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Meet the NEAR Endorsed Delegates
Recorded: April 10, 2025 Duration: 1:09:33Space Recording
Short Summary
The NEAR ecosystem is witnessing a pivotal moment with the launch of the House of Stake initiative, aimed at enhancing governance and community engagement. Key discussions among endorsed delegates highlight trends in decentralized finance, strategic partnerships, and innovative funding approaches, all geared towards fostering growth and sustainability in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hey everyone, we're just about trying to get started.
I'm trying to invite the speakers we have scheduled for today, but whilst I try to figure that out,
I'm sending those requests through.
If you want to, if you're a speaker,
send a request through and maybe that expedites things.
But I've sent requests to everyone,
requests to everyone so it should be fine.
so it should be fine.
One second.
Hey, just checking if you can hear me okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was planning to do mic test once we have everyone on.
Awesome, so far so good, thanks.
Awesome. So far so good. Thanks. Awesome.
There's one request to speak from an account I don't recognize.
Do you recognize this one?
No, I'm unsure who
this account belongs to i think i've kind of identified all the speakers so i'm not sure
if this is one of them okay
Awesome. I think we have one, two, three, four, five. We're probably only missing
Gus from Nierweek. Maybe it's him. I need to quickly check.
Yeah. Gus from Nierweek is probably him. Yeah. check yeah it's him it's him
awesome i've sent him a request i've approved his request actually um so he should be up uh anytime
all right i do see him as a speaker now.
Yeah, I think we've got everyone on board.
So maybe we can kick things off.
And yeah, I'd like to pass it on to Lane to kind of give a very quick overview of House of Stake.
He's the primary point of contact and the man behind the initiative. So I would love for him to kind of
break it down for us. Awesome. Yeah, thank you. So hey everybody, I'm Lane. For anyone
that I haven't met before, I work at the NIR Foundation in a research capacity, but yeah,
my focus right now is is bootstrapping
this house of stake initiative uh just to be very clear I'm not a delegate right so the delegates
are here and you'll hear from them they they're in the driver's seat of house of stake I am kind
of a coordinator facilitator like a steward um project manager really right so uh just kind of
helping all the different folks
and organizations that are driving this initiative to coordinate and
collaborate so just I guess I'll just take like a minute or two just to do a
super brief background I'm assuming most folks listening to this conversation are
familiar with with house of steak but you know near given the kind of age of
the ecosystem the size of the, the maturity level has relatively immature governance.
NIR has basically been BDFN since the past, most notably the NDC initiative
a couple of years ago to kind of design and launch a more mature governance system for
the near ecosystem, the protocol, et cetera.
And we could easily fill the whole hour here talking about NDC and everything that went
wrong with that.
But just for the purpose of the intro, suffice to say that it was a bit overcomplicated and
kind of the incentives weren't aligned correctly. So yeah, so basically house of stake is kind of like near
governance 2.0, you could say. So kind of learning from the mistakes of NBC and just learning from
the broader governance landscape across not just near, of course, but also like EVM projects in
particular. There's quite a few DAOs and DeFi projects and protocols that have quite mature governance.
So we've been studying governance for the past about a year now, working very closely with Gauntlet.
So shout out to them. Thank you for their help designing the system.
Yeah. And what we're in the process of rolling out is a fairly straightforward system that's based on a VE token.
So VE stands for vote escrow.
And the idea here is anyone who holds NIR or liquid stakes NIR can escrow that into a new smart contract that's being developed.
And in exchange, they receive a VE NIR token that's soul bound, right?
So it can't be traded or sold.
And they will use that VE NIR token to participate in governance, either via delegating it to someone else,
including our set of approved delegates here,
or else they can also choose to delegate to themselves and then vote in
proposals. So that system is, it's basically permissionless, right?
Anyone can request delegation, anyone can delegate to themselves.
But we do have just kind of bringing
it back to the purpose of this call, we do have this initial set of 11, quote unquote, approved
delegates. And these are both individuals as well as a few organizations, you'll see some
organizations here as well. And this is a group that the screening committee, which consists of
basically NIR One gauntlet and the NIR Foundation reviewed applications as part of our call for delegates
and basically handpicked this initial set of delegates to just kind of help
kick off the whole House of Stake initiative.
There's quite frankly a lot more to say about House of Stake. I could talk about the goals, I could talk about some of the
economic plans, etc. But let me just kind of stop there for a moment, keep it brief, and we can kind of
plans, et cetera.
But let me just kind of stop there for a moment,
keep it brief, and we can kind of circle back
circle back if that's interesting.
if that's interesting.
Awesome.
Yeah, I think that really helps.
And maybe we can probably just move on with intros
from the endorsed delegates we have today.
And to kind of clarify, we have six of the 11 delegates that have been picked.
The idea is to run two different sessions,
this being the first one,
but kind of giving folks in the community the opportunity
to know everyone who's kind of been picked
as an endorsed delegate.
So get a feel for who they are,
what they've been doing in the ecosystem,
both in NIR and broadly speaking across Web3,
their background in governance, if any, and their motivations to kind of be part of this initiative.
