NEAR opens House of Stake vote to cut annual token issuance to 1.6%

NEAR's House of Stake is voting on HSP-029, a proposal that would cut the blockchain's maximum annual token issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months. Foresight News reported that voting has opened and closes on Nov. 2, and the forum thread lists the proposal's status as Voting.

The proposal comes from Sal Ternullo, chief executive of SVRN, and changes a single parameter. Maximum issuance would fall about 3.75 basis points per month in a per-epoch ramp until it reaches the 1.6% target in month 24, while the existing split of new tokens, 90% to staking participants and 10% to the treasury, stays as it is. A 90-day grace period follows ratification so wallets, exchanges, custodians and staking providers can update disclosures before the first basis point comes off. Under the current 2.5% cap the network mints about 89,517 NEAR per day; at the target rate that falls to 57,291, according to the proposal's own measurements.

The supply math is the core of the pitch. The proposal models 11.8 million NEAR not issued over the first two years and 66.1 million over six, a supply 4.36% smaller than the current schedule would produce. In an Oct. 2 report, Crypto Briefing put the same six-year figure at roughly $329 million worth of tokens at early-October prices and noted that governance could pause the ramp mid-schedule but could not reverse it and push issuance back up.

Stakers absorb the other side of the trade. The proposal puts gross annual staking yield at 5.268% today and 3.372% at the target rate, assuming the 42.71% staking participation measured at block 216,701,043 on Sept. 22. Its risk section adds that operators who hold little or no NEAR of their own could lose roughly 36% of commission revenue once the target rate is in force. The forum text states plainly that 57.3% of supply is not staked, so non-staking holders face no offsetting reward loss and simply see dilution slow.

The proposal's measurements come from NEAR mainnet at block 216,701,043 on Sept. 22, when 558.2 million NEAR, or 42.71% of supply, was staked across 406 active validators. Two weeks earlier the staking ratio stood at 46.92% with 424 validators, and roughly 54.5 million NEAR was unstaked over that fortnight while the token price rose 86%, which pushed gross yield up from 4.796% to 5.268% as the denominator shrank. The forum post also measures the treasury's share of new issuance at 10.13%, superseding the commonly cited 96/4 split, and it commits to quarterly reports comparing realized issuance against the schedule.

Ternullo disclosed his own stake in the outcome. SVRN holds about 55 million NEAR, more than 90% of it staked, composing more than 8% of staked supply, and intends to vote in favor, per the proposal's conflicts section. The same disclosure estimates the cut trims roughly 855,000 NEAR per year from SVRN's staking rewards at the target rate.

Passage alone does not change the chain. HSP-029 requires House of Stake ratification first, then separate validator adoption through the standard upgrade process, the same path NEAR's earlier issuance halving took with 68.41% approval. Crypto Briefing reported that the previous cut, from 5% to 2.5%, carried about 80% validator support and shipped in the nearcore v2.9.0 upgrade in late 2025.

Not everyone on the thread is voting yes. One commenter wrote that the numbers justify a cut but not the destination, and said they were leaning against until the endgame, meaning a fixed supply, is defined. The discussion grew out of an August debate in which NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin withdrew a Sovereign Fund proposal and argued that discretionary allocation creates risks the protocol should not internalize.

The ballot in the House of Stake, NEAR's stake-weighted governance body, remains open until Nov. 2, after which a separate validator upgrade and the 90-day grace period still stand between ratification and any change to the issuance cap.