Hi all! Maxwell here on behalf of the HoS team.
I’m writing this post to publicly address the August 7th alpha launch of HoS and those users who locked up NEAR at that time. For a few different reasons, not least of which being that the House of Stake Security Council’s processes were not fully matured and implemented, the decision was made to deprecate that contract in favor of a new, more resilient deployment and the front-end shut down.
During this alpha launch, some very early adopters chose to lock their NEAR for HoS participation. That locked NEAR goes into a private vault contract that no one, including the deployer or owner of the main HoS contract (eg. neither the NF, security council, nor HoS team), can access or control. This design coupled with the non-upgradable nature of the contract means nobody is able able to circumvent the process to release that locked NEAR; note that this is by design, and is a security mechanism to ensure that a given user’s NEAR is always under their sole control and custody.
Very few users locked much NEAR to the original contract, but even so, we’ve discussed this with Agora and NF Finance and would now like to offer support to those early adopters. The Agora team has agreed to prepare a document that outlines how to unlock and claim locked NEAR via the CLI, which they will publish very soon. Note that removing funds from lockup will take 90 days, as that was the cooldown as implemented in the original deployment.
Apologies for the inconvenience- we thank you for trying new experiments with us. If you have any issues following the CLI steps, please reach out and we’ll be happy to help you.
Further, NF Finance has agreed to compensate all these early depositing users in the following ways:
- Delegating equivalent veNEAR to all depositors in the original contract, until they are able to retrieve their funds. Note that for pragmatic reasons (the contracts themselves require a 3 NEAR deposit), this will only apply to those users who deposited 10 or more NEAR.
- Reimbursing these users their fees and deposits lost in interaction with the old contract (around ~3 NEAR per account);
- Ensuring that these users remain eligible and benefit from any incentives given to depositors in the full-launch of HoS;
- Finally, we are also exploring options for a further one time bonus or badge, but haven’t come to a conclusion on what would be most appropriate; more to come.
All of this will apply to the veNEAR locked before October 13th, 2025.
We want to emphasize that we are committed to making you whole- we appreciate your patience and support.
Best,
Maxwell and the HoS team