So maybe we can just go around the table and do quick intros and anything you kind of want to highlight as, to begin the spaces for.
Anyone who wants to unmute themselves, feel free to.
Yeah, maybe, okay.
Let me stop, sir.
Okay, Alan or Slime, yeah, kick it off yeah please okay thank you uh well
certainly in this conversation i want to introduce myself i'm alan i has been on the new ecosystem
since 2021 i have been also contributing since the launchment of metapool
Contributing since the launch of Metapool,
the biggest liquid staking inside of the new protocol ecosystem.
And since the launch that we have inside of Metapool,
we decided to have a community-driven protocol
that is managed by a DAO.
So this is one of the most active DAO that we have inside of it.
It actually has around 400 wallets voting during each month.
We have many programs that we have developed to promote our governance.
This includes our grants program.
We have a voting mechanism that allows validators on NIR to earn an extra delegation through our voting system.
And also we have a voter program that allows people to receive a payment for giving them voice inside of the decisions that have been taken on Metapool.
This has been months and years and a lot of experiment that we have been running and seeing inside
of the governance that we have on Metapool and also this has been translated inside of
the, well, translated as discussions, conversations in the governance mechanisms that we had on
MED.
On NDC we looked to participate, we had some participation, even when we didn't reach
to any of the councils that were chosen for NDC.
But we were there, we were looking to have our voice
inside of that.
And now on the House of State,
I'm being chosen as delegate to participate
and to give voice to the people that is interested
to participate inside of
the new protocols ecosystem.
And I think that this business is on our side.
So that's what they want to share.
We have successful governance program being active right now on the ecosystem.
And I'm excited that we can have more successful programs such as the house
of the state right now being developed and being introduced inside of the community so
that's me that's what we are looking for and that's a bit of a long history
awesome yeah big fan of metapool uh and and everything they do on chain in terms of governance. I think we can go with slime up next and then, yeah, feel free to unmute yourself as we go along.
of interior we are a company of one person essentially technically for about one actually
so we building a new coin tooling token tooling developer tooling we have my bot training water
volume bot meme marketplace sorry market making tools payment system build a lot of stuff for
this year so and I'm also quite active in different telegram communities of
meme coins and non meme coins so I wanted to bring my expertise of the trenches, let's say that, because the House of Stake
model is real users don't really have a lot of say in this.
And that's completely intentional. the real users which are the billion users that is trying to onboard are not going to be whales
with a lot of tokens so somebody needs to stand for their opinions to see what they need what don't need and that's basically what the interest i am trying to defend in this
house to take program so even so i'm a builder i think i'll be more intensively representing users
rather than developers because developers are already quite represented. Nier has a lot of good tech, a lot of opportunities for developers to get funding.
So yeah, I have a very minimal governance experience.
So really appreciate that Aretha, 404 and Tanay, I hope I'm pronouncing it
correctly, are going to help us not go rampant and do whatever the hell we want as a community.
And avoid common mistakes and so on.
That's it for me.
Hey, I'm Charles.
I'm a builder on Nier. I joined the NEAR ecosystem about three years ago. I joined Pagoda, so I was part of the teams there, really building different tools and products for developer productivity and to help technical people and creatives build and leverage NEAR tech to bring their products to life. So that was about three years and since Bogota wound down, been building
independently and now formed a company where we're focused on bringing mainstream consumers
into decentralized finance in an approachable way to really help bridge the gap between these
esoteric communities that we have. We're really passionate about the tools that we're building
and applications and protocols and bridging that
to everyday use cases for crypto normies and regular people.
That's one of the things that I'm passionate about
and really looking forward to contributing
to this governance.
I don't have any prior experience in governance.
Yes, I have experience in not-for-profits and more,
I guess that's the closest to decentralized governance
I have experience on,
but not like true decentralized technology like this.
My perspective is really centered on being product
and user focused, providing support for creative builders,
and my desire to improve NIR's connection within and beyond the crypto world
i'm happy to jump in next um hello everyone i'm finley from areta
so you guys may have already come across Sid or Bernard also from Areta.
Areta is a leading governance strategy firm and financial services firm. So we focus on ecosystem
growth. I myself sit on the on-chain growth team and I'll tell you a little bit more in a moment
about what we focus on. But if you've already come across Areta, it may have also been our investment
bank. So we're the leading investment bank by deal count
in Web3 and we work on all sorts of things
from M&A transactions to token capital markets,
as we call it, which really just means series B
plus capital raises and institutional token launches
and the likes of those sorts of bigger financial transactions
working with institutions and such,
bringing them into the industry.
So on the on-chain growth team where I sit,
our mission is really focused on capital allocation.
And what we're trying to do is sort of how we're anchoring
ourselves is to try and sustainably grow the number
of quality applications in the crypto ecosystem.
And we're trying to do this by lowering barriers for builders
and providing them with the resources that they need
and the support that they need
from really their first idea and their inception
all the way through to the growth stage.
We are a governance firm,
so we have a lot of experience in other ecosystems.
