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NEAR House of Stake AMA with Gauntlet
Recorded: July 17, 2025 Duration: 0:37:42Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key figures from the Nier ecosystem outlined the launch of the House of Stake project, a pivotal initiative aimed at enhancing governance through token integration. The partnership with Gauntlet and Conthed aims to optimize validator rewards and staking incentives, while also addressing trends in inflation rates to ensure sustainable growth.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello everybody. Welcome to today's spaces around House of Stake.
Whilst we wait for Jake to join, I'd like to kind of do a quick mic check with, I'm not
sure if I'm pronouncing your name correctly, but Norm?
Hey, yeah.
Yeah, all good.
Is the T silent there?
T-Norm is the name.
All good.
All right.
Yeah, just, okay. I see Jake is requesting to speak.
We usually don't have a very big audience,
but I'm pretty sure people might be listening to a recording later on.
So I think it's valuable insights,
especially from your end to kind of know what's happening,
everything related to House of Stakes.
So, yeah, I think Jake is up on stage.
Jake, if we could do a quick mic check to get started.
Yes. Hi, Mr. Potato. Can you hear me?
Yeah, you're good.
Cool.
Yeah, thanks, everyone, for joining today.
We've, for a change, decided to sync with Conthed
because they've been doing a bunch of stuff for a while
and they're kind of always working behind the scenes
when it comes to house of stakes.
So it's kind of due to popular demand from the community
that we thought it would be a good idea to
touch base with content to kind of know what they're doing. So we could do very quick intros
from both ends. So I can introduce myself. Most folks in the ecosystem probably already know me,
but I'm Mr. Potato. I'm part of the Nier community squad where we're kind of helping bridge the gap with all parts in the Nier ecosystem, trying to get community more involved with everything
that's happening on Nier.
And yeah, would kind of like a very quick word from both Jake and T-Norm.
Yeah, I can start, Jake.
Hey, everyone.
I'm T TNorm. I am the governance lead at Gauntlet. And before that, I spent a ton of times in many DAOs in the space. Uniswap, Optimism, Arbitrum, you name it, on kind of the DeFi side. Spent some time at Masari before that as part of their governance team.
So very familiar in the space with DAOs and DAO governance and excited to be, you know,
supporting Near and the House of Stake get started here and hopefully take some of those
previous lessons learned and build something that is unique and exciting and tailored
toward what the near community kind of season wants and what the near chain is is built for
so including ai and all the exciting experiments but that's that's my side jake go ahead
yes hi everyone uh i know a lot of people in the crowd and a lot of people in your community but
my name is jake i've been with galet for over three years now, focusing mostly on protocol strategy, partnerships, and growth optimization research.
So I've been working with Nier for over a year now, focusing mostly on helping protocols initiate new mechanism launches, grow their ecosystem with meaningful incentive spend, as well as optimizing infrastructure that's already existing.
So it's been great to work with your team and Mr. Potato so far,
and excited to get into it today. Is the host on mute, perhaps?
Oh, yeah.
Thanks for calling me out.
So thanks for the intros.
I think for folks who might be hearing Gauntlet for the first time, it would help to kind
of know very briefly, I
know Jake kind of touched upon this a bit, but what Gauntlet does overall as an organization
and a bit about their involvement in House of Stake in terms of design and everything
else.
Yeah, I can hop in on this.
So Gauntlet is a firm that has been around basically since the beginning of DeFi.
Started out doing quantitative risk management on lending protocols, compound Aave. Since then, you know,
has kind of taken a quant approach to a bunch of the novel economic problems that come about in
DeFi and decentralized finance. So we are the largest curator on Morpho, which is a popular
lending protocol in the Ethereum space.
We also do a ton of applied research and mechanism design, which is closer to what we're doing with NIR and the House of Stake work.
And yeah, we also have an entire governance arm that spins out and is serving as a delegate in a bunch of the communities in the space.
So those are kind of the most relevant avenues probably to near in our work here.
Yeah, that's super helpful. I kind of mainly know Gauntlet for the involvement in DeFi and
like curating vaults and stuff. So yeah, I've been following some of these vaults on Morpho,
particularly on base,
just because Ethereum is kind of expensive to transact on.
But yeah, coming back to house of stake,
maybe, again, a very quick overview of the framework
that you guys have put together.
How does, how do you,
if you were to kind of do an elevator pitch
on how house of how do you, like, if you were to kind of do an elevator pitch on how House of
Steak is designed, that would be helpful just to kind of put everyone up to speed.
Yeah, absolutely. So the House of Steak is a proposal that was proposed around this time last year initially actually. I actually think
we're like a day off or a week or so off from when it was like formally put together at least
on kind of our comms channel. So it is a proposal to bring near tokens to the center of near governance and is really an evolution beyond the near digital collective, which was a community led program more focused on, you know, individuals and one person, one vote. tie the NIR staking into the governance itself and introducing token-weighted governance,
introducing a lockup contract that incentivizes folks to align long-term with the governance of
NIR, and then also introduces what we envision as being pretty robust on-chain governance in the long term.
So this is really evolving the near space towards a mature governance process.
And in the full proposal, we lined out an architecture essentially for that proposal process.
It introduces a couple governing bodies, including a screening committee to help streamline and improve the quality of proposals that come through.
It includes a security council to oversee the implementation of proposals that are going directly on-chain, as well as serving as an emergency security function for potentially malicious proposals.
And then we also introduced the endorsed delegate pool,
which is a sponsored pool of delegates endorsed by the community.
Right now, that process is being done by the screening committee.
