SVRN’s Take on the Sovereign Fund
Please note that I am the CEO of SVRN, a public company that holds NEAR on our balance sheet and strives to grow adoption of the NEAR network and product set. We are token holders with a fiduciary duty to our shareholders, and we are also operators who depend on the network staying secure and well capitalized. What follows is my articulation of why we support Illia’s direction towards a sovereign wealth model for NEAR, and preliminary thoughts on the controls it requires to be successful.
Over the past ~18 months the market has rewarded buyback and burn as a short-term mechanic, but I haven’t seen a forward model that tests how it holds up five years out. Illia made the counter-argument in his post and I agree with it: the same value put to productive use keeps supporting public goods, and the base underneath it stays whole.
The precedents cited in the origin post are where I’d start on design. Norway’s fund has compounded through decades and every change of government. Parliament sets the mandate. NBIM manages the money under an investment policy anyone can read, every holding is public, and a fiscal rule caps what the state can take out at the fund’s expected real return, which sits near 3%. That arrangement, where the people setting parameters can’t move the money and the public can check both, has held up under governments that disagreed about a lot.
NEAR has already run a small version of the idea to fund public goods. The Validator Support Program pays long-tail validators a set dollar figure which matches the unit of account in their cost structure. The fund takes the same lesson and generalizes it to the rest of the network’s public goods. Starting it from the treasury the protocol already holds, before revenue or emissions move, is the right size for a first experiment.
SVRN’s support for the live system depends on the domains below being defined before the first milestone, and staying transparent and independently verifiable after it. My team has operated custody and security programs inside regulated financial institutions, experience that has informed how we grouped these:
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Investment mandate and policy.
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Custody and key management.
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Risk framework.
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Reporting, transparency and verifiability.
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Public goods funding policy and governance.
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Accountability and failure modes.
If this moves from concept to practice, we’d also want to look at which revenue streams are in scope at the start. Intents fee-switch flows and NEAR AI inference payments behave differently enough that the answer changes the fund’s volatility profile. The success criteria for each milestone should be well defined before emissions get redirected, plus a stated floor on economic security while inflation steps down and validators migrate to the new payout model. The last one is where yield comes from in the early phase, since the acceptable counterparty classes end up driving most of the risk framework above.
We’ll engage through House of Stake, and if a controls workstream comes out of this discussion we will happily contribute and offer to help to lead it.