House of Stake Updates: Transparency Thread

House of Stake Working Groups Update May 2025

As part of the House of Stake initiative, four working groups are actively shaping strategic direction and operational frameworks for the NEAR ecosystem. Below is a summary of key outcomes in May and plans for June.


1. Ecosystem Growth Strategy Working Group

Focus
Aligning on the key objectives and KPIs for NEAR’s ecosystem growth strategy, to help prioritize the initiatives our working group will focus on

Participants
Tané, Areta, Aurora, NEARWEEK, Charles Garrett, Slime, Cameron Dennis

May Highlights

  • Held 4 interactive workshops that surfaced 7 key opportunity areas
  • Developed an almost-final matrix of goals and KPIs (user growth, dev retention, TVL growth)

:page_facing_up: Ecosystem Growth WG Key Metrics Drafting

June Plans

  • Publish the Key Objective/KPI matrix and open a 7-day async feedback window
  • Present the refined strategy for feedback and iteration during the next House of Stake community call

How to contribute:

  • :small_blue_diamond: Review and comment on the KPI matrix when it’s published
  • :small_blue_diamond: Share any ecosystem initiatives you’re involved in that align with the growth goals

2. Network Economics & Security Working Group

Focus
Assessing the impact of potential validator issuance reductions on decentralization and long-term sustainability.

Participants
Slime, Alan, Takeshi, Rika Goldberg (404 DAO)

May Highlights

  • Launched a community survey on inflation and staking
  • Compiled a list of ~40 NEAR-native projects (validators, DeFi, AI, wallets, games, etc.) to receive the issuance survey
  • Assigned outreach owners using NEAR Catalog and ecosystem mapping tools

:page_facing_up: Full list

June Plans

  • Publish anonymized survey results and raw data

How to contribute:

  • :small_blue_diamond: Take the staking/inflation survey (if you haven’t yet)
  • :small_blue_diamond: Share the survey within your community circles
  • :small_blue_diamond: Provide feedback or ideas on how to improve the long-term network economy

3. Governance Infrastructure & Processes Working Group

Focus
Designing scalable and transparent governance processes for House of Stake and the wider NEAR ecosystem.

Participants
Tané (Takeshi and Shoji), 404 DAO (Cole), Slime, Alan, Cameron, James

May Highlights

  • A draft forum post was prepared to introduce the governance submission process and collect initial proposals (draft link)
  • Explored directions for AI-assisted governance. James (james.near) is currently studying HoS contracts in order to build an assistant with these potential capabilities:
    • helping users lock/stake NEAR to get veNEAR and delegate it
    • reviewing or summarizing proposals with recommendations
    • participating in governance discussions
    • creating proposals
    • voting autonomously

:link: Community-built multi-agent proposal generator

June Plans

  • Publish the forum post and begin accepting community proposals
  • Continue testing AI-based governance tooling (community testers welcome)
  • Implement UI/UX improvements in the governance portal

How to contribute:

  • :small_blue_diamond: Submit your proposal once the forum post is live
  • :small_blue_diamond: Volunteer to test AI-based governance tools
  • :small_blue_diamond: Share UX feedback or ideas to improve the governance portal

4. Treasury Management Working Group

Focus
Creating clear guidelines for how NEAR’s treasury is used to maximize impact, manage risk, and support sustainable ecosystem growth.

Participants
Yuen, Slime, Cole

May Highlights

  • Reviewed treasury management initiatives from Arbitrum and ENS
  • Assessed legacy NEAR DAO treasury practices and gaps
  • Discussed legal entity structure with Lane

:page_facing_up: Summary of May 21 call

June Plans

  • Align with Growth WG on funding priorities
  • Launch community survey on treasury goals and risk preferences
  • Begin draft of initial budget and allocation framework
  • Meet with NF counterparts (Founder Success, Strategic Initiatives) to discuss guidelines, respective areas of focus, preventing overlap, etc.

How to contribute:
:small_blue_diamond: Fill out the treasury goals & risk survey (when released)
:small_blue_diamond: Share examples or ideas for effective Web3 treasury management
:small_blue_diamond: Reach out if you have legal, financial, or operational expertise to offer

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4 posts were split to a new topic: House of Stake: Transparency Thread Off-topic Posts

I’m getting very tired of this back and forth. Guys, what you’re discussing has literally nothing to do with House of Stake, and it’s not at all constructive. Take it elsewhere.

