Key Principles for HoS Constitutional Documents and our Roadmap in 2026

[AK_HoG]

Today, we’re kicking off forum discussions around the ratification of the HoS Constitutional Documents.

While the individual policies are still being drafted, I want to start by sharing the key principles that apply to all constitutional documents. These principles shaped how every document is being designed and should serve as a shared foundation going forward.

Understanding, and aligning on, these principles is important, not just for the current ratification process, but for how we evolve HoS governance in 2026 and make future decisions together.

Please read on below, and join the community AMA to discuss them together!

Constitutional Docs AMA #1: Key Principles

Date: Thursday, January 15, 2026
Time: 7:00 PM UTC / 2:00 PM EST / 8:00 PM CET
Link: https://meet.google.com/ydx-tsrh-yih

Come prepared with your questions and comments!

Key Principles

1) Why Constitutional Documents?

The purpose of House of Stake’s (HoS) constitutional documents is to:

• Provide transparency into how HoS operates
• Make governance accessible and inclusive for new stakeholders joining the ecosystem
• Clearly define the rights and responsibilities of all HoS participants
• Learn from past DAO failures, lack of clarity leads to mistrust, governance disputes, and distracts from solving real problems
• Align on a shared North Star, ensuring we’re aligned before facing high-stakes decisions

2) Enforceability and Governance Debt

Once any constitutional document, including the Constitution and the PVP, is ratified by a token holder vote, it is reviewed by the HoS Director and the Security Council. Upon a successful review, the document comes into force immediately.

That means everything written in these documents must be enforceable from day one. Because of this, we are deliberately avoiding governance debt, i.e. putting rules or structures into constitutional documents that we are not yet ready to run, enforce, or support in practice.

As a result, the documents proposed for ratification now are designed around what we can realistically enforce today, not what we might ideally want to enforce in the future.

This is why you’ll see current governance bodies and transitional limitations reflected in the documents, including:

• The current mandate of House of Stake (as specified here)
• Existing governance bodies and roles, such as Endorsed Delegates and Screening Committee members

Of course, all constitutional documents can be amended via a Tokenholder vote, following the defined proposal process, provided we are ready to operationalize them. Any such updates, for example, moving to a fully community-elected Screening Committee, can be proposed and re-ratified once we are ready to enforce them in practice.

3) The Status of HoS Decentralization

This is how voting power at HoS is distributed today (Jan 9, 2026):

Note that

• 355 delegates are registered at HoS
• only 5 delegates can take over simple majority
• only 9 delegates can take over supermajority
• one of the 5 largest delegates is sufficient to outweigh 340 HoS other delegates of in total 355. Even when considering only participants with non zero voting power, that single delegate still exceeds the bottom 222 participants combined.
• in other words, even if 340 delegates agree to a proposal, only one delegate would be enough to block it

While stake-based voting establishes a decentralized decision-making mechanism at HoS, the current distribution of voting power is not yet capture-resistant, even assuming all delegates act with the best intentions.
This is an important reality to acknowledge.

4) Progressive Decentralization at House of Stake

Today, House of Stake is not fully independent.
The NEAR Foundation (NF) can still impose certain limitations, such as:

• Defining the HoS mandate
• Appointing and funding the Head of Governance (HoG) role

We’re currently running stakeholder interviews with core ecosystem participants (led by @jacklaing , @jlwaugh , and @lane ) to understand expectations around HoS.

One thing is already very clear from this feedback: The real issue is not our legal structure, whether HoS has a treasury, or even the constitutional documents themselves.
The real issue is trust.
Do NEAR stakeholders trust that HoS can produce good decisions in the best interest of NEAR? Looking at the current status of decentralization at HoS (see section 3)?

5) Solving Real Problems

2026 is the year HoS needs to prove its value to the NEAR ecosystem.
Key questions we need to answer together:

• Can HoS support real, high-impact decision-making?
• Can we build a system that’s robust and attack-resistant?
• Can we attract locked NEAR and claim legitimate decision power?

My goal is to build our governance “muscles” by solving real problems. Imagine a NEAR decision that needs something more nuanced than a simple yes/no vote offered by our current voting tools. Do we say, “Not available, come back in a year”? Or do we commit to supporting it and shape our priorities around that need?

I strongly prefer the second.

Our 2026 priorities will be driven by real decision-making use cases, while continuing to avoid governance debt. Let’s focus on work and proposals that matter.

6) Towards Full Independence

As Head of Governance, the mission I agreed on with the NEAR Foundation is to make House of Stake fully independent within 12 months, assuming we successfully build the required structures and trust.

There is no fixed or “hard” checklist for independence yet. However, Lane and I are actively working with NF and core nodes on upcoming season announcements that will clarify:

• What NF expects HoS to develop
• How HoS’s mandate for the upcoming season will be shaped
• Concrete steps NF expects HoS to take toward independence
• Which use cases we’ll focus on, and why

The goal here is clarity and alignment on both sides.