And if we're just looking across the industry
and through our experience,
there's obviously a lot of issues
with how capital is allocated at the moment,
and more specifically how value is captured and recycled within the ecosystem.
So, I mean, I could spend a lot of time here talking about grant programs and incentives.
But for the moment, I'll spare you guys all of that.
We sort of we wanted to address this issue in the industry and we designed a framework or an approach called the smart capital activation
framework this is our tailored approach to capital allocation basically dedicated to designing
strategizing and executing on programs which keep the value in the ecosystem so there's a few
different few different arms to that and I'll get into that later in my explanation, but within this approach,
we just really look to be a little bit more intentional about how we allocate capital
across the builder funnel. So like I said, from inception through to scale. And we want
to make sure that the builders have the support that they need and the resources and distribution,
because obviously at the end of the day, the builders are the backbone of the ecosystem.
So, yeah, that's us.
Areda has been involved in NIR since I believe early 2023.
It predates my time at Areda a little bit.
I believe we received a grant back in the day.
But yeah, excited to be on this call, excited to spend some time hearing the intros from all of these delegates.
So thank you for organizing i can just go next hello everybody my name is gus i'm here representing near week
so originally i got into the blockchain space in around 2015.
I have a background in political science and quite interested in, you know, all type of classic governance coordination dilemmas.
and it was actually DAOs that brought me into that in 2016.
And that's why when I stumbled upon Ethereum, I thought that was very interesting that you could coordinate. And it was actually kind of DAOs that brought me into that in 2016.
The first DAO, so to say, I've been involved in was the early days of MakerDAO,
and I've been involved in a bit of other experiments,
kind of took a UX consumer focus, was involved in what's called the Meta Cartel at the point,
and also today still involved in Meta Cartel Ventures and Hydra Ventures Investment
DAO. In the NIA ecosystem, I joined the NIA Foundation in 2020. And since then, I have,
together with a few other guys, spinned out and created NIA Week. So we're an ecosystem media
within the NIAverse, expanding to everything AIX crypto. So yeah, happy to be here and discuss better.
Again, jump in here.
Hi, everyone.
Good morning.
My name is Rika, and I'm with Total Floor DAO.
We're a governance organization.
We've been around since about January 2023. We started doing governance organization. We've been around since about January 2023.
We started doing governance work.
We're involved with a lot of different ecosystems, which includes Uniswap, Arbitrum,
CK Sync, Optimism.
And we really try to do what's best for each protocol. So even though
we are involved with a lot of ecosystems, we, we really try to focus on each of them and what is the best interests of each protocol.
Personally, I've been involved with onboarding
initiatives and have really seen how, like all the different challenges that exist
around coordinating different stakeholders' interest
and achieving alignment.
So our intention with NIR is really to design the best
governance frameworks that are simple,
that are easy to use and to minimize the admin efforts
that are involved.
Generally, we are excited to be a part of Nier.
And yeah, thanks for having me on.
Awesome.
Yeah, it was great to hear backgrounds
on who's doing what and like,
especially for the teams who don't have, who haven't had as much of an involvement in the near ecosystem in the past.
So that's super helpful to kind of get yourself more known to the wider near community.
I think now we can probably dive into discussing House of Stake, right?
So House of Stake is a very promising governance setup, and there is a few challenges that
have kind of been highlighted as part of bringing this program to life.
as part of bringing this program to life.
So kind of wanted to get everyone's take
on how each one of you is thinking
of addressing these challenges.
And for folks in the audience,
I'll just quickly go through what those,
we could probably call them problem statements
look like for the ecosystem.
So there's one challenge around being able to effectively manage the near treasury
and like,
how do we manage resources as efficiently as possible across the
ecosystem,
taking into account all stakeholders,
growth,
et cetera,
et cetera.
The second one is a very heated debate oftentimes in
in social media and in some telegram chats and it's around near token issuance currently it
stands at around five percent per annum but there's been several instances where it's been discussed
to kind of lower that down. But there's been good arguments on both sides as to lowering it,
whether lowering it is counterproductive for validators and other stakeholders who kind of need that token inflation to sustain operations.
And as a third challenge, there is also this question around network security.
network security. So how do these endorsed delegates work together to kind of strengthen
and maintain the security of the network as a whole? So these are like very high level
challenges and problem statements that have been put to this program. kind of we kind of relying on these endorsed delegates for insights thoughts
and ways to kind of address these these issues so if anyone wants to go ahead and share their
views and thought processes on what they have in their mind that would be awesome.
If not, let's just repeat the same people
how we did on the previous instance. So we can go ahead with Alan, Slime,
I think it's Charles, Aretha, Gus, and Zika.
Yes.
I was expecting if somebody else was willing to take the voice on the second participation,
but yeah, I will take this one.
Well, I think that we need to have a clear idea on how the governance is looking to
work inside of me um there's an issue around capital allocation that's the main issue to solve
and also the this is related on how we do this to be community-driven, and at the same time, capital
efficient.
And I mean, these are the general challenges that you can find on any Web3 ecosystem.
