HSP-003: veNEAR Holder Rewards Program

House of Stake Proposals
22

To clarify the economics, HSP-003 does not result in any net new inflation. The funding for this is coming out of the HoS treasury, which is funded from two pre-existing sources: funds being transferred over from the old NDC trust, and new issuance that’s been flowing into treasury.near (0.5% of total issuance) since genesis.

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I appreciate the feedback on marketing as well here, that’s an interesting perspective. It feels a little orthogonal to the purpose of this proposal, however, and I’d encourage a fresh proposal that speaks specifically to a marketing budget.

3 Likes
23

Treasury spend will create inflation, as it is new NEAR entering the economy. I’m down for making the spend, but we should still be aware that every spend lowers the NEAR price, so there needs to be strong upside somewhere too. Which there is here.

The purpose of the proposal, as I see it, is to get people to stake into veNEAR, for a variety of reasons.

The only way they will do that is if they know about it, marketing is the MOST critical function to make that happen. Good marketing will be required in fact! Of course we need to do the mechanical change here to raise the APRs to compete with defi APRs… but without good marketing, we are being inefficient with the spend.

That being said, I’m going to abstain in this vote for now, I do think this proposal will be good for the community, and probably there will be some coordination with the main marketing team for NEAR to promote this… I just wish there was a clear marketing plan in place to go along with it.

Marketing is critical in this industry, and we have a lot of great things to talk about! But look at meme coins! Tokenomics is less powerful than marketing in this industry.

3 Likes
24

We vote FOR this proposal.

We support the proposal because we believe it’s difficult to organically bootstrap the delegation without such initiatives based on experience in other DAOs that we’re involved in. It also strategically leverages the recent reduction in NEAR staking APY to make veNEAR incentives competitive. By offering a clear, time-bound rewards program, it aims to bootstrap participation in the House of Stake, potentially increasing governance engagement and long-term locked NEAR. The proposal is structured as a pilot, allowing for community feedback and adjustment before any long-term commitment, which aligns with prudent governance experimentation. However, we also believe this should be a temporary measure and more considerations to achieve a long-term solution to the governance token delegations.

25

The Decision version of this proposal passed a few days ago. I just updated the status of the canonical copy from Voting to Final: proposals/HSPs/hsp-003.md at main · houseofstake/proposals · GitHub

1 Like
26

will it work for stNEAR/LiNEAR/rNEAR as well?

27

The migration of 60M NEAR into veNEAR to strengthen decentralized governance could be highly effetctive! However, as people mentioned before me, the distribution mechanics is unclear and mercenary participation is not insignificant. For this reasons, more metrics should be integrated for the “Delegation Selection” (e.g: Ecosystem Footprint Score: ISSUE: Delegate Selection Transparency and Metrics )

I believe that these metrics can help to migrate these 60M NEAR with more accuracy and thus properly strength the decentralized governance !

1 Like
28

Update on program progress below:

TLDR:

  • HoS Rewards tracking is now available using this dashboard! Results are updated daily at 12:15am Pacific Time.

  • Progress is being made with incentives driving new participants and NEAR locking into HoS.

  • Room for improvement is evident, program would benefit from greater efforts to incrase large holder adoption and engaging proposal activity in HoS.

    Program owners are working together to improve the program, and more updates will be posted to update the community on strategy of veNEAR adoption. More details below:

Background

House of Stake (HoS) went live on October 13th, 2025, introducing a new on-chain governance and delegation framework for veNEAR holders. Following the launch, HoS rewards (HSP-003) went live on December 19th, 2025.

At the start of the rewards program, HoS had the following:

  • 341 participants
  • 3.677M NEAR locked

This update provides a brief overview of how the campaign has progressed since launch and highlights key metrics.

Impact Summary

Since the launch of the rewards program, incentives have generated:

  • 103,508 additional NEAR locked, bringing the total NEAR locked in HoS to 3.78M. This represents a 2.8% increase in NEAR locked.
  • 31 new accounts participated in HoS, bringing the total number of HoS participants to 372. This represents a 9% increase in the number of participants.

Key Stats

To date, 20,755 NEAR are claimable as rewards to accounts that have locked NEAR in HoS (not necessarily claimed). The table below highlights the accounts with the largest rewards by locking their NEAR in HoS.

Account ID veNEAR Delegated To NEAR Rewards Earned
717e23c9f60bbbdda4b1b9118a1a7e095320940219645d7fdd55b801af8a7f82 hos.slimedragon.near 2,439
21a075b68b8fb9ff01942c1f052c2dec984d8a833191f29db700d7a298f5f624 vadim.near 2,436
ffef0feba237d91dd78c61c41e692456afc757ce55eb04e6ba374494ccd14505 vote.mob.near 2,436
spareuni818.near N/A 1,617
0df78d0bbb77808cc8bb7afba092e184dd0cf8caf3e89af2295ac62d95ee9d63 vinibarbosa.near 1,221

ROI

Total claimable rewards can be used to calculate a return on investment (ROI) by dividing the new NEAR locked by the claimable NEAR rewards. The ROI remains positive, but modest at 499%. Assuming an incentive budget of 280K, ROI would need to increase 4x to reach the critical target of 10M locked NEAR in three months.

Additional Near Locked as of 26th Jan '2026 103,508
Total Claimable NEAR Rewards as of 26th Jan '2026 20,755
ROI per NEAR 499%

Rewards Claimed Versus Total Claimable Rewards

Total claimable rewards sum up to 20,755 NEAR but only 43% of these rewards have been claimed, yet. This means that once users have locked their NEAR into House of Stake, they do not return to the platform to claim rewards.