I’ve locked this thread for now. If you cannot participate constructively in forums like this going forward, it’s going to be harder for me and the others working on House of Stake to provide updates and answer questions. That hurts everyone.

L

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I moved these posts to a separate thread, feel free to continue the conversation there: House of Stake: Transparency Thread Off-topic Posts

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Hi everyone, we’re overdue for another update here. There’s more and more happening in the growing HoS ecosystem, so I’m going to try to structure these updates a bit more going forward.

Hiring

See House of Stake: Open Roles and the additional information I shared at Telegram: View @NEAR_HouseOfStake, and thanks for your patience as I’ve owed you these JDs for some time. None of these roles have been filled yet, and you’re welcome to apply yourself or refer someone else. I hope to fill most of these roles soon, and will continue to post updates here as that process continues. As I describe in the linked thread, these roles are all full-time roles at NF for now, but some will transition to the HoS Foundation.

Entity Formation

As I previously explained, the blocker to completing the setup of the new HoS Foundation is the Fireblocks vault that will be used to receive the incoming NDC Trust funds. I’m happy to report that over the past few days, the paperwork was completed and the fees have been paid, so I expect this vault to be set up this week. With any luck, it should only take a few more days after that to transfer the funds.

I previously shared a list of questions from the delegates and the community about the new HoS entity. I’m also happy to report that we have answers to all of these questions, thanks to Bianca @ NF Legal. These are undergoing a final review process internally and I expect to be able to share these this week. Bianca has also kindly agreed to join an AMA on a X space next next week to review the answers and cover any remaining questions; @fiatisabubble and his team will update with details about when this will happen.

As a sneak peek, the answer to most of the questions is, “It’s up to the community.” This is exciting, but it also means that HoS will have to develop operational expertise - or recruit experts to help - with things like treasury management in the near future. Something to begin thinking about!

Economics

Gauntlet continues to make progress towards a final set of proposed economic parameters for “HoS 2.0”, which is the next iteration of the HoS project beyond this initial locking/delegating/voting stage. We expect this work to be substantially complete within the next week or two. This includes things like the proposed mechanism for calculating yield for staking and locking NEAR/veNEAR under House of Stake.

Governance

@KlausBrave ran some initial “Mission-Vision-Values” workshops with the delegates last week, and collected a lot of very valuable feedback on these topics. He’s in the process of reviewing and distilling this feedback; expect to hear more from him this week.

Gauntlet also has a draft proposal with more details around the role of the Steering Committee and, in particular, how to add, remove, and replace delegates. I expect this will also be shared soon.

Delegates

I defer to the delegates to directly share their progress and that of the respective working groups, but from my perspective I see progress being made on several fronts, including Network Economics & Security, Ecosystem Growth, and Gov Infra & Processes.

The Network Economics & Security working group ran a survey to collect community feedback on inflation and issuance, and shared the results. I found this, especially the visualizations, very insightful and informative. This group also hosted a successful AMA to discuss these results.

Ecosystem Growth has been in touch with the NF Founder Success and Partner and Infrastructure Success teams, and also with the data & analytics team at NF to put together an ecosystem dashboard for HoS. They’re working on benchmarking current metrics as a way to track progress once HoS goes live.

And the Gov Infra & Processes group has been as active as ever, reviewing relevant research, sharing ideas, and discussing relevant AI tools.

I can’t possibly do justice to everything happening here. I can only share the things I’m aware of! So again, I encourage the delegates and others to share other updates here.

AI/Product

Metapool previously built some AI tooling for their own governance system, that they’ve kindly agreed to adapt for the HoS use case. I’m not sure how much of this has been shared publicly and I don’t want to post any spoilers here, so I encourage @claudioac & co. to share more, but this should be up and running very soon! I expect this will be the first end-to-end, functional AI governance tooling for HoS.

@jlwaugh has also built some really cool, prototype AI-tooling, and along with @Cameron, is helping coordinate with a few other third-party builders that we expect will contribute to helping us ship AI governance tooling. Again, I don’t know how much of this is already public and don’t want to over share, but I encourage James and Cameron to share more here about what’s cooking!