But, you know, eventually we'd love to find a way to decentralize that
process and turn it to the community as well. So that's kind of a very high level overview of
the governance structure of the House of Stake, as well as some of the new
committees and dynamics. But Jake, is there anything you wanted to touch on that I didn't go
deep enough on on your side that you think is worth pointing out?
No, I think that all sounds good. Mr. Potato, let us know if you want us to dive deeper into
any of the things Trevor just went over. Yeah, so you've mentioned screening committee a couple
of times, which is kind of a great segue to talk a bit more about it. So as TNOM was kind of hinting
that eventually you kind of want it
to kind of be a more permissionless framework
for picking and removing endorsed delegates.
And I think I've heard about a charter being put together.
So I think it would be nice to kind of talk a bit about that.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
So right now, in terms of the launch for House of Stake what we're calling House of Stake 1.0 is essentially the implementation of stage one of
this long-term vision for NIR governance. So we had contracts that were built by the FastNIR team,
and then we have the Agora team building on a front end. And then on the kind of more
operational side, Gauntlet alongside Klaus, who is a service provider to the NIR Foundation,
and alongside the NIR Foundation, we are putting together some of these guiding documents. And the screening committee is one of those documents that we're drafting,
excuse me, is one of those committees that we're drafting a charter for. And this charter will
basically give an overview of the purpose and authority as outlined in the original proposal,
talk a little bit about how we see membership and
operations, and put together a roadmap for what we hope to be elections down the road so that the
screening committee isn't just kind of appointed by the NIR Foundation, but when we feel like
governance is in a strong enough place, we can turn it over to actually be set by the community.
We can turn it over to actually be set byNIR stakers, you know, whether it's
individuals or large whales, with kind of a list of delegates that the screening committee feels
are going to be really important and aligned governors of the NIR protocol. Anyone can still be a delegate. Anyone can still receive delegation.
But over time, I actually expect this endorsed delegate status to become something that is,
you know, more or less degraded with just the power that is delegated actually on chain, right?
actually on chain, right? So I think the way to think about endorsed delegates is this is a
set up, a start at trying to signal to delegators who kind of the screening committee feels like
will be good stewards. And moving forward, we'd like to decentralize that process.
Within the next, you know, six to 12 months, I think we'll probably implement some kind of rolling evaluation. You know, one, keeping endorsed delegates accountable to the voting thresholds and engagement thresholds that have been set forth for them, as well as providing an opportunity for new delegates, people in the community who are, you know, receiving natural
delegation, getting a share of voice, making big contributions to be able to join kind of that list
of endorsed delegates. But I know I kind of rambled there, but let me know if that was helpful or if I
can dive deeper on any aspect of that. No, actually, it is quite helpful to kind of break it down.
I do see endorsed delegates as fairly important in the initial days because you kind of need stewards to evangelize and get more people on board.
So it will be a challenge at start.
I think like after a while, we should once we kind of have a very strong foundation, their roles and responsibilities can kind of evolve.
a very strong foundation, their roles and responsibilities can kind of evolve.
But like sticking, like continue to talk about the endorsed delegates, there's been some
discussions around their potential contributions and possible remunerations for them.
So I know that there's been some chatter around this.
I know that there's been some chatter around this. This mostly came out from talks at ECC. So I kind of wanted to get Gondlin's perspective on dedicate compensation. And how would you kind of propose that to kind of work going forward?
Yeah, that's a great question. So having been involved in many DAOs in the space, I think delegate compensation is something that has certainly been previously controversial and is now significantly less controversial.
controversial. And, you know, in some communities, essentially table stakes for engagement. I think
it's something that should be discussed. And it's something that the screening committee is
and the NEAR Foundation are kind of talking about. I don't want to make any, like, broad statements or
specific promises regarding, like, what this will look like like because it's still very much in
development um that being said i think what is being discussed and what was mostly discussed uh
on on site at ecc was some combination of baseline compensation for those that meet kind of the general voting and engagement requirements.
And then, you know, a process for more meaningful contributions, whether that is establishing a
program, leading a working committee that produces helpful or impactful research in the community.
is helpful or impactful research in the community. Activities like that should, I think, have some
route towards compensation. And I think this in the short term would probably be something that
would come from the near foundation outside the scope of the DAO as kind of, you know, you can
think of it as a mini grant to steward and ensure that the house of stake is keeping people engaged and folks feel like they're
being valued from a compensation perspective. That being said, Klaus, who is one of the other
contributors and partners working with the NIR Foundation, has been very excited about the DAO
setting up its own compensation infrastructure and really
more with a focus towards, I think, paid contributors, right?
Beyond like the delegate compensation, actually, how do we think about setting up, you know,
potentially entities where folks can be funded that are supported and under the DAO structure, that can give people
potentially full salaries, part-time salaries, contract work, things like this. And I think
that's something that you're seeing more and more. We see it in Arbitrum, probably most explicitly,
with quite a number of companies kind of being spun out as service providers and folks starting to be hired and poached full-time kind of from the roster of contributors uh and then we also see it
uh more and more i think in in places like uni swap uh and some of these other uh ave and some
of these other more mature dows right um so i i think that's kind of how I think of it. One being a essentially grant program and delegate compensation program and the other being infrastructure for contributors to really have a long term impact and hopefully and potentially even careers supported by the DAO in the future.
Yeah, I think, and just to kind of clarify for everyone in the audience, there hasn't
been a final decision made in this regard.
But there is like broad consensus that there should be some kind of baseline remuneration
alongside some variables around contributions that kind of provide value to the whole framework.
There's also at ECC, there was pretty big updates on the Agora side.
Agora, for folks who may not know, is responsible to kind of build the front end that's powering
the smart contracts for House of Stake.
smart contracts for house of stake