NEAR Governance Weekly: HoS Launch nears amid summer lull, Community pushes for transparency
House of Stake launch on the horizon, discussions slow down
It’s been a relatively quiet week in NEAR’s governance channels – perhaps a seasonal lull as many take summer holidays and as the community anticipates the imminent rollout of the House of Stake (HoS) platform. NEAR Foundation’s Lane Rettig, who leads the HoS initiative, returned from the EthCC conference and a short vacation noting he was “still deeply in message debt and catching up”. This lightened activity comes as HoS moves closer to launch; the Agora team confirmed that smart contract audits are scheduled and a tentative go-live date of August 7, 2025 has been set pending a successful audit. An updated HoS testnet frontend is already live for community testing. With these milestones in sight, many discussions have paused, creating a brief calm before HoS governance truly begins.
Official Updates: Audit Underway and New Launch Date
This week brought concrete progress reports from the HoS leadership. In a July 17 update, Lane summarized recent developments: the HoS team has established a bare-bones web landing page and is finalizing operational details like entity formation (e.g. setting up a Fireblocks vault for the HoS treasury). Perhaps most notably, Lane revealed that NEAR Foundation (NF) has partnered with “a lab at a major research university” to pursue governance research, with terms just finalized and a formal announcement expected soon. This direct funding of an academic initiative – done without any open request for proposals – has prompted some community concern about discretionary spending. In response, community members are “strongly encourag[ing] the Foundation to ensure open competitions for research grants, so that universities worldwide can participate transparently and fairly.”
On July 21, an update from Kent (of Agora) delivered welcome news on HoS technical progress. He confirmed that a bug fix to the HoS smart contracts has been completed and those contracts (v1.0.1) are now entering an external audit by Halborn slated for July 28–August 1. Barring any issues, August 7, 2025 is the target launch date for House of Stake’s initial version – roughly on schedule after months of development. Kent provided a new staging site URL for the HoS frontend and urged community members to keep testing and reporting bugs or feedback ahead of the production release. If all goes smoothly, NEAR token holders will soon be able to lock NEAR for veNEAR, delegate to endorsed delegates, and vote on proposals via the HoS platform.
New Compensation Committee to Oversee Spending and Hiring
Even as HoS’s technical launch nears, governance of the initiative’s human and financial resources remains under scrutiny. Lane noted that just last month NF introduced a new “compensation committee” to review and approve all roles and expenditures related to HoS. This committee was established to bring more oversight and rigor to how funds are spent – a response to earlier ad-hoc decisions that raised eyebrows. For example, a community watchdog blog revealed that a contractor hired to assist HoS governance (without any competitive process) was paid $15,600 in a single month with “no public report provided to justify the payment”, calling it “deeply inconsistent” with the principle that “there should be an accountability… for every dollar that gets spent.”. Such instances – along with questions about uncompetitive vendor selection – underscore why many see the compensation committee as critical for transparency in expenses, vendor selection, and accountability. The committee’s role will be to vet salaries, contracts, and budgets, ensuring that funds are allocated prudently and with clear justification. As one community member bluntly asked regarding opaque spending, “Where is that accountability now?”.
Delegates’ compensation debates
Meanwhile, within the budding House of Stake council itself, debates continue over how (and whether) the 11 endorsed delegates should be compensated. Some delegates have proposed receiving stipends or rewards for their work even before HoS is live – a point of contention for many in the NEAR community. Critics argue that compensation should be earned through meaningful contributions and only with approval from the token holders the delegates represent. In fact, the original HoS proposal suggested any delegate reward pool must be “voted on and approved by the community” in a transparent manner. Community sentiment echoes that delegate rewards ought to depend on demonstrable work and merit, not entitlement. As one community member noted in a forum discussion, it’s fortunate that NEAR holders can always choose to vote directly because “so far, not a single delegate has earned that merit.” The implication is clear: to deserve pay, delegates must first prove their value.
