Thank you very much for all of the feedback and comments on our House of Stake (HoS) proposal. It is great to see this level of attention and care for NEAR governance.
Gauntlet would first like to address the concerns around the existence of any committees within the proposed governance framework. We want to outline from a first-principles approach why committees can be a net positive for governance and then dive into how these committees were structured to solve the problems with the NDC.
We will start by addressing some of the lessons learned from the NDC and how this system attempts to improve NEAR governance. The NDC had a large number of councils and regular elections, which decreased active governance participation and made governance attacks easier. Additionally, the NDC bodies had explicit control over fund allocations. So even when the community became aware of the pain points in the inherent design of the structure, there was a lengthy and expensive process to limit them.
This new framework looks to directly accommodate governance fatigue, which is evidently a significant problem for DAOs and societies at large. Committees can function as a filter for governance to ensure the active delegates are only engaged when it matters most. Second, the most effective governance systems inside and outside of the crypto industry typically utilize both delegate representatives and committees to have experts make decisions, who are nominated at the very least to help aid governance.
There seems to be some confusion about the responsibilities of the two committees our proposal introduces, and we would like to clarify.
The first committee is a security council comprising the Near Foundation and core protocol experts such as NEAR One, with no elections. This committee can only approve major network upgrades and oversee protocol development and security but will not spend any ecosystem funds.
The second committee is the screening council, which can only increase the quorum and voter approval % required for a proposal to pass. It is important to note that the screening committee cannot allocate any funds for governance and cannot veto any proposals; it just makes it harder for “bad proposals” to pass. This function is critical while bootstrapping a governance ecosystem, making it easier for delegates to avoid governance fatigue and helping the DAO avoid governance attacks while bootstrapping delegations. Again, the role of the screening committee is not to be gatekeepers but to aid in governance and efficient funding, it cannot unilaterally veto any proposal.
In response to some community feedback around ensuring the committees are effective and do not reproduce historical issues, a potential recommendation for improving the screening committee would be to implement a 1-year expiration clause. This would require the DAO at large to vote on renewing or restructuring the committee purely through governance. If the House of Stake DAO believes it is resistant to governance attacks and governance fatigue at that point, it can stop the screening committee and convert it to a standard quorum and a Yes % for proposals.
We also see a future where the community incorporates the use of AI agents in the HoS in the coming months to either screen proposals or act as delegates, which is in line with Illia’s vision of AI-driven governance. We expect to hear more on that very soon. Keen to hear thoughts on this from others.
The second main theme of feedback Gauntlet has observed relates to legacy staker compatibility for veNEAR voting. The current update is that Gauntlet and the NEAR community are actively working towards developing an additional mechanism to resolve this concern by allowing legacy stakers to select their validator and receive veNEAR, without requiring them to utilize LSTs or change their chosen validator. As we work to finalize the requirements and details of this mechanism we will provide updates to the the community for further feedback asap.