Research

I reviewed a second and final draft of the proposal from our candidate research lab partner, and it’s in great shape. I’ll share an executive summary internally at NF this week for final approval, then we can kick off the partnership, including finding postdocs/faculty/undergrads/etc. to contribute to this research effort. The first project we intend to pursue is a “Call for Governance Data”, to build the world’s largest governance-focused data set, which we can then use for all of the AI applications we intend to build. More soon.

As always, let me know if I’ve missed anything. I’ve re-opened this thread, so feel free to share comments or questions, but please keep things on topic.

Cheers,
Lane

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GM NEARians,

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Cannes for an amazing day of House of Stake. We are humbled to be building in such a thoughtful and action oriented communities.

Some highlights from last week:

Alpha site: https://agora-near.vercel.app/

  • Feel free to go in and create some test accounts and play around. I will create a new proposal each day, so you can see those voting mechanics at work.
  • We will put together a process for collecting feedback soon
  • Site will be open sourced by mid next week. Just removing all the //HACKs :wink:

Contract Update

Roadmap

Goals for the next few weeks

  • Publish new contracts and ensure delegate and undelegate work as expected on Testnet
  • Open source the application
  • Add support for Endorsed Delegates and advanced delegate filtering
  • Speed up the site
  • Launch on mainnet, locking in a date now with the Foundation.

Find me on https://x.com/kentf if you want to reach our directly or find me on Telegram @kentfenwick.

Looking forward to getting this live with all of you. Have a great week.

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Hi folks! As usual, there’s tons of things going on lately. I’m recently back from Cannes for EthCC and our HoS event, and a week of holiday, which means that I’m still deeply in message debt and still catching up everywhere (X, this forum, TG, etc.). Please bear with me, and thank you for your patience.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s going on, from my perspective:

Events

See my recap of the Cannes event:

In that post, I included a list of questions, reflecting on this first event and considering the next one. We don’t currently have any concrete plans to do another in person event, but IMHO we should keep up the cadence on these and, ideally, do them roughly quarterly. (I explained why in that post, and in the substack article I linked there.)

It might make sense to meet face to face in Buenos Aires around the time of Devconnect in November. We’ve also talked about doing an event in North America, or another one in Europe, in the autumn. Now would be a great time to weigh in here if you have an opinion (but, please, not in this thread–feel free to use the Cannes Event Recap thread, or we can start a new one).

Website

@KlausBrave and I have been working on putting in place a barebones HoS landing page. We acquired the domains houseofstake.com and houseofstake.org a few weeks ago, and we put up a barebones, Docusaurus-based landing page here:

(Note that we’ll rename this houseofstake.org and switch it to that domain shortly.)

This all lives in a public repository on Github, so all are welcome to contribute, submit PRs, etc. For now I expect this will host the following:

  1. A high-level description of the project, its goals, etc.
  2. The list of delegates
  3. Some foundational documents: mission/vision/values, CoI, CoC, etc.

What else do we want to add?

The goal is to keep this barebones and simple for now, using basic markdown, with as little vendor lockin as possible so that we can migrate or upgrade to a more sophisticated hosting platform in the future. To that end, we’ve chosen Docusaurus for now. If someone in the community wants to take it upon themselves to help build a better landing page, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hiring

Unfortunately, none of the full time roles that I listed here last month have been approved by NF or posted on the official careers page. I don’t have full transparency or understanding of why this is the case, but it appears to be due to a combination of two things:

  1. NF just last month introduced a new “compensation committee” and a new process by which all roles must be reviewed and approved. This process is happening now for the HoS roles, but it may take some time for some of the roles.
  2. There’s still some lack of clarity in terms of which roles will migrate from NF → HoS, at which point in time, and exactly what that process will look like. We’re figuring this out too.

I received a couple of applications for the Head of Governance role, and one for the AI Product Lead. Luckily, I was able to get the AI Product Lead role approved as a contractor position with NF, and we’re planning to onboard someone to this role later this month.

Please feel free to continue to refer candidates to me, or to apply yourself, with the caveat that these roles shouldn’t be considered final or official until they’ve been approved and posted on the NF jobs board. That may take some more time, and I’ll keep you posted here.

