Report: NEAR Ecosystem Stakeholder Analysis & Engagement
28/10/25 Authored by Maxwell - for public release
Summary:
Author spent approx 3 weeks interviewing various ecosystem partners, and additional time performing data analysis using both public tools like Dune and using an internal data tool the NF graciously allowed me access to.
The findings are that the largest portion of available NEAR is held by large individual accounts (read: whales). The largest of these accounts correspond to exchanges, some to funds, and then a relatively distributed group of individual accounts. Excluding backers, exchanges, infrastructure, value locked in protocols, NF accounts, and institutional holdings, about ~680M NEAR remains- quite decentralized! There are also an additional ~60M corresponding to accounts with balances between 20 and 100k.
Exchanges, funds, the NF, and so forth are (for the most part, although exceptions exist) not able to participate in HoS for various reasons. In theory, that leaves around 800M NEAR that could be activated, and an additional 71M that exists in LSTs.
Relevant data visualizations and numbers provided below to help illustrate.
Obligatory ex-academic disclaimer: Interpretation of data is always somewhat subjective: categorization can change based on your own analysis and the cutoffs and labels you choose.
Fig 1: Total Supply Breakdown of NEAR as of 10/28/25
Fig 2: Distribution of NEAR among ‘unknown’ accounts, eg. those accounts not directly attributable to a specific project, backer, etc, including NEAR held by individuals. Includes both staked and liquid NEAR. Note that this does not include LST holdings.
Personal Notes/Interpretation:
The good news is that a lot of NEAR in the system is individually held and can, in theory, participate in HoS governance. That said it’s not perfectly clear how many of these individuals can be convinced or are able to participate. Regardless of our inability to label them, some of these accounts may still represent holdings of various organizations, who may have various legal or fiduciary obligations. Still, IMO, it does seem based on this analysis that a short-medium term goal of 10% total NEAR participating in HoS should be achievable!
Increasing more engagement by these holders will be an ongoing effort, but we will work towards this by increasing awareness (via social media and individual contact), continuing to improve the security and usability of the governance interface, and continuing to build new optimizations, incentives, and features that enable participation by those who for instance cannot currently unstake or require multisig compatibility.
Finding the individuals who hold all this NEAR and engaging them has been difficult at times. Unsurprisingly, not many individuals who I suspect have large NEAR holdings have been eager to leap in, especially in the early days of a newly deployed contract and framework. This actually goes doubly for those whom this NEAR represents a significant portion of their personal assets, who are not eager to move their NEAR until they’re certain it has been production tested.
It is also worth noting that based on some of my conversations, many individuals with large holdings have deep skepticism of governance, in part due to previous ecosystem experiments. Perhaps the most important thing we can do to convince those with these stances is prove that the HoS structure can be effective, and give them paths where participation with their stake is as secure and demands as little of their time and diligence as reasonable. We are actively working towards this.
Conclusions/Next Steps
Continued outreach and awareness-building around HoS is critical to our growth and success; You (the community) can certainly help with this(!), and we’ll certainly keep doing our best here as well.
Our team and Agora are continuing to build to address usability and formalization of processes. We are actively monitoring feedback and prioritizing things, so feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are all very helpful and encouraged.
Beyond this, we hope those of you watching from the sidelines continue to watch closely and hope that you’ll consider participating when you feel that you’ve done your own due diligence.
If you have questions, concerns, comments, or ways we can make participation more palatable to you, my door is always open on TG @bearmans.
And finally, on a personal level- thank you for remaining interested in what we’re building, and in the broader initiative of bringing open governance to the NEAR protocol.