Kent here from Agora with a House of Stake Platform Update.
Audited Runbooks for the NEAR Community
As you remember the last time we spoke, we are launched the Alpha site but quickly took parts of it down due to how the contracts were deployed. We have since been working closely with the NF Security Council and Halborn (NEAR Auditors) to ensure that we have a bulletproof runbook for deploying those contracts from the NF Security Council vs. Agora. We will also be making all of those deployment guides public so that the rest of the community can learn from them too.
The NF Security Council will be reviewing these this week, and then we will perform a Testnet deployment, validate all is running well. Then move to production.
Governance Rewards
While we have been waiting for the audited runbooks and working back and forth with FastNEAR and the NF, we have been working with Gauntlet on how the Governance rewards will be generated, claimed within the HoS Platform.
Adding support for rNEAR
We are happy to announce that we are looking to add support for rNEAR as a new LST in the core locking and staking flow.
The goal in the first few months of House of Stake will be to maximize the amount of veNEAR possible, so adding more ways to get veNEAR will be a top priority for everyone. We are also going to document this flow so that more LSTs and staking tokens can submit a PR and add themself.
The goal is to make House of Stake a thriving platform when all is done.
Know that Agora and the other House of Stake partners are hard at work getting everything ready for launch. Thank you for your patience and feedback. I am looking forward to hearing from you in the Telegram or here.
Hi folks - another quick update here, since I know this is overdue. It’s been an extraordinarily busy period. As always, you should consider the HoS Core Team kanban as the source of truth regarding the current set of tasks and their status. I just reviewed it, and it’s pretty well up to date - and will be even more up to date tomorrow once we kick off a new iteration.
HoS full launch: see update here. Tldr: Agora has delivered the code and the launch runbook to the security council. This is in their hands now. We’re hopefully a few days away from this being complete.
Hiring a Head of Governance: see update here. Tldr: we’re in the final stages of this process and I’m hopeful it’ll conclude next week.
NDC funds transfer: see update here. Tldr: this is also almost complete.
Comms and policy docs: we released a number of important communications and draft policy documents over the past few days, with more coming soon. See:
The legal framework of the Near Digital Collective (NDC) establishes that any significant transfer of funds from the NDC Treasury — including transfers to other funds or organizations — must be approved by the community (Near Consent). Trustees are obligated to obtain such approval, and during the transitional period, they may authorize only limited expenditures that strictly align with the defined purposes of the trust (near.org/blog/near-digital-collective-legal-framework).
NEAR Community consent (Near Consent) is a mandatory requirement for any transfer of funds from the NDC Treasury. Decisions are made through the Voting Body and on-chain voting, while trustees act merely as executors of the community’s will and are legally bound to operate in its interest.
I realize that it’s been a while since I posted an update here. I’m not sure if this thread is the best place to communicate what’s happening in House of Stake going forward, given that we have multiple other places where we’re sharing updates including the core team kanban, the product team kanban (and various Github issues more generally), @AK_HoG’s Community Governance Calls, and of course forum threads for individual projects like this one: HSP-002, HSP-003: next steps.
However, for now I’ll keep posting updates here on occasion.
HoS has grown and matured quite a bit since we started a few months ago. As I mentioned before in this thread, we’re at a point where it’s impossible for one person, including me, to know everything that’s going on. This is even more true today. So I can only share updates as I see them from where I sit.
Here are a few of the things that are going on right now:
We’re in the process of bifurcating the team along the lines of Governance and Product, with Angela taking ownership of Governance work going forward. For updates on Product work, see the newly-created product tag (Topics tagged product), the roadmap that @jacklaing shared previously: AI Governance Product Roadmap, and the first AI governance product: AI Governance Dashboard (Alpha) – We’d Love Your Feedback. Jack and @jlwaugh have made great progress on this AI-powered proposal dashboard, and your feedback is super helpful at this stage.
@bearmans and I were in Buenos Aires for Devconnect last week. We participated in a number of governance-related events and workshops, and were able to share a lot about our work and learn from what other projects and protocols are up to (including Sky, Stellar, Hats Protocol, Cardano, Ethereum Foundation, Solana, Octant, Morpho, Canton, Tally, and a bunch of others).
We’re working super closely with Agora, Gauntlet, and @HackHumanity to launch rewards for HSP-002 and HSP-003. These are coming soon. For more information, see HSP-002, HSP-003: next steps.
We’re planning to do another in person GovHack-style event in Q1. More info on this soon.
@bearmans is working with NF Marketing on an announcement of our research partnership, and separately, is in the process of making whole our earliest alpha users (Addressing users of the August 7th alpha launch) and launching non-economic incentives for early HoS participants.
I’m thinking a lot about team composition, about how the team fits into NF’s product-centric pivot, and about how we can put product more firmly at the center of our work. I’m also thinking about a research roadmap.