I’m going to post the responses that @akrtws_TE-Academy and @eleventh19 previously shared, in the interest of time, so that the community has time to review them before the AMA call later today.
Angela
PDF format: angela responses.pdf (280.4 KB)
Angela Kreitenweis
08.10.2025
Essay questions
We expect responses to these questions to be 400+ words each.
Response Q1/Essay – Angela Kreitenweis
Q1:
As the Near House of Stake scales, you’ll need to increase our operational capacity without compromising the principles of decentralized governance. Today, many DAOs struggle to scale without a single influential party (Foundation/delegate/service provider/etc.) or significant support from the core team. Please describe your strategic vision for this challenge. How would you design a framework that balances the need for accountability, legal compliance, operational structure, and efficiency with the decentralized nature of our community? Do you rely on service providers, subDAOs/committees, contributors, sub-entities, incubated companies, or something else? Please support your answer with specific examples from DAOs or other relevant organizational structures.
Thanks for asking these great questions!
Before diving in, I’d like to ground this conversation in a few shared definitions. These definitions are based on what I know at this stage and might evolve as I learn more, but they help make sure we’re all speaking the same language about what we’re building and why.
What is our shared North Star?
The goal of NEAR is to be blockchain for AI, the platform powering the agentic future. NEAR is the execution layer for AI-native apps—enabling agents to own assets, make decisions, and transact freely across networks. For the rest of this discussion, let’s take that as our collective North Star. Every governance mechanism, incentive structure, and funding decision should be judged by one simple question: Does this get NEAR closer to that North Star future?
What is the House of Stake (HoS)?
The House of Stake is the parliament of the NEAR ecosystem, the place where all stakeholders come together, where power is exercised transparently, with accountability, and toward long-term alignment.
At its core, HoS is how we transform individual perspectives into collective intelligence. It’s built on:
- Mechanisms to aggregate stakeholder input toward the best possible collective choice,
- Checks and balances to ensure no single group can dominate, and
- Technical security and incentive alignment to protect against malicious or misaligned actors.
Together, this is how we decide, in Illia’s words, “if some action gets you (us) closer to that North Star or not, and out of all the possible actions you can take and the capacity you can take at any moment, is this the best action?”
Who are the NEAR stakeholders?
Let’s define a NEAR stakeholder to be any individual, group, or organization that
a) adds value or capital to the NEAR ecosystem, and
b) has an interest in, or is affected by, the outcomes, decisions, or activities of the ecosystem’s systems, projects, or organizations.
This includes, but is not limited to:
- Token holders, investors and stakers (individuals or entities that provide financial capital to the ecosystem).
- Validators (participants responsible for producing blocks and maintaining network consensus).
- NEAR protocol builders (contributors developing and maintaining the NEAR core protocol e.g., the NEAR One team and other contributors).
- NEAR product teams, (internal or external teams e.g., NEAR Intents, Chain Signatures, NEAR Mobile) working to advance NEAR’s product-focused strategy.
- Product end-users (human or agentic users, institutions, corporates, individuals, who interact with the NEAR core protocol or NEAR products, and user-owned AI systems).
In the context of this work, I define:
Type A Stakeholders (1) as those who add financial capital to the NEAR ecosystem, for example, by buying, holding and staking NEAR tokens.
Type B Stakeholders (2–5) as those who contribute intellectual or operational capital, such as ensuring secure consensus (validators), building and maintaining the protocol and successful products (protocol and product teams), or generating product and network demand (end-users).
Type A stakeholders typically buy and hold (and vote-lock) NEAR tokens, while Type B stakeholders typically receive and spend/sell NEAR tokens. This difference is important because it highlights why we should further develop HoS’ design, as discussed in my response to Question 3/Essay.
What’s the role of the Head of Governance (HoG) at HoS?
The role of the HoG is to build clarity, trust, and capability in how the ecosystem makes decisions. It comes down to four guiding questions:
- Do voters have the context, data, and information they need to act in NEAR’s best interest - today, in 3, 6, and 12 months?
- Are stakeholder voices represented in a way that’s clear, proportional, and trustworthy?
- How can the DAO build and support a reliable community of capable decision-makers - and how can contributors trust the system in return? (This includes safe decision-making mechanisms, robust tools, and aligned incentives.)