Demands for Transparency: screening committee and event funds
Transparency – a recurring theme in NEAR’s governance discussions – remains a point of tension, especially regarding who is making decisions behind the scenes and how funds are used. One focal point is the HoS Screening Committee, the small group tasked with selecting the initial delegates and fast-tracking certain proposals. Back in March, Lane outlined the committee’s composition in broad terms (three NF representatives, one NEAR One core dev, and one Gauntlet member). However, the actual identities of some members – particularly the NF-appointed individuals – were never officially disclosed. Now, more than six months since delegate selection began, community members are pressing for clarity. They feel the Screening Committee has either outlived its usefulness or failed to be sufficiently open about its makeup and mandate. “Its full composition remains opaque,” one forum blog noted, saying it’s “said to include Lane, a member from NearOne, one from Gauntlet, and two unnamed individuals linked to the NEAR Foundation.” Moreover, “so far, the NEAR Foundation has chosen not to disclose their identities.” Such opacity has fueled calls to either reveal the committee members or even reform the process, folding any necessary duties into the delegates’ and community’s hands. In response, there’s talk of establishing a dedicated Due Diligence Team under the HoS Security Council to independently vet proposals and check conflicts of interest, adding another layer of accountability.
The community is also demanding transparency in how NF-sponsored events and initiatives are budgeted. The first in-person HoS kickoff event in Cannes (held alongside EthCC) is a case in point. By all accounts the July gathering was productive – “a big success… a great first opportunity to get to know one another, build trust, share updates”, according to Lane’s recap. However, questions have been raised about the costs and funding of that event. Only Lane has provided a public summary of what transpired. There has been no detailed expense report released to the community yet, despite this being an NF-funded offsite to kickstart a “community-owned” governance project. On social media, a prominent NEAR validator openly asked, “Where can I see a transparent report of the expenses for this governance offsite in Cannes?”. So far, there has been no public answer. Community members expect that delegate attendance and NF-funded activities be justified openly – some have even suggested that any NF-funded delegate who fails to secure at least 10,000 veNEAR in community delegation should return the funds allocated to them for such events or roles. The rationale is that delegates need a minimum level of token-holder support to validate the investment in them. (Notably, of all delegates, Lane himself was the only one to promptly publish a detailed Cannes trip report on the forum.) The silence from others on their takeaways or spending has only amplified calls for full disclosure. The Cannes case underscores why many in the community insist that House of Stake’s finances be treated with DAO-like openness going forward – every event, grant, or expenditure should be logged and reported.
Community urges limits and trial period for HoS Governance
As NEAR’s grand governance experiment prepares to launch, the community’s message is that transparency and accountability are not optional – they are prerequisites for legitimacy. There is even a growing sentiment that NEAR’s founders should intervene to ensure the experiment stays on course. Some community members are urging Illia Polosukhin, NEAR’s co-founder, to take a more active oversight role: specifically, to impose a hard cap on compensation within the House of Stake (for example, setting strict limits on delegate stipends, committee budgets, and other payouts) and to institute a clearly defined trial period for this new governance model. The idea would be to treat HoS’s first months as a pilot – with capped costs and continuous evaluation – rather than an open-ended entitlement. By setting these guardrails, Illia could signal that while the Foundation supports decentralizing governance, it will not allow runaway spending or unchecked authority in the name of “community” without proven results. “The House of Stake treasury is community-owned, and it is the community that must shape and enforce governance norms,” as one forum post put it. Many believe a mandate from the top to limit pay and periodically review HoS’s performance would reinforce that principle and protect the experiment’s integrity.
PS:
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Wonderful to see more volunteers from the community stepping up to strengthen the new $NEAR governance experiment! Join the event or host your own!
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Meanwhile, Klaus and Lane have launched a dedicated DAO —
hos-bounties.sputnik-dao.near— to fund bounties related to HoS for the Community contributors, with an initial budget of $5,000. -
Interested in joining the Compensation Committee?
Hit like under Rika Golberg’s post to express interest. -
Time Passed Since the NEAR Foundation announced New Governance but not yet launched: 477 days, 17 hours, 43 minutes, 29 seconds, 121 ms
Approximate Money Already Burned: $552,555.48 USD (not including Cannes trips, flights, Gauntlet invoices)