NEAR House of Stake Approves HSP-029, Cutting Issuance Cap to 1.6%

Ternullo's HSP-029 Clears House of Stake

The NEAR Protocol governance body, the House of Stake, voted on Monday, November 2, to approve HSP-029, a proposal that lowers the network's annual issuance cap from 2.5% to 1.6% across a 24-month ramp. Sal Ternullo, chief executive of SVRN, authored HSP-029, which keeps the split that sends 90% of newly minted NEAR Protocol (NEAR) to stakers and 10% to the treasury while changing a single parameter. House of Stake runs its votes on veNEAR, a governance token obtained by locking NEAR for voting weight, and the public record shows 3.29 million veNEAR in favor against 1,071 abstentions, with opposition at effectively zero. Approval does not enact the cut on its own: the House of Stake Security Council can veto the proposal until November 16, and validators must adopt a protocol upgrade that the governance body cannot force on them. Once live, the plan grants roughly 90 days of grace, then trims issuance by about 3.75 basis points a month until the cap reaches 1.6% at month 24, taking daily emissions from about 89,500 NEAR down to about 57,300 at the target rate. It is the second reduction inside a year, after the cap was halved from 5% to 2.5% in late October 2025, a move cited as grounds for this one because the validator network kept growing even after rewards fell. The timing follows a sharp price run: the NEAR price climbed 86% in the two weeks before the Sept. 22 snapshot the proposal's modeling uses, reaching $4.30, while the staked share of supply slipped from 46.92% to 42.71% over the same stretch.

Fee Revenue and Buybacks Carry the Case

The economics land hardest on those who lock tokens. At the current staking ratio of 42.71%, the proposal's modeling puts gross staking yield at about 5.27%, falling to about 3.37% at the target rate; for holders who treat staking as yield farming, the annualized return, expressed as APY, shrinks by roughly a third. Ternullo reads the recent numbers skeptically toward emissions as the driver: gross yield rose from 4.796% to 5.268% in the fortnight before the snapshot, which he attributes to “a stake following the price” and the cost of locking up liquidity rather than to the emission schedule. Validators feel the cut as well. NEAR Protocol (NEAR) runs on delegated proof of stake, and if staking and fees stay unchanged, commission revenue drops about 36%; the model finds 24 of 405 pools would fail to cover machine costs from commission and owner stake with NEAR at $4.30. A holder staking 1,000 NEAR ends the second year about 20 tokens short of the old cap's path, while the 57.3% of supply left unstaked loses less to dilution and gives up nothing in return. Fewer emissions mean 11.8 million NEAR less over two years and 66.1 million over six, leaving supply 4.36% below where the old cap would have carried it. The argument for trimming now rests on a changed revenue mix: NEAR Intents, the network's crosschain execution service, processed $10.4 billion in volume in the third quarter and has generated more than $52 million in cumulative fees, over $8 million of which has funded open-market buybacks of the token. A fixed total supply is under study but forms no part of the approved plan, and exchanges, wallets and staking providers get the 90-day grace window to align their systems with the new schedule.

Near-Unanimous Tally, One Veto Window

The HSP-029 issuance cut vote closed near-unanimously: 3.29 million veNEAR yes, 1,071 abstentions and no opposition recorded, with the Security Council's veto window open until November 16. The rationale traces to August, when co-founder Illia Polosukhin dropped his plan for a security fund of roughly 30 million NEAR Protocol (NEAR), worth about $53 million at the time, and Ternullo wrote the issuance cut as a result. The precedent points the same way: Solana passed its own cut, SGP-0002, on August 28 with 67.001% of the stake, and Galaxy's vice president of research, Lucas Tcheyan, said that month that supply cuts alone do not move SOL or ETH because demand sets the price, a caveat that now meets a token whose spot price slipped 7.3% over the past day and sits 30% off its peak toward $4.00 support. By authoring the ramp, Ternullo has committed the network to a path his own model prices: the first reduction lands after the 90-day grace period, and the cap stops falling only at 1.6%.