- Finally, how do we measure whether our decisions are working - and improve based on evidence?
With these shared definitions in mind, I’ll now move into my responses to the core questions for Head of Governance candidates.
Q1:
Scaling decentralized governance is one of the hardest (and most exciting) challenges we face in DAOs today. At the House of Stake (HoS) we aim to increase operational capacity without becoming a central point of control. Think of HoS as a living parliament, combining structured operations with open participation.
Here’s how I’d approach it:
Understanding HoS Operations
At a high level, HoS operations let the NEAR parliament run properly. Each workstream, or “mandate”, follows a clear operational cycle:
- Understand what is needed by collecting and surfacing stakeholder voices.
- Propose solutions through open calls or stakeholder proposals.
- Decide on the best action using voting mechanisms to find consensus.
- Execute the decision (disburse funds, deliver outcomes or enable third parties to deliver, and evaluate results).
This creates a shared rhythm for decision-making across the different mandates.
Structuring the Mandates
I’d structure HoS operations (and research) around the four HoS mandates:
- Economic Governance (managing the NEAR protocol and product-level parameters (treasury, inflation, fee switch, sustainability programs).
- Technical Governance (topics like MPC signers for chain signatures, or NEPs escalated to HoS and can’t be resolved purely via GitHub).
- Build Legitimacy (growing the amount of NEAR and veNEAR in the system, and ensuring a broad, credible base of participation).
- Grow Engagement and Ecosystem Health (activating decentralized participation in governance and across the wider NEAR ecosystem).
Each mandate requires different expertise, involves different risks, and impacts NEAR’s long-term stability in different ways.
So, their degree of decentralization will vary accordingly.
Example 1: Mandate Economic Governance
This is a huge mandate: evolving the NEAR token economy to serve our North Star.
Economic decisions, on the supply and demand side of tokens, can’t be taken in isolation. Many times, they sit at the intersection of two competing goals: growth and stability (see Q3). To navigate this, this mandate needs deep, data-informed expertise.
A good analogy is Open Source Observer’s role for Optimism. They are tasked with providing an open source data pipeline to power the insights behind Retro Funding. Though technically a key contributor, their work is open-source, transparent, and built for the ecosystem. In other words: centralized in practice for capability, decentralized in outcome through openness and replication.
For HoS, I’d take a similar approach, convene stakeholders around 6-12 month goals, open RFPs for proposed solutions, and then vote on the best action and best delivery partner.
If early processes prove too slow, I’m pragmatic: we can start with “good enough” solutions, like a committee to select delivery partners, and gradually decentralize over time. The key is to build momentum without sacrificing integrity.
Example 2: Mandate Engagement & Ecosystem Health
To illustrate, consider Funding the Commons, an initiative focused on public goods infrastructure. They run hackathons, residencies, and ecosystem events, partnering with organizations like Protocol Labs, Filecoin Foundation, Octant, and NEAR Foundation.
For HoS, this kind of partnership model is ideal. To establish NEAR’s presence in the AI sector, we’ll need strategic partners, like AI communities, industry alliances, conferences, and universities. They can do what internal teams cannot: attract talent, grow visibility, and build credibility in the AI community.
If NEAR’s goal is to become the blockchain for AI, then the community must become the home of AI-natives. External partners can help us achieve that more effectively than building large internal teams.
Example 3: AI Governance Tooling
Building AI Governance Tooling is a special case. Here, HoS functions like a product team, building governance infrastructure for ourselves. It’s an in-house effort where the HoS is both the developer and the end user.
In the next 12 months, the goal should be to build MVPs, small, testable components like AI delegates that help scale decision-making. From there, we can iterate toward decentralization: imagine mandate-specific delegates, or multiple AI systems built by different NEAR stakeholder groups competing for trust and adoption.
In a nutshell
HoS operations should be structured, not centralized. Wherever we can decentralize safely, we should. Wherever centralization is required for capability, it must come with transparency, and open paths to decentralization.