What to Do Next

• Ask questions and share feedback on these key principles in this thread
• Join the community AMA on Thursday, January 15, 2026
• Spread the word about HoS and encourage community members to participate in the discussions and upcoming votes

Looking forward to the discussion!

[Dacha]

@AK_HoG

The current mandate of House of Stake (as specified here)

Thank you for sharing this in a standalone topic and for clearly outlining the current thinking it’s helpful for alignment and for having a substantive discussion.

That said, I’d like to raise several fundamental questions and concerns regarding the mandate, its legitimacy, and how governance is functioning in practice today.

If House of Stake is operating under a relatively narrow, initial mandate, what is the underlying rationale for transferring NDC funds into HoS at this stage?

More broadly, the mandate itself appears to have been defined through internal alignment rather than open ecosystem consent. As far as I understand, it has not been formally discussed, agreed upon, or ratified by tokenholders. If legitimacy is a core goal, shouldn’t reaffirming or updating the mandate through a transparent, community-driven process be a priority?

At minimum, I would strongly suggest that this mandate should not be communicated as final or settled. Treating it as such risks locking in assumptions that have not yet earned broad legitimacy.

I’m also concerned about the idea of fixing current structures, charters, and governance bodies in constitutional documents. Cementing today’s setup , especially transitional or NF-dependent arrangements does not feel like a path toward decentralization. Instead, it risks formalizing the status quo.

Constitutional documents should enable evolution, not freeze early-stage power structures that we already know are imperfect and temporary.

While stake concentration among delegates is a real issue, the focus on voting-power distribution screenshots misses the core problem.

The more fundamental issue is that effective control currently sits with centralized gatekeeping bodies: the Screening Committee, the Security Council, and the HoS Foundation - all of which are fully or heavily controlled by the NEAR Foundation.

As long as these bodies determine which proposals are allowed to reach a vote, decentralization at the veNEAR holder level is secondary. A concrete example: more than 10 proposals have been stalled for over four months without ever reaching a vote not because tokenholders rejected them, but because they were never admitted to the process by NF.

In this context, statements like “only 5 delegates are enough for a simple majority” are largely academic. Especially when several of those top delegates are affiliated with NF, and when the real bottleneck exists before voting even begins.

The statement that “House of Stake is not yet fully independent” is accurate but it understates the situation.

NF does not merely retain residual influence; it actively exercises control over what progresses and what does not, including which proposals are advanced and which are effectively blocked. This is not a temporary edge case — it is the current operating reality.

Until this changes, HoS cannot be meaningfully described as autonomous.

@AK_HoG

We’re currently running stakeholder interviews with core ecosystem participants (led by @jacklaing , @jlwaugh , and @lane ) to understand expectations around HoS.

I respectfully disagree with the claim that the real issue is trust. Trust is a consequence, not the root cause.

The deeper issue is structural incentives. A significant number of ecosystem stakeholders receive funding from NF and are therefore rationally resistant to decentralization. Genuine decentralization would shift decision-making power — and budget authority — away from NF and into HoS, which is understandably perceived as a risk.

A simple stress test makes this clear: try initiating a serious conversation with @illia about moving NEAR DevHub under HoS governance. The reaction reveals far more about the current limits of decentralization than any voting-power chart.

It seems clear that these dynamics are well understood by leadership. However, from the outside, the current posture appears to prioritize caution and preservation of the status quo over openly addressing these constraints.

That may be understandable at an individual level, but it does limit HoS’s ability to function as an independent governance institution in practice.

Yes , HoS can attract locked NEAR and earn legitimate decision-making authority. But only if it is genuinely decentralized and operates under a mandate that is openly discussed, clearly defined, and ratified by tokenholders.

As long as HoS functions de facto as a subsidiary or extension of NF, rather than an independent governance body, there is little incentive for the ecosystem to commit stake or treat its decisions as sovereign.

Until proposal gatekeeping, mandate definition, and operational control are meaningfully decentralized away from NF-controlled structures, HoS risks being perceived fairly or not as a managed governance layer rather than an independent one.

NF is not even able to put an initiative to create an independent media outlet up for a vote. Instead, we continue to see chat moderation, message deletions, and active censorship.

This clearly suggests that the issue is not a lack of trust or immature processes, but a reluctance to relinquish control over the narrative and the information space.

Under these conditions, discussions about mature decentralization and independent governance feel premature.

I’m raising these points because I believe House of Stake can become something much stronger. But that requires naming these realities clearly and addressing them directly, rather than softening them in language.

[AK_HoG]

Thanks @Dacha for your comments.
They deserve a proper answer, please join the community call on Thursday.