Developing on Web3 is challenging.
You don't see results in short term. There are long histories of failure startups that
happens on Web3.
And we are always looking, or we are always
asking ourselves what is the next thing that we should try
in order to be able to share all the benefits
that we have inside of Web3 for our users for new users for
the community so that's that's how we are looking for so there is a basic metric that we are that
we need to ensure that is happening there should be more need tokens that are being taken from the market than those that are being delivered to the market
and this can be in many ways i don't mean selling and buying i can we can also say uh locking
tokens we can also say tokens that are being allocated to the to the mechanisms that are
being used on the centralized apps etc but that's's the main point that we have inside of you.
There are several discussions about how this can be done.
One of these is reduce the emission of validators.
Yeah, it's an idea.
It needs to be disclosed, and we need to simulate all the scenarios that we can face by making this possible.
But I think this is not the only and will not have the total solution for increasing.
It will be not that solution for reducing the token circulating on the market, or it
will be the entire solution because there are tokens that are already there on the market.
We need to find the best projects that can take action over these tokens and recover
them properly.
And this implies that any capital allocation program needs to see for many things.
For the people that is able to take these tokens and make a big effort and have the best team,
have the best people, have the experience, have all of what we require to make possible ideas that they have.
We also need to think in the community that they have a lot of valuable people
that have been contributing on the near ecosystem
and also have several good ideas
on how this can be done.
And we can give them the voices
and the opportunities to make this possible.
I think there is a clear demand right now
from the community of how open it is
the near foundation or the near community and now the House of how open it is the new foundation or the new community,
and now the House of State,
to receive ideas from the community.
And I think based on what we have been talking
on the past meetings of House of State,
that we are totally open to it.
We are totally open to receive more ideas,
to receive more people,
and also that there is an active community that can contribute to this governance mechanism.
So in our resume, I think we need to have these real metrics on projects that are being presented
to folks at stake of more tokens being recovered from the market than those that are being presented to folks of stake of more tokens being recovered from
the market than those that are being supplied to the market.
And this being done with the best people that we can find in our community or in the teams
that are willing to contribute to the community. Yeah, those were great points.
I probably want to move on to Slime if he's able to speak.
But at the same time, to kind of make the spaces a bit more dynamic uh feel free to kind of um disagree with anyone if you want to uh or like if
you have other thoughts um that would be interesting as well to kind of get different points of view so
um if slime is unable to speak at the moment we can probably move on okay slime awesome go ahead
okay it's time go ahead so I can agree that we have to give people more creative freedom to
don't kind of be be able to do what they want if they want to build something that this thing will benefit the NIRP token,
that will benefit the inflows and reduce the outflows.
But at the same time, we have kind of a limited treasury.
It was like less than $50 million last time I checked.
So not a whole lot to work with.
And we have to be careful with who we want and who we don't.
I think the most important part is of course we have to do the tokenomics.
As you said, people want to reduce the inflation from 5% to maybe 2.5%.
There are some other ideas that some people told me.
I'm not sure if in private or on Twitter, but some of these ideas are making it like Bitcoin,
so that the reward rewards half half every like two two years or four years
like the halvening of bitcoin and a fixed supply the other idea is to make it more liquid so that
other people can borrow this staked near from the protocol itself and this borrowing generates
revenue and if it generates like one percent api so we can just remove the inflation by one percent
And the second point is marketing.
We have done a lot of stuff this year.
Not we, but the people who are not present here.
A lot of ways that we try to
DeFi stats. all the defy stats we have been creating a lot of meme coins pumping their volume pumping their
prices or like with hot they onboarded a lot of, but these people are mainly not contributing a whole lot for the TVL.
So I think if we fund the next big thing, like that costs millions of dollars,
then I think we have to structure it in a way that some project brings users in.
that some project brings the users in then new coins for example of course some buy stores
leave coins but um it's a good way to onboard the masses casinos have always been a profitable
business so for example meme coins make people people trade on. Then at a very convenient timing,
protocols like Rea Finance
announce some liquidity incentives.
Then other protocols
shortly after
announce an airdrop to people who use NIR daily.
And it has to be very well coordinated if we want
to do something big.
But for small projects like 20, 30, even 100k, we can totally fund them, give people the freedom to express themselves in a way that benefits the near token
yeah just not be rushed about the big decisions
yeah i like that suggestion of not being rushed about large decision and kind of splitting up
different avenues that type of projects are like facets that we want to focus on
on funding when i think about how we could have an organized approach to utilizing the treasury
you mentioned a little
no yeah uh we can hear both of
you uh yeah you can hear me okay yeah yeah yeah you mentioned the large group and having very
like considerate slow slow consideration of large significant funding. If I think of a couple of other facets of how we might allocate treasury
for ecosystem growth programs
and improving the visibility of programs
that are targeting prior to a pre-seed stage project,
like hackathons and near protocol rewards
and really helping builders to match them
with the appropriate
track where the incentives and expectations on the product maturity align with where
they are on their project, from those hackathons and different groups to pitching for RFPs,
for public good infra, soliciting requests for product teams, for other proposals that
we see from the infrastructure committee
committee or generally providing founder support where for teams who have shown traction or have
built and deliver things such that we have confidence in their ability to execute on some
vision even if it maybe has less proven traction is one area. And then another area of empowering and retaining
builders by aligning funding with projects
that have specific timelines for tracking
towards user adoption and realistic timelines,
strong project hypothesis, in addition
to the technical merit.