Response Q2/Essay – Angela Kreitenweis
Q2:
The NEAR ecosystem is complex. In addition to the NEAR proof of stake blockchain, there’s also NEAR Intents, Chain Signatures, and AI infrastructure products, and there will likely be other product offerings in the future. One way of describing House of Stake is as the “central bank of the NEAR ecosystem,” in the sense that HoS is intended to manage economic policy not just of the core NEAR protocol but, in fact, of all of these other products as well. This includes things like blockchain issuance/inflation, the current 0.5% subsidy that flows into the treasury.near community treasury contract, or turning on a “fee switch” for other NEAR products. The initial House of Stake treasury contains ~3.5M NEAR (~$10M USD present value). What’s your vision for the use of these funds and how budgeting should occur, and, more broadly, what’s your vision for how HoS can achieve economic sustainability through acting as a “central bank,” along the lines described here? What sort of economic policy should NEAR target, and how can HoS help us achieve this?
The idea of the House of Stake (HoS) as a “crypto central bank” managing the NEAR token economy combines the analytical precision of corporate finance and business modeling with the macro-level responsibility of a nation’s FIAT monetary policy. Two worlds that normally don’t meet.
This is genuinely new territory for any crypto ecosystem, and it will likely take years, even a generation, to master. We don’t have all the answers yet, and that’s okay. We can already build on the lessons that DAOs and protocols have learned so far.
A Crypto Central Bank: What We’ve Learned So Far
A useful framing for the role of a crypto central bank comes from Kensuke Ito’s 2024 survey on cryptoeconomics, which outlines two key goals:
- Building consensus for decentralization: Instead of delegating authority to a few centralized entities, these systems gather and aggregate information from distributed peers and produce a trusted, shared outcome (like NEAR’s Doomslug consensus).
- Designing token value for autonomy: Network participants act to maximize their expected rewards, but if those rewards come in tokens, then token value and incentive sufficiency become critical on both the supply and demand sides of the economy.
In short: good governance must secure both consensus and confidence. Those two forces are the foundation of any sustainable crypto economy. (I dive into more concrete examples of how this plays out in my answer to Q3.)
Making HoS Sustainable
Like traditional central banks, HoS could aim to fund its operations through the income generated by its monetary activities, and top up the current 0.5% of annual inflation rate.
We could explore models such as:
- Staking a portion of the treasury to generate yield, similar to how ENS DAO stakes part of its ETH holdings with providers like Lido.
- Investing a portion of reserves in yield-bearing assets, following models like Frax, which leverages collateral reserves for steady returns.
That said, these models depend on mature token economies like ETH and come with additional risk and complexity. So we need to be careful not to compromise NEAR’s liquidity or take on unnecessary exposure.
Long-term, I’d tie HoS’s financial sustainability directly to NEAR’s success. As NEAR grows, achieves stronger product-market fit, and grows protocol revenues, the HoS operational budget should scale proportionally. It should reflect the health and momentum of the NEAR ecosystem (see also my answer to “What is your single most important quantitative or qualitative metric for determining whether House of Stake is successful?”)
How Budgeting Should Work
Budgeting isn’t just an accounting process, it’s the heartbeat of governance.
- Budgets should be structured around HoS mandates, since each has distinct priorities, costs, and time horizons (as I outlined in my Q1 answer).
- More importantly, budgeting should become a key moment of coordination, when the NEAR community aligns on shared goals, tradeoffs, and metrics of success.
DAOs have done an amazing job making it easy for anyone to submit proposals. But what’s often missing is the shared debate, the context-setting moment where we align on the big picture before diving into individual ideas.
In representative democracies, citizens first come together to discuss the bigger questions:
What’s working? What’s broken? Where do we want to go next? (yes, call it North Star).
Only after that they elect delegates to execute the vision and shape the details. Finally, an executional layer makes sure decisions are carried out. That first step, the broad, contextual debate, is what’s missing in most DAOs today. Instead, hyper-detailed proposals appear at random times, and token holders are expected to react without the necessary context or preparation.
I’d like to change that.
Imagine a Governance Day at every NEARCON, a dedicated session where the community reviews progress, debates priorities, and sets high-level budget directions for the next cycle. It would turn governance into something visible, participatory, and tangible.
If we truly believe that decentralized AI can outperform centralized systems, then we should make decentralized governance itself a living experience, one that anyone joining NEAR can see, feel, and be part of.
