Firstly, I want to thank everyone here who was active, providing arguments pro or against the proposal. Thank you to validators who actually voted and expressed their opinion either on forum, TGs or X.
As we have seen the lack of participation and voting was a larger problem than substance of the proposal itself.
As vote came to conclusion, I want to reflect here and respond to some comments above.
1. I have previously experienced the challenges around validators participating in governance. We have clearly seen this again - with a number of validators explicitly avoided participating and when contacted confirmed that they can’t really vote either way due to their internal policy.
Near Digital Collective and House of Stake were originating from this understanding that a large set of validators are mostly service providers and not stake holders in the network.
2. As a person who designed current economic parameters I find the discourse quite ungrounded. The design had very different assumptions which have been invalidated since:
- Validators would have large holdings themself and use rewards to reinvest into ecosystem development - building and maintaining wallets, explorers and etc. It was based on what we saw in ‘18 in EOS and early Cosmos ecosystem. As we have seen this didn’t happen and professional validators are mostly service providers.
- Design of Economic security that required having fisherman and rewarding them to make sure that security of shards is high. This has been replace with stateless validation.
- Gas price and storage staking price - has been reduced 10x since mainnet.
Overall I think we all have better understanding that gas is not the right measure of value of decentralized permissionless networks. Bitcoin has no burning gas but is highly valuable. Check out our discussion with Sam @ Frax.
- The challenge has been without strong hypothesis around how economics of such system works it’s hard to do proper analysis, and as such discussion becomes more “vibe”. So far the only true stays that need to increase demand for token and reduce supply.
Also some responses to comments:
This is incorrect. Currently ~71m NEAR in liquid staking => which is ~12% of staked NEAR.
Also this logic doesn’t make sense - high inflation rate limits LST adoption. And all of the other DeFi infra like NEAR <> LST pools or lending NEAR are highly undesirable with high inflation because you need to beat 1/2 of the inflation rate with fees to justify deploying liquidity there.
This doesn’t make sense. 9% yield that is perceived as “no risk” as it’s in-protocol staking is effectively removes any need for people to take any risks and in turn reduced velocity of the capital to 0.
Talking to many holders who we tried to onboard into liquid staking previously - they effectively not willing to move capital given the current state even to liquid staking as it requires taking additional smart contract risk.
Imagine US setting their US Treasury bill rate to 9% - there won’t be any investment happening in the country. Even current 5% have dampened the risk taking.
It’s been over 4 years since MainNet - exact time for halvening by this logic 
Metapool has been supporting small validators and is responsible for ~100 validators as far as I understand coming online in the past year. From small validators (launching a program to run validators for as low as $27/m) to institutional players like Vodafone and NTT.
That said adopting more focus on minimizing Gini coefficient of validators is a good idea - e.g. move stake more to the smaller stakers.
For context, we have been working with Metapool to develop the program around small validators.
Albeit doing another vote with changed inflation procedure as @HOT_DAO suggested is possible I don’t think it make sense.
Validators who wanted to vote have voted. From them we have a very conclusive 91% PRO and 9% AGAINST.
Also reminder that from mechanical perspective - this was Signaling not a binding vote. The actual binding change will need to be done by adopting a new version of Protocol by 80% of validators.
House of Stake looks like the right approach to actually have an ecosystem level vote going forward - where stake holders who are willing to lock their capital for long time are given disproportionally more weight in the decisions. House of Stake should vote on the inflation changes.
For the active members here - what would be the amount of stake locked (non NF obv) that would ratify the House of Stake in your eyes?