House of Stake Updates: Transparency Thread

[haenko]

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.

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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)

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:

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

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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

Full list

June Plans

• Publish anonymized survey results and raw data

How to contribute:

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

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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

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:

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

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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

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.

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

[lane]

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

[lane]

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

[lane]

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.

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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