Response Q3/Essay – Angela Kreitenweis
Q3:
Please review the HoS design, and our stated mandate. Do you believe that this design accomplishes our goals/mandate? Why or why not? What would you change if you could? Do we have all of the necessary checks and balances in place? What additional checks and balances, if any, would you implement among NEAR Foundation, the House of Stake Foundation, the screening committee, the endorsed delegates, the security council, and token holders/delegates? Bear in mind that: 1. The House of Stake Foundation cannot bloat with hiring and become a second NEAR Foundation; 2. The system must empower experts with long term budgets who can see the execution of work through multiple iterations to enable optimization; and 3. Delegates cannot be made to vote on policy without context and funding decisions without clear objectives.
I think the current HoS design is a step in the right direction for NEAR. It clearly incorporates lessons from the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC), particularly around incentives for participation, greater transparency in funding decisions, and more active support for DeFi initiatives to stimulate economic activity. Those are big improvements.
But if I could change one thing, it would be stakeholder coverage.
At the moment, the HoS design focuses primarily on Type A stakeholders: token holders. This makes sense given the system’s veNEAR-based structure. However, it unintentionally leaves out Type B stakeholders, the builders, protocol teams, AI product developers, and even end-users who create enormous value for the ecosystem, but don’t necessarily hold and vote-lock large amounts of NEAR.
That’s not just a fairness issue, it’s a strategic one. Without incorporating these perspectives, HoS risks missing the full picture required to deliver on its economic mandate.
Why this matters
Take a concrete example. In February 2025, NEAR Foundation launched the $20M NEAR AI Agent Fund to accelerate development of autonomous, verifiable AI agents on NEAR. It’s a great start! But to put it in context: Google alone plans to invest around $75 billion in 2025 to expand its AI and cloud infrastructure, and that’s just one branch of its AI stack. The competition is intense, and the window to gain meaningful market share for decentralized AI is short. From the perspective of a product or AI team, this is the “now or never” moment to launch and scale. Every step toward product–market fit will take real persistence, and significant funding. At the same time, there’s a structural challenge: tokens used for early-stage funding often re-enter circulation quickly, which increases supply and can put short-term pressure on the market.
Meanwhile,Type A stakeholders, large token holders and veNEAR participants, may prioritize stability. For them, predictable monetary policy, lower inflation, and mechanisms like token buybacks or fee burns are the ideal path forward, as the proposals here and here suggest. Their logic is sound: 60M+ new NEAR tokens minted annually (under current parameters) can dilute value, and managing supply gives markets confidence.
These two perspectives, growth vs. stability, both serve NEAR’s mission, but they pull in opposite directions. Finding the right balance can’t emerge if only one stakeholder group holds decision-making power. This is especially true for protocol and product teams, NEAR’s interface to end users, who gather most valuable insights into what it takes for NEAR to compete, and win, against centralized players.
The way forward
We don’t need to rewrite the veNEAR contracts or cancel the HoS launch. Instead, we can iterate toward inclusivity. For example: Introduce a Type B “veto” or advisory vote, similar to Optimism’s Optimistic Approvals, ensuring that builders and product teams can flag when a proposal might undermine growth or ecosystem health.
Over time, we can experiment with ways to quantify Type B value creation (define measurable contributions e.g., network usage, agent adoption, protocol innovation), and/or develop Governance AI tools that help surface tradeoffs.
Short Form Questions
We expect responses to these questions to be < 250 words each.
Response Q1/Short Form – Angela Kreitenweis
Q1:
DAOs often fail to put the right decision-makers in charge of key decisions. How would you design a governance system that ensures specialized knowledge is weighted correctly for critical decisions, while still upholding the principles of decentralized consensus?
First, I see a mandate-specific network forming around each HoS workstream, contributors, domain experts, and even AI tools that support decision-making (see Q1/Essay). From there, we can add mechanisms that make sure real expertise drives key decisions, such as
a) Mandate-specific delegates
Delegates should focus on areas they actually understand, economics, protocol upgrades, ecosystem health and so on. We’re better off having five deeply knowledgeable economists vote on HoS monetary policy than a hundred participants guessing. Likewise, core developers should guide technical upgrades, not those unfamiliar with the code. And crucially, these delegates aren’t making decisions in a vacuum. They’re executing on the broad direction and priorities that come out of public debate (see my Q2 answer). That way, their decisions are grounded in community consensus.
b) Incentive alignment
Evaluating proposals takes real time and effort, and it should be rewarded. Delegates who make thoughtful, data-driven calls should share in NEAR’s success, while weak participation or bad calls should have visible consequences.