Entity Formation

The Fireblocks account that I mentioned in my last update is now active, and all of the keyholders have set up their accounts. Unfortunately, we’ve run into problems with the MPC setup for one of the keyholders, which is a blocker on finishing “structuring the vault” (i.e., configuring the required number of signers, etc.) and receiving the NDC funds. Resolving this will probably require talking to Fireblocks. Sorting this out is one of my top priorities for this week.

We also have a call with the NDC trustees scheduled for next week to finalize the transfer.

Economics

Gauntlet shared their final Q2 deliverable, which lays out their plans for transitioning from “HoS 1.0” (what’s already been built) to “HoS 2.0”, where HoS plays a deeper role in protocol economics, validator compensation, etc. They’ll be presenting this plan on a X space in a few hours.

Governance

Expect an update from @KlausBrave on his work here (as described in my previous update) very shortly. We also still owe you Gauntlet’s draft proposal with more details around the Steering Committee, adding, removing, and replacing delegates, and delegate compensation.

Delegates

I haven’t personally been very active in the working groups the past few weeks, so I defer to the delegates and the working group leads to share updates as they see fit.

AI/Product

Metapool shipped an AI copilot prototype in time for Cannes. Very exciting stuff! We got a demo of this at the HoS workshop, and I also included it in my EthCC talk, where I laid out my personal vision for what the HoS AI product roadmap might look like, driving towards a form of “swarm intelligence.”

@KlausBrave and I kicked off work on a prototype with the Deepgov team, which you can see here. This is a super early prototype of a “deep listening” tool that allows us to use AI to consume a torrent of information (this forum, telegram, social media, etc.) and produce straightforward, structured reports to understand the sentiment of the community, what issues people care about the most, etc.

@KlausBrave also shipped a really exciting prototype “Code of Conduct agent”, which he may be able to share here. The general idea is that we want to put our money where our mouth is, dogfood our own tooling, and lean heavily into the use of AI in governance, especially to remove the drudgery and busy work often associated with things like policing a CoC.

I know that @jlwaugh , @Cameron and others have also had a hand in shipping some AI-related prototypes over the past few weeks, so I encourage them to share more here about what they’ve been up to.

Finally, I expect all of this work to accelerate, and for us to massively increase coordination - e.g., putting in place proper project roadmaps - when the AI Project Lead starts in a matter of days, as mentioned above.

Research

I’m excited to report that just this week we finalized terms and language with our new research partner, the lab at a major research university that I’ve alluded to here several times. Once all of the paperwork is signed and everything is final, we’ll announce this partnership and explain more about our plans and goals - hopefully in time for my next update here.

If any of the above work sounds interesting or exciting, and if you’d like to contribute, please reach out. As always, let me know if I’ve missed anything. Feel free to share comments or questions, but please keep things on topic.

Cheers,
Lane

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Thank you! Looking forward

It’s unfortunate that this was yet another selection made without an open and transparent competition.

I hear you. Thank you for the feedback. In an ideal world, all such decisions would be made, and funding disbursed, in this manner. The reality is that negotiating a deal like this is a great deal of work - it took nearly six months end to end to get this done, and I don’t personally have the bandwidth to do this sort of negotiation with a bunch of potential partners (that alone would be a fulltime job). If we were to attempt to do a deal like this in a decentralized, community-driven manner, realistically I just don’t think it would ever happen, at least not at this stage in HoS’s maturity - hopefully that will change.

I and other stakeholders who have been part of the conversation have a high degree of confidence in, and feel a strong values alignment with, this partner, so I feel totally confident moving forward. As with everything else that’s happening now, this is initially being funded by NF, not out of the HoS treasury. And, as with everything else happening now, this will eventually also fall under HoS oversight, so HoS will be able to decide to continue the relationship, or terminate it, or evaluate other potential partners.

In the interest of expediency, I think it’s best that we kick off now and reevaluate in a few months in a more public fashion.

L

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GM Nearians!

Quick update from Agora as much has been happening since our last post.

House of Stake v1.0.1 Contracts in Audit

As we mentioned previously, we had a bug in the original HoS contracts and those are changes are currently fixed and waiting to get audited by Halborn. That audit will start on July 28th and will end on August 1st, 2025.