So aligning funding for these smaller, not large, super large checks,
aligning funding with milestones and paired with supporting projects
even after they receive a grant with the likes of marketing and BD matchmaking, etc.
So that's a couple of things that I would add to your suggestion around
allocating treasury
funds to larger and small projects.
I don't think I have too much to add on the one about reducing issuance.
Just generally, I would be cautious to consider reducing issuance without a plan for how to supplement validator incentives
to not squeeze out or make it less appealing for smaller groups, smaller businesses to
bring on and run validators.
Dan, you mentioned, Smiley, you mentioned some helpful suggestions from other conversations
that you had.
I would want to expand on that and know what other levers are available for us, like viable
for reducing issuance, and how might we be able to model the risk of one solution versus
another, the risk that that would pose to smaller validators
just to avoid reducing validator count and making some decision that has a negative impact on
on our decentralization
Do you want to go over, Ritter?
I think I would.
Oh, yeah.
Go for it.
I think I would echo a lot of your take, Charles, on sort of ecosystem growth and being pretty
intentional and also just having like a little bit of a bit more of a forward-looking view
on how we allocate capital from the treasury.
Yeah, I think this is, like I mentioned in our intro, I think this is just a place that
we've seen a lot of ecosystems go wrong.
And having, you know, sort of having a Dow standard grant program off the hop, just rushing
into something would cause a whole host of issues. So, I mean, from accountability perspective, with the lack of oversight, KPIs, and outcomes
not really being tracked or even outlined in a reasonable way.
But then as well, from a builder perspective, a lot of these programs we found are really
restrictive in the way that early stage projects need to be building
and the milestone based funding just doesn't let them build as dynamically and as much
freedom as is actually important at that stage.
So I think when you look through this lens, it's important to see, okay, what are the
questions we need to be solving for how we approach capital allocation for NIR? I think one of the things that's important is how can we get funds?
And this is something that Slime and Charles, you guys both touched on.
How can we get funds and resources to builders at the moments that they need it, but also
not in a restrictive way?
While also being conscious on the flip side of treasury budgeting and not spending too much money at the outset.
As well, how do we structure these payouts so that they're distributed only when there was actual value created?
Or we can have some sort of assurances that actual value will be created for the near ecosystem?
How do we enable these programs to keep value distributed within the NIR ecosystem.
So yeah, I think these are all just like very important questions.
And I don't think the answers to these are the programs and initiatives that will solve
these fall into the scope of this call necessarily.
But I think what is important is just sort of the higher arching question, which is how
do we align the outcomes from capital allocation with
the outcomes from the near ecosystem?
I think there's a little bit of work that needs to be done there ahead of time from
the delegates on this call, as well as some of our other colleagues who aren't on these
calls, to just figure out what those objectives are, are they intents, agents, otherwise,
and then how do we sort of trickle down from there into the capital allocation strategy?
Maybe moving on quickly because I spent a little bit of time there talking on the question of issuance.
I would echo, I think it's important to have the validators be involved in these conversations as well. And you wouldn't want to do anything sort of with them out of the loop and leave them hanging in the balance just by dint of not being involved in those conversations. So
I think there are other ways to sort of generate real yield through the new ecosystem as the
ecosystem matures even more. And then this real yield could be sort of distributed to validators
to offset the costs with reducing
issuance. So there's a couple of little suggestions. Could be anything from, I mean, the transaction
fee burning mechanism right now is a good way as well. Obviously, yeah, there's just like
investments or a few other strategies. I don't have too much more to add here but i think it's important to have validators involved in these discussions
um and yeah and and obviously do this in a thoughtful way
i can definitely second that point i think i wouldn't say it has been neglected but the
validated community in the ecosystem
can definitely be prioritized more
when you look at other communities.
So I think that's super important.
That is the backbone of layer one, first of all.
But look, generally, how I view this part of House of Stake,
this is season one, right? it's maybe even the pre-season
there's a certain amount in the treasury right now but you know that can definitely be expanded
if if we're doing well right and if we're doing well as an ecosystem prices you know can go up
and treasury will go up as well the only thing we really have to lose scarcity is time here
because we are up against the big closed-sourced AI companies
and that's kind of really a big mission here.
And I think, you know, we really have to tackle this and see,
okay, it's hard.
No one has done this before.
We have other ecosystems.
We have ecosystems that are doing fairly well in full on-chain governance,
where they actually have nodes and specific things are merged.
It's not a core team that's merging just GitHub.
It's actually merged.
There's also other examples where it's not on a chain level,
but just governance, DAO allocations that is working fairly well.
We have a lot of examples of stuff where it's working not well.