Response Q2/Short Form – Angela Kreitenweis
Q2:
In this role, how would you balance your personal principles with the NEAR Foundation’s value of pragmatism over perfection? Please give a real-world example of how you’ve made a pragmatic concession to achieve a greater goal.
As a researcher at GovXS, I’ve seen firsthand how fragile governance systems can be when voting mechanisms aren’t designed with rigor. But as a founder of TE Academy, I also learned that sometimes momentum matters more than perfection. At TE Academy, we built a merit-based NFT system to reward contributors, one group being our study group hosts. We needed a fair way to approve achievements so hosts could mint their NFTs. Ideally, we would have built a robust impact-measurement model… but quantifying a study group’s contribution turned out to be incredibly complex. So we made a pragmatic choice for this type of NFTs: we introduced fixed rewards with mutual peer approvals, based on community consent. It wasn’t the most technically elegant system, but it worked, it was transparent, trusted, and fit the scale of our early community. At the same time, we didn’t compromise on what truly mattered for the total system: security and credibility. We took extra time to flesh out our minting process, smart contract design and safeguard the core NFT infrastructure, because that was the foundation of TE Academy’s reputation.
That experience taught me a simple rule I still follow: move fast where it’s safe to iterate, but protect the parts that carry the community’s trust.
Response Q3/Short Form – Angela Kreitenweis
Q3:
What is your single most important quantitative or qualitative metric for determining whether House of Stake is successful? How would you use this metric to prove to the community that HoS is working as intended?
If I had to pick one metric, it would be PMF users, real users due to product-market fit, whether agentic, automated, or human, who interact with NEAR because it genuinely solves a problem for them. That’s the shared North Star across the whole ecosystem. Everything else, TVL, transaction counts, even veNEAR governance participation, should ultimately serve that outcome. We don’t want inflated, artificial numbers. We want adoption that comes from real product-market fit.
veNEAR participation can be a useful sub-metric in the meantime. It tells us whether stakeholders are motivated to engage and help govern the system, especially while user adoption is still growing. But we need to read these signals correctly:
- User growth without veNEAR increase may indicate users trust the system’s direction. That’s healthy.
- veNEAR increase without user growth may indicate governance is becoming self-referential. That’s a warning sign.
Ultimately, successful governance should make itself felt in the real economy. User growth should affect the HoS’ budget, funding better operations, research, and long-term capacity. That positive feedback loop is the clearest proof that HoS is working as intended (see Q2).
Response Q4/Short Form – Angela Kreitenweis
Q4:
For House of Stake, growing the amount of locked veNEAR is absolutely critical to success. How would you encourage large NEAR holders to delegate their tokens?
To grow locked veNEAR, we first need to understand what drives, and what blocks, large holders from participating.
For many large investors, it’s not a question of interest but of compliance and risk. Some simply can’t participate in DAO governance under their current legal structures. For others, it’s personally risky to be seen as taking an active governance role. Uniswap recognized this early and launched DUNI, a Delaware-based entity designed to give delegates a legally sound framework for participating in governance. We should take the same approach: evaluate what’s needed, without ideological blinders.
Response Q5/Short Form – Angela Kreitenweis
Q5:
Do you believe the voices of small holders should carry the same weight as those of large holders, or should decision-making naturally prioritize major stakeholders? In concrete terms, how should we balance these two groups?
I don’t think this question is really about small versus large holders, it’s about how well stakeholder perspectives are represented in decision-making. As discussed in my Q3/Essay response, the real challenge is making sure the system reflects the voices and incentive alignment of all key stakeholder groups.
From there, we should iterate on the current HoS design and explore decision- or mandate-specific voting models. For some areas, a one-person-one-vote system could reinforce broad legitimacy. For others, weighted voting or veto rights for specific stakeholder groups might make more sense.