HSP-027: Remove the NEAR Developer Gas Rebate

Thanks everyone for the input so far. Let me provide more details.

Data sources

This is the most important piece. Unfortunately the only way to get precise rebate information I am aware of is to run a script against an archival node. Dune does not have exact information required, so the table in the original proposal is produced using this query. It tracks the maximum potential rebate, best effort estimate of the real rebate (subtracting some non-rebated gas burn), and the total number of unique contracts called in the time period. Even for an aggregate view across last 12 months it times out more often than not, so the best metric that I was able to collect for this time span is average per contract. For better understanding I dug into shorter time periods and will be sharing more detailed results for May (latest complete month) and October (anomalous number of unique contracts used). Let me know if you spot inaccuracies in the queries.

Global Contracts

Even if the developers come up with a sweep function they need to call it on hundreds of thousands of accounts to collect <1 milliNEAR from each. October last year was a month with 223,698 unique contracts called. 220,379 of them were XXXX.craft.tg, the most popular of them was called 35 times and accumulated at most 1.76 milliNEAR. They were all using global contract trading-zone-gc.tg, served 270,375 calls and accumulated no more than 34 NEAR. A trading app with 0.1 onchain TPS collected at most 1 NEAR per day. And to get that 34 NEAR developers would need to sweep 220k accounts - I am leaving to the reader to calculate the cost of it. Yes, more contracts is bad for the current rebate model.

Another important point, global contracts are normally deployed by users to the accounts they control. They have full access keys for those accounts and may have NEAR balance as well. They may frontrun the developers. And blindly sweeping full balance means stealing from them.

Also, above proves that global contracts are very much used.

Sharded Contracts

Sharded contracts use global contracts and have the same sweeping problem. It is a newer feature and is not widely used yet, although e.g. Intents team no longer writes non-sharded contracts at all. And for a good reason. Non-sharded contracts do not have future. They are stuck to a single shard and cannot be split if they reach the limit. There are 2 major scaling factors for contracts: TPS and storage. NEAR’s per shard TPS is pretty high and even the most used contracts are somewhat far from the limit at the moment. The storage is a very different story. Aurora uses 13.71 GB of storage and keeps growing. It is already so big that it has a dedicated shard just for it and it is getting close to the limit of what a single shard can handle. There is no way forward after that without using sharded contracts. intents.near is much younger, but grows much faster and is already at 9.20 GB. It was 8.18 GB last month. These contracts will have to migrate to sharded contracts very soon. And if you aim at any decent adoption you should stop writing non-sharded contracts today.

Per Contract rebates

Here is a per contract rebate query, sorted from the highest. Copying the first page for simplicity:

month account rebate_upper_bound_near rebate_estimate_near
2026-05-01 00:00:00 v2.jars.sweat 939.43006270111 787.979872472734
2026-05-01 00:00:00 claim.sweat 918.725359475307 805.875006924759
2026-05-01 00:00:00 game.hot.tg 542.078916925404 317.042112966482
2026-05-01 00:00:00 token.sweat 502.119100532959 224.708568736626
2026-05-01 00:00:00 v1.signer 469.843902440916 365.162099907591
2026-05-01 00:00:00 intents.near 469.320789061813 377.539174837087
2026-05-01 00:00:00 sweat.jwt.fast-auth.near 464.5463790268 444.625866326288
2026-05-01 00:00:00 dclv2.ref-labs.near 437.255989973556 364.721162714801
2026-05-01 00:00:00 aurora 421.574493122567 375.382979449951
2026-05-01 00:00:00 v2.ref-finance.near 415.459706971659 293.834488037747
2026-05-01 00:00:00 btc-connector.bridge.near 169.198345212573 158.434344913327
2026-05-01 00:00:00 wrap.near 165.430441359832 44.7704426868291
2026-05-01 00:00:00 pyth-oracle.near 130.048860388951 79.3190137882047
2026-05-01 00:00:00 fast-auth.near 117.607547544798 42.4552077882615
2026-05-01 00:00:00 17208628f84f5d6ad33f0da3bbbeb27ffcb398eac501a31bd6ad2011e36133a1 93.6357822830427 43.243143706957
2026-05-01 00:00:00 v2_1.omni.hot.tg 93.2815300155812 60.5213131141285
2026-05-01 00:00:00 jars.sweat 79.1509989355846 76.2506278872496
2026-05-01 00:00:00 aa-harvest-moon.near 66.8311706948639 38.6379776197929
2026-05-01 00:00:00 jwt.fast-auth.near 61.8963236802213 16.9227167640358
2026-05-01 00:00:00 usdt.tether-token.near 45.0789497614927 15.1470927248217
2026-05-01 00:00:00 zec.omft.near 36.3937466762795 12.0258513544999
2026-05-01 00:00:00 contract.wormhole_crypto.near 35.5286994260362 28.2870720479062
2026-05-01 00:00:00 meta-pool.near 33.1626912293811 26.4567127958578
2026-05-01 00:00:00 client-eth2.bridge.near 30.9572961636255 25.2719587685355
2026-05-01 00:00:00 firedrop.hot.tg 30.6172551920528 24.3794294986928

Only 14 contracts cleared 100 NEAR per month bar, 25 contracts got 30 NEAR or more. I am pretty sure none of them treats this as a meaningful revenue stream and for most of them I know it from talking to the teams.

You can find dex.intear.near at the page 2, row 40 with 8.5 NEAR rebate btw.

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