Either it's like DAOs being swarmed off payout requests.
And as you guys are saying, milestones have to be like, who's going to actually review that, etc.
I don't know if you've been in the foundation as well.
And it's kind of in the beginning, grants teams are just growing and growing, growing, because
how are you supposed to review all those like small payouts i think there we really have to tackle it
as smaller iterations uh i think one example when it's the early days of let's say gitcoin for
example and and how that was in the fm community we're talking every three months there was about
the post from from vitalik with the team saying this is what worked this is what didn't we to adjust it. And I think that's really the mindset we have to get into. We have
to think about pretty fast, you know, iterations when it comes to that. That's, of course, easy to
say, but I think that's really the key here because it's hard stuff and we're not going to get it
right the first time. We happen to be building a state-of-the-art user-owned AI stack. Of course, we should use that
as well. And we should use what works and start small from other ecosystems and see if it works
in our ecosystem. Sometimes things that are working in other ecosystems will not work here too,
because maybe there's not 200 projects that did big ICOs and have a lot of capital to also
do retroactive funding or whatever. But some things might work as well. So that's kind of my overarching opinion on how we should approach this.
Learn from the best, try it out, iterate fast, be full transparent about it,
and move on and try and do better, you know, and only that way we can kind of learn.
And of course, you know, when you're talking validators, et cetera,
it's a pretty big thing.
And taking into account main validators the the that is the
big companies the professional ones the smaller ones the voices what is the plan here is there
going to be other income streams other infrastructure structure to to like be running that that's kind
of essential questions too yeah so i would just say like it's not like something i have a strong
opinion about but but definitely as as Charles and Arita were saying,
that's essential we talk with and actually start creating more, perhaps, open,
validated discussion in the NEX system.
Yeah, all of these have been excellent points. I've been thinking back to what Charles said about how we should have balance between funding
different types of builders. So builders who are more early stage and then builders who are more
mature. So I think it's important to have different types of grant programs and types of ways to
allocate the funding. So like some examples, you could have grant programs. Questbook is an
example. You can also have an incentive program. Incentives right now, of course, are
also have an incentive program uh incentives right now of course are um
people have different thoughts about how incentives should be run and their efficacy but
in general incentives are a good way i think to allocate capital to builders, right? And just speaking more broadly,
we think that it's important to take a lean approach and a simple one to not over-engineer and not over-complicate things.
And then on the second point about reducing issuance to valid in mind that validators are only one type of ecosystem participant.
They're obviously a very important one, but they're just one.
And so if you reduce their issuance and counteract it with positives to other ecosystem participants,
then it could result in a healthy balance, right?
So also thinking about the need to rely on experts. So Gauntlet could be one that would be able to model out
the implications of reducing situances to the validators, right? And really be able to figure out the impact of it on the broader
ecosystem and all of the other participants. So yeah, just to kind of summarize, like,
relying on experts, leaning on them to help guide us with these sorts of complicated decisions.
guide us with these sorts of complicated decisions.
Yeah, that's great.
Great insights from all of the delegates.
I think like there's, everyone's coming to tackle the same problems from almost the same angles with slight preferences for either being more cautious or wanting to
try things out fast and then iterate as we go along. So there's definitely different approaches,
but it feels like everyone seems to kind of be aligned, or at least the ones,
then those delegates we have today on the panel, they seem to be very aligned with helping grow the ecosystem,
find a way that's maybe net positive
when it comes to reducing token issuance,
and then on a final point to kind of figure out
how can we strengthen network security with all of these things happening at the same time.
everyone to highlight what key areas they would be working on
or they would like to be working on as indoor delegates
or kind of want to be supporting.
And maybe as well share insights as to how they expect
to attract delegations from the community,
how they intend to stay in touch with delegates,
whether it's a matter of comms, accountability,
and everything that goes along those lines.
And yeah, and if you have any other closing remarks
around why should kind of people delegate to you specifically?
So we'll go through the same people and take the same turn.
So I'll let Alan kick it off.
Okay.
I think that I have to say that we are here for the long term.
We are not here for the short term because at Metapool,
it has been since the launchment,
and it was our house to launch our first liquid sticking solution,
and it's now our biggest liquid sticking solution.
And we have been working really closely with different kinds of communities
inside of the
ecosystem this includes validators where where most of the validators
have less are not centralized i want to say that they have less than one million tokens
delegated and they are being driven by community members by companies, by projects inside of NIR, and receiving delegation
from making staking such as Metapool to keep their tasks inside of the of securing the
NIR protocols network. On the other side we also have been working with different communities
and different regions. Here we have a big program of ambassadors in inside of southeast asia we have been giving grant
in a large part of latin america and also in africa and this has been contributing to more
people start participating and contributing to the ecosystem as users that are here for the state. So we want that. We want to work in a sustainable,
and brilliant community that can be active
in different stages of the development of the ecosystem.
That's our approach.
So we cannot do that alone.
