The author explains the yield gap: stake fell from 46.92% to 42.71% of supply in the two weeks before the snapshot, which pushed the yield up. We use the table figures, which the press also repeats. They remain the proposal’s estimates.
The value of the 66.1 million avoided tokens is put at about $153 million in the summary and $284 million in the cumulative table, both at the $4.30 price. Only the second matches the arithmetic.
What a 1.6% cap means for stakers and for holders who do not stake
For someone who delegates through a validator charging the median 5% commission, the proposal estimates yield falling from about 5.00% to 3.20% by the end of the ramp. A holder staking 1,000 NEAR would end year two with about 20 fewer tokens than if the cap stayed at 2.5%. To be exactly even, that staker needs NEAR to be worth 1.827% more than it otherwise would; the author calculates that the smaller supply alone delivers 0.857% of that, at an unchanged network valuation.
Holders who do not stake, 57.3% of supply at the snapshot, have no offset to weigh. Their share of the network is simply diluted more slowly: the proposal puts the avoided dilution at roughly $86 on a $10,000 position at the target rate.
Tax enters the author’s case as well. Staking rewards are taxed as income in many countries, so part of them is sold when received; borrowing an estimate from Solana’s debate, the proposal assumes about 17% of rewards leave the network that way. Readers in France, Italy or elsewhere should check their own rules, which we have not assessed here.
In tokenomics terms, issuance is the cost the network pays in new tokens to reward the stakers who secure it under proof of stake. The debate on the forum is about how much of that cost is still needed.
Small validators and SVRN: who loses income, by the author’s count
The proposal counts validators whose own revenue, commission plus yield on the operator’s own tokens, covers machine costs of $500 a month for block producers and $200 for other nodes. At the $4.30 spot price, 170 pass that test at 2.5% and 146 would at 1.6%, so 24 of 405 fall below it. The author argues that the long tail was never living on issuance: in the 163 pools with 30,000 to 60,000 NEAR of stake, the median operator owns 19 NEAR of its own against about 40,130 delegated.
Operators who hold no NEAR get no price upside to offset the cut; the proposal says they lose roughly 36% of commission revenue. Ternullo also pointed out on 13 October that Meta smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">Pool’s proof of stake coin with a protocol that stakes it for you and issues a transferable token (such as Lido stETH or rETH) representing the deposit plus rewards, which you can use or sell while the coins stay staked.">liquid staking contract, with 24.8 million NEAR, is the main delegator in 186 of the 406 active pools.
The author’s company has a large stake in the outcome. SVRN holds about 55 million NEAR, more than 90% of it staked, which the proposal says is over 8% of staked supply. It runs validator infrastructure through partners and an MPC node paid under an earlier House of Stake programme, HSP-007, which it also wrote. SVRN says it will vote yes, and estimates that the cut would cost it about 855,000 NEAR a year at the target rate.
On the forum, operators back the cut and others ask where it ends
Support has come from several operators. The operator of the thecoding.pool.near validator, posting as vinibarbosa, said he would vote for it with more than 300,000 veNEAR. A validator ranked around 120th said it would go further, to 1% at once. A representative of ChicagoCityNode backed it too, which drew a reply claiming the node is funded by the NEAR Foundation.
The objections are less about the arithmetic than about the destination. One participant, cloudmex-alan, wrote that he was “leaning no for now” because the earlier discussion pointed to a fixed supply while the formal text calls 1.6% the final change; Ternullo replied that final meant the last step of this proposal, not the end state. Another, awstian, argued that each cut asks long-term holders to pay for newcomers: “I am tired of this mercenary approach to tokenomics.”
Everstake asked for modelling on net issuance after fee burns and Intents buybacks, a test of how sensitive yield is to the staking ratio, and a pause mechanism, noting that “There is no pause mechanism or set-health safeguard.” It also pointed out that NEAR fell from about $2.10 at the 2025 halving to below $0.90 in February 2026, and that the later recovery came alongside the growth of NEAR Intents.
That cross-chain swap service carries much of the demand-side case made on the forum, and it had a bad week: its postmortem on the deposit bug that minted $3.8 million in ghost funds came out on 17 October.
Bitwise’s NEAR ETF and the yield it passes on
One holder with a direct interest in the yield is Bitwise. Its NRR fund began trading on NYSE Arca on 29 September and took in $35.5 million on its first day, Crypto Briefing reported; it held about 15.8 million NEAR on 12 October. The fund stakes its NEAR. At launch Bitwise cited an annualised staking reward rate of 5.3% as of 25 September, with 33% of rewards going to fees for the staking agents, the custodian and Bitwise, according to Unchained.
We found no statement from Bitwise on what HSP-029 would mean for NRR, so this is our inference, not the firm’s: if the yield falls toward 3.4%, the staking income the fund can pass to shareholders shrinks with it. Kam Benbrik of Bitwise wrote on the forum on 19 October that the firm liked the proposal’s simplicity and was “approaching this with an open mind”, without saying how it would vote.
What to watch before and after 2 November
The House of Stake count runs until 16:48 UTC on 2 November, and the proposal page shows the running tally against the quorum. What counts as a supermajority there has not been stated as a number on either official page.
After that, validators. Polkachu has said yes; Everstake, The Tie and others have asked for more data. NEAR One would have to ship a release that carries the ramp, and no date has been set. It is also not settled whether the one-quarter grace period counts from the House of Stake vote or from validator adoption: the technical specification says activation comes one full quarter after ratification without defining the moment more closely.
Until then, the cap stays at 2.5% and NEAR keeps minting about 89,500 tokens a day. Our NEAR Protocol page tracks the token’s supply and price.