On Chain Claimable NEAR Rewards as of 26th Jan '2026 20,755 NEAR
Claimed as of 26th Jan '2026 8,931 NEAR
% Claimed over Claimable rewards 43.0%

Insights

Retail vs Whales

Whales are defined here as users who have locked at least 25,000 NEAR into the House of Stake. Using this definition, 20 whales are currently participating in HoS.

As previously noted, incentives resulted in an additional 103,508 NEAR locked and 31 new participating accounts. While the number of accounts increased meaningfully (+9%), total NEAR locked grew by only +2.9% Of the 31 new accounts, only 2 qualify as whales under the definition above. The recent growth has been driven primarily by smaller holders rather than large holders.

Furthermore, the total NEAR locked in HoS represents less than 1% of total NEAR supply, providing additional evidence that large holders (whales) have yet to participate meaningfully in HoS. This highlights a key opportunity for the program: expanding participation among larger holders will be critical to increase total NEAR locked in HoS meaningfully.

Proposals to Drive Activity

A large portion of claimable NEAR rewards is yet to be claimed. One potential explanation for this is that users are not engaging with the HoS website to claim their rewards after locking their NEAR. Historically, user engagement with House of Stake has been closely tied to governance proposal activity.

As shown in the chart below, NEAR locking spikes in the periods leading up to proposal end dates. This correlated behavior makes sense; the more opportunity that is interesting to the ecosystem being routed through HoS, the more HoS adoption will occur. Should this correlation continue, high-value proposals will act as a key catalyst for growth and participation.

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To date, the following experiments have been observed:

  • Changes to NEAR locked with proposals, but absent incentives
  • Changes to NEAR locked absent proposals, with incentives

Changes to NEAR locked in the absence of proposals suggest that incentives alone are not effective at increasing NEAR locked. Recently, a proposal was introduced to establish a sustainable financing program for MPC node infrastructure. This creates a period over the coming weeks during which both proposals and incentives are active simultaneously. This period can be used to evaluate whether incentives drive incremental growth in NEAR locked beyond what is observed during proposal-only periods.

The hypothesis is that proposals act as a catalyst, giving users a reason to engage with House of Stake. Incentives are expected to increase NEAR locked only when paired with an active proposal, meaning incentives amplify proposal-driven demand rather than creating demand on their own. Gauntlet will continue to monitor response to incentives during this period with active proposals in HoS.

Next Steps

  • Gauntlet to revisit program effectiveness and methods of improvement with the Near Foundation and the House of Stake owners to inform program strategy. This includes efforts to understand feedback from larger holders better to increase whale adoption.
  • Gauntlet will continue to publish the performance of this campaign monthly to the forums.
1 Like
29

Thank you for the analysis. I would like to add some additional context that may be relevant when interpreting the recent changes in NEAR locked.

First, the recent increase in the number of delegates was largely driven by a task initiated by the NEAR Foundation for NEAR Legion degens.. As a result, this increase appears to be campaign-driven rather than organic growth caused by incentives.

Second, I believe that a meaningful and sustained increase in staked veNEAR is unlikely until House of Stake demonstrates a higher level of decentralization. At the moment, governance influence and operational control appear to be highly concentrated around the NEAR Foundation. This concentration may limit the effectiveness of both incentives and proposals in generating long-term, trust-based participation.

For these reasons, changes in NEAR locked during this period should be interpreted cautiously, as they may reflect coordinated actions rather than structural demand for participation in House of Stake.

3 Likes
30

Very helpful thank you for the analysis.

I’m new to House of Stake. Recently I locked and staked a meaningful amount of NEAR and stNEAR (meaningful for a regular person, anyway). I’ve supported NEAR for years and I’ve never stopped stacking. I also delegate across a range of validators, and I’ve got mates who’ve done the same for a long time.

Bear with me I’m a bit tired but here’s my main point:

It can sometimes feel like NEAR doesn’t fully embrace the “buy, stack, and stake” crowd. There’s a big, untapped group of supporters like me who aren’t builders or devs. We’re busy living life, we’re not trying to become contributors in a technical sense but we’re committed long-term and want to support the ecosystem from the sidelines in a meaningful way.

With HOS, I only moved over a fraction the portion that made sense for me to unstake, withdraw, and lock with you. But I genuinely think you’d attract a lot more capital (and more long-term whales) if incentives and onboarding felt more open and community-friendly.

Related to that: I’d love to see more endorsed delegates and a clearer path for new delegates to join. When it feels like an insider “boys club,” it can be off-putting even for people who have plenty of tokens and want to bring others in. For example, my friends would delegate to me… but if there’s no realistic path to becoming an endorsed/recognized delegate, what’s the point?

That’s my two sats.

Much love to everyone building and shipping — I appreciate every person who makes NEAR better day after day. Keep going.

1 Like
31

Yeah, most of this so called NEAR-Legions Degens is driven by the task, and would unstake if they had finished it, without actually participating in forums or any form of discussions.

The task only encourage ppl to “Delegates your veNEAR, or announce oneself to be the delegates”, where most of this degens opt the first options.

Currently we have less than 1% coversion for this activities for new delegates to speak out on behalf of the House of Stake, but i hope it would be a good step for a better decentralizations on NEAR.

I really don’t like what it sounds like, but I really want clarity proposal needs to be discussed first before the actual send as Proposal, or there are certain metrics/ kuorum that need to be fulfilled for a proposal to be announced.

Ill be learn more regardings this matters, i might missed out many things on HoS.

2 Likes