New Test Site Address

As we move our infra to proper production readiness we have a new staging site up at:

This will act as our staging site and then once the new contracts are done and deployed, we will move everything over to production.

New Date for Launch

Assuming all goes well with the audit, we are aiming to launch on August 7th, 2025! We will keep the thread updated if that date has to move.

What you can do to help.

Continue testing the staging application and submit improvements, bugs and feedback here: HoS Alpha Feedback.

We will post again after the audit and confirm the final delivery date!

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Hi everyone,

Quick update from my end as well. We’re planning to go live in a week, on August 7. I won’t be able to update this thread until the launch is done, since we’re heads down focusing on the launch, but in lieu of updating this thread, please check the following resources:

Thanks everyone!

L

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GM! Kent here from agora.xyz, we are excited to announce the Alpha Release of House of Stake at https://gov.houseofstake.org/.

What to expect in the Alpha Launch

During this time we will be getting some final production polish done, and we will be encouraging the endorsed delegates to create their delegate statements.

The official launch will be coming next week on August 14th.

We would love your help

Go and explore the site, click around, report bugs and overall, get excited about what is to come. The public roadmap can be found here: 📯 NEAR House of Stake | Agora. Please use it to submit ideas, bugs, vote on roadmap items. We will be using this to keep the roadmap as open and transparent as possible, while being community driven.

Thank you to everyone who has given feedback and helped get us to this Alpha launch. More to come next week!

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Hi everyone,

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! As I’m sure everyone has seen by now, @kent and his team shipped the alpha version of the HoS frontend a week ago (see previous message). If you haven’t had a chance yet, I encourage you to help us test it out! You can report bugs and issues using the “Report bugs & feedback” link at the bottom right corner, and you can use the public roadmap Kent linked above to submit ideas, feature requests, etc. Shoutout to Kent & co. for already incorporating and shipping a number of feature requests, including support for more wallets!

What follows is a brief personal update, as previously promised on the part of the core team.

Note: you can see my work in a different format on the Core Team Kanban. Here’s a link that’s filtered on my username:

  • My primary task these past couple of weeks has been project managing the launch. This includes coordinating work among NF (esp. Finance and Marketing teams), Gauntlet, Agora, Hack Humanity, FastNear, and other ecosystem stakeholders. In addition to the Kanban, you can also track progress in this public dashboard. This included daily preparatory standup calls last week.
  • I also spent quite a bit of time improving transparency and project management for the Core team, including setting up the Kanban and launch dashboard, and authoring this post on my philosophy for working in public and why it’s so important that we do so. I spent some time teaching my team how to use Github effectively for project management.
  • I authored a draft blog post announcing the launch. Thank you to the others who have contributed. I also authored a comprehensive marketing brief for the NF marketing team (not public). I also reviewed the content on the houseofstake.org website prior to launch and helped with the launch (although Klaus and his team get 99% of the credit for this!).
  • I worked with Bianca to get the Head of Governance role listed on the NF careers page and began reviewing the inbound applications.
  • I prepared House of Stake updates for NFC (internal) and for the Ecosystem Collab. call today.
  • I finalized and announced the composition of the interim Screening Committee, and of the Security Council. I reviewed draft charters on these and other topics from Gauntlet.
  • I worked with Gauntlet and Agora to finalize the parameters for the HoS 1.0 launch.
  • I created an updated HoS budget for NF (internal) and began the process of review and approval internally.
  • I helped review and finalize the legal terms & conditions for the HoS frontend and houseofstake.org website.
  • I generally did my best to stay active and up to date on multiple communication forums, including Telegram and this forum, although I am admittedly somewhat behind on this forum. I’ll continue working on getting caught up.

That’s all for me, for now! More soon.

L

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Hi all,

This is my first transparency update since starting in this role.