I think that we need to create breaches among different teams that
can be doing this and we have a big picture of what is happening in the different areas
of the new ecosystem to create sustainable projects that can help different teams to
receive support from the house of state. So that that's us long-term players interested to make
sustainability inside of the new ecosystem and that's why we are willing to receive your tokens
in delegation as an investor delegate inside of house of state
Awesome.
Again, we have
Slime
up next, but if Slime
is... Yes, I'm here.
Alright, yeah, go ahead.
So, I
actually would encourage people who have
a lot of Nier to do your own research and what yourself.
If you have time, because no one will work for your back if not you.
But if you don't have time, then you can delegate to whoever aligns with you most.
That's also, by the way, why I'm not that hurrying to decrease the API
of near staking, because it will be not us
who are deciding to what the near protocol tokenomics will be.
It will be people who are staking,
people who have a lot of near,
who have locked their near for three months, I believe.
Not entirely sure.
I think we haven't been communicated,
or I forgot that,
how exactly it will be.
I believe Gauntlet had like two variants
of how it will work.
We'll see a bit later.
So yeah, I will be focusing on DeFi, on tokens, on meme coins and all the related fields.
I can do research on whether the community wants to have these projects that are asking for grants
because I have access to a lot of community.
I have some of the most used apps among traders on NIRR
because we don't have a lot of tokens to trade with.
So mainly the traders are meme coin traders
if we count in numbers numbers of people i also have some technical expertise to check if
specific approaches are technically technically viable or not and
technically viable or not.
yeah.
So my non-goals are
projects that are not in the
NIR ecosystem, but
are claiming to be.
That
say a lot of things about NIR,
but not mention
NIR in their docs, launch
the token on Solana,
and launch the product on base. And NIR in their docs, launch the token on Solana, and launch the product on base.
And NIR is just emotional support.
I'm not willing to be focusing on BTC5.
A lot of projects on different chains tried it, but I believe it's still less than 1% of Bitcoin supply is in there.
I believe it's still less than 1% of Bitcoin supply is in there.
And even now on Nero, there are a lot of testnet and mainnet.
Actually, I believe it's only one mainnet app.
But it doesn't have a lot of users.
So I think Bitcoin holders don't really want this.
So we wouldn't be supporting any of this unless it's really innovative that people would actually
want the target audience that is Bitcoin holders and also I don't really want to support AI
infrastructure but I want to support AI apps that are like consumer apps for real people with real users
because right now we have a lot of AI infrastructure and I don't think there are
more than zero AI agents that I actually daily use. So that's my take. If I don't use something,
if I don't see people use something then it's probably
not that useful so if you agree with my take you can delegate to me
yeah uh i always love slime not holding back uh so it was was not something I was expecting in, in,
in this spaces for people to openly say that they won't be supporting XYZ.
So that's, that's interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. And, and, and I love it. I think next up we have Charles.
Yeah. I like your take. Well,
and I like your suggestion to,
or rather saying to turn it back around on people and delegate your NIR to VE NIR and vote for yourselves.
And that got me thinking that as builders, people creating products from NIR, there are several delegates who are also creating products targeting end users.
end users, might be interesting to think how we can incorporate bringing that decision into
an experience for users as they're using the app, maybe after a certain level of engagement,
to prompt them with, hey, do you have an opinion on this or like a way of presenting and guiding
them to being able to vote themselves, or at least presenting the opportunity to have them vote on
something, especially let's say if it's a DeFi app, you have a user who is participating in staking and presenting to them. If there's a proposal
relevant towards something related to, let's say, staking or reducing issuance that could affect
their yield, it could be an interesting opportunity to present a path for someone to vote directly on
their own, or at least introduce the concept to them, and perhaps also provide them with a chance to delegate towards a chosen delegate.
Anyway, that's what your speech brought to mind. Yeah, I'm building actively on NIR. I understand
the opportunities and the friction. Like I mentioned before, if you delegate with me,
you're voting for NEAR funding to become more outcome aligned.
I value making things accessible to non-technical creatives
and better integrating NEAR with the involving needs
of builders and the different stages
that they have with their projects.
I'm particularly focused on supporting teams that are not just technically strong, but also
positioned to bring NEAR into everyday user experiences for mainstream consumers. So I will
be a lot of the questions that I have and the voting that I will do will come from that perspective.
So that aligns with you and happy to chat more about it
or talk about delegating to support my votes.
And thanks for having me on the space today.
This is a really interesting conversation.
Awesome.
Right on.
Yeah, just I guess another plus one for empowering folks to set off on their own voting journey
as well.
So yeah, I like that idea, guys.
In terms of Aretta's priorities, I think we'll really be informed by our experience in other
ecosystems, as well as that smart capital activation framework I mentioned at the top,
which is something now that we're actually doing in a few different ecosystems.
So I know I've harped on it on this call maybe a little bit too much, but we really do feel it is important and that many other items will sort of fall into place if we can focus on the treasury and allocating it effectively and true to the objectives that we set out for NIR.
effectively and true to the objectives that we set out for NIR.