So far my time has focused on:

My work on the AI governance product roadmap went through several rapid iterations, and included key supporting work such as:

  • Reviewing NEAR AI’s roadmap and the work of other teams in the NEAR ecosystem to identify technologies we can leverage and potential build partners
  • Researching AI governance teams and identifying potential build partners
  • Holding calls with prospective partners to validate alignment
  • Getting up to speed on AI governance tooling in our pipeline (e.g. the work James described above) to ensure continuity
  • Meeting with James (in person and in follow-up) to understand his work with Bitte and identify where I can support
  • Distilling the roadmap into a preview for NEAR’s State of AI blog post, which helped refine the roadmap itself
  • Exploring public roadmap tools for community engagement (including enrolling our org in the Project Dependencies beta), which also helped to informed the roadmap’s structure

h/t Klaus who helped me with understanding the Near ecosystem, roadmap ideation and sensechecking, build partner calls, and evaluating public roadmap tools

The current roadmap draft will be published as a Google Doc by EOD Monday to collect feedback from the broader NEAR ecosystem. After incorporating that feedback, the roadmap will move into a public Kanban board (backed by GitHub) where it will continue to evolve through community input.

Now that my onboarding is complete and the roadmap is in a good place (pending ecosystem feedback), I’ll be providing more frequent updates here and on GitHub.

Current focus areas for my next sprint:

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Hi all!

First time posting to this thread after a couple months of work, sorry to take so long getting in here.

My work since starting a couple months back has fallen into three main buckets: governance/AI/AI governance research, some BD intros/further discussions with potential partners (incl. our major research partnership which we should formally announce soon), and currently a lot of outreach to the individuals, projects, and small groups with large holdings of NEAR to assess willingness to participate & delegate in the HoS veNEAR lockup.

  • Research: I know many people who’ve worked extensively in governance and have also worked to expand my network here since my start. Much of my time here was spent researching success stories (with ‘success’ being very vague here) in governance and finding the people who helped to architect that success. AI governance too has proven to be something more people have been working on than I initially expected, and some of those people are much farther along than expected.

    • I’ve produced a lot of half-baked reports based on my work here and a handful of finished ones, I’ll try to get a few more finished and in such a state as they could be shared publicly.
  • BD: Nothing very specific to share here as of yet as nothing is finalized. However, we’ve had outreach and intros from a variety of groups, including those already doing something involving AI governance or onchain agents that could be used for things like treasury management; as part of our mandate, we’ll continue to explore these partnerships as ways to expand our AI tooling and cement ourselves as a top AI-focused ecosystem.

  • (more recently) Stakeholder Outreach: It’s always a little challenging to get ahold of every person I need to talk to (often timezones make this take longer than it should), but after some effort managed to get ahold of most of the major stakeholders we wanted to talk to and gauge their interest in HoS participation. Long story short, most were very open to participating, but many expressed reservations around the details, particularly the current lock-up minimum duration (3 months). I’m working with Gauntlet and the NF to finalize details of a proposed incentive structure for lock-up participants, and we are also exploring the possibility of shortening the lock-up during some launch period to help reduce friction of adoption.

I also attended the Science of Blockchain conference in early August and got to discuss AI governance with a lot of the attendees- people are overall quite bearish on governance at the moment, but the possibility of AI governance was interesting to some and I was able to make some very interesting connections there, as well as build some more rapport with face time with our research partner & team.

(as an aside for the benefit of certain community members I’d like to note that my costs visiting this conference were extremely minimal and I will not be invoicing any reimbursement for travel costs attending SBC.)

I just completed a cross-country move and therefore only worked pretty minimally (<10 hours) over the last ~10 days or so, so I’m catching up on as much as I can this week. If any community member has input on any specific things I’ve done they’d like me to share publicly, please feel free to flag them and I’ll prioritize finalizing those reports for public consumption.

Thanks for reading, and shout-out to anyone who I’ve pinged who’s helped me out over the last couple months! Really hoping to make the HoS a standout success.

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Honestly, if the plan is 50M veNEAR, it won’t be possible without support from NF. They left you to handle this outreach on your own, but in reality, you don’t have much to offer the whales — especially since every proposal will first need to go through NF’s filter, starting with the Screening Committee and then the Security Council. Who would really be interested under those conditions?

If I were you, I’d just take it easy and spend the last few days before the school season begins with family.

@lane Regarding outreach, I have a proposal you could suggest to Illia: NF employees should lock the NEAR tokens they sell every month on exchanges into veNEAR for 5 years and delegate them to @illia That would be a true demonstration of their commitment to Near Ecosystem —much more meaningful than posting pictures of themselves touching Illia’s backpack. And of course, the NEAR price would only benefit from this.

Would you be able to float this idea in the NF Slack and share results here?

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