So yeah, I just would say another really big emphasis on the need for clear, trackable
ROI of funds spent, on-chain verifiable metrics, or maybe even a convertible grant program
is an idea we've been kicking around a little bit to keep the value within the ecosystem
and to our earlier discussion could even be one of the solutions for reducing issuance. And maybe I can give
a quick example and it can kind of outline how we interact within ecosystems
and can give people an idea of if we're relevant to delegate to. So we worked and
we developed a security subsidy marketplace which was actually recently
just extended by Uniswap.
And really what this is, is it's a dedicated venue for service providers, for security service providers, so audit providers, and any ecosystem project to negotiate services.
And what we found from this pilot with Uniswap was faster audit completions for projects,
with Uniswap was faster audit completions for projects,
even a 20, 30% reduced cost in audits.
And then for the ecosystems,
this became a really strong branding effect as well.
So these are the sorts of outcomes
that I think are important
and like sort of things that we should be looking for
for near in the early days.
As well, I think outside of just the on-chain team,
we're also the leading investment bank
in crypto.
So, with working on transactions like CoinGecko's first acquisition, we also sold Solscan to
Etherscan.
I think these experiences from our investment banking team and sort of our networks that
we've accrued there really give us relevant institutional connections, which could also
be a valuable resource for scaling near in the future um obviously the partnerships become become a big point um so yeah
maybe just to summarize on why someone might be interested in delegating to us we we have been
around for a moment and we have seen some of the ins and outs of dows we are extremely wary of
capital uh not being wasted or spent on random initiatives.
We also are delegates ourselves
in a bunch of other ecosystems.
I think we have like Arbitrum, Aave, ZK Sync,
sort of over 50 million in assets under delegation.
And this is something we really pride ourselves in being,
you know, really putting a lot of attention into
and really being active.
So yeah, I guess if you're curious to learn a little bit more
about our delegations or our philosophy,
you can always ping me.
But on behalf of Aretta,
we're really excited about this opportunity to grow out near,
to be a house of stake, indoors delegates.
And yeah, thanks again for having us on this call
and yeah, looking forward to more to come.
So thank you everyone
on behalf of near week i can say we've been in the extreme for a long time we've been pushing out weekly newsletters now for i believe 207 weeks in a row so we are following everything what's going on. We try to do fair representation
of all groups. The current sort of OKRs and North Stars and ecosystems, and that's what I'll be
fighting for too, is first and foremost developer adoption, AI mindshare, number of agents,
and also it's the basically token inflow, right?
And that means it's two audiences.
It's developers and there's developers first and it's investors.
And I think that's really, you know, the two groups we need to do everything we can to make this a success.
And that's what we are fighting for.
I don't want to like pitch a lot more myself right now.
I think we're out of time as well.
But generally, I'll say that's our standpoint.
And yeah, happy to be invited for this call.
And thanks, everyone.
I can jump in here last.
Thanks, everyone.
This has been awesome.
I'm excited to be a part of this really great group of endorsed delegates.
And on behalf of 4O4, our vision is really to build a robust governance system.
And we want to make sure that there is transparency, accountability, and also we want to
involve the community. So we want to make sure that there is delegation, there is redelegation,
there's opportunity for other people to become delegates. And we also just really want to prevent
governance attacks. So the more delegates that there are, the more token supply, it's all better.
And we will also bring in the wisdom that we have acquired from other ecosystems that we're a part
of. As I mentioned, we're delegates in ecosystems like Arbitrum, EKSync, Uniswap.
And yeah, just super excited to be a part of this.
And thank you so much for having me on today.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it was great to hear everyone's closing remarks
and where is everyone's mind at
when it comes to priorities for the ecosystem.
I also agree with what Slime said
and a bunch of the endorsed delegates seconded,
and that is if you do have the interest
and spare time to kind of do your own due diligence,
it's fascinating to kind of get involved in DAO governance
just to kind of see all of these moving parts.
It's something you don't see in the corporate world or in Web2
or whatever like similar analogies you want to make with regards to that um so it's
i can at least speak uh in personal capacity is super fascinating to kind of know
how the ripple effects of certain proposals and initiatives can kind of help the ecosystem
grow further or like what kind of challenges uh you of have to tackle and avoid to kind of make
sure that the ecosystem stays afloat and all of the other responsibilities you would have as
a token holder. But yeah, this was a very insightful space. I personally enjoyed it a lot because I've got to know more about some of these delegates who I wasn't aware of in the past. So really appreciate everyone on board. But this is just the part one. So we have 11 endorsed delegates.
We've managed to put six of them today in the spaces here.
And probably in the next week or so,
we intend to run a part two with the remaining five delegates.
So keep an eye for that.
And yeah, thanks for tuning in.
And thanks, Lane for tuning in.
And thanks, Lane and the Indoorsilicates for their time here.
Thanks, everybody, for a super interesting, productive conversation.
I think this is a great start.
Really grateful.
Learned a lot from everyone today.
So I'm just echoing everything that Mr. Potato just said.
But yeah, looking forward to doing another one of these soon.
All right, then.
Bye, everyone, and until next time.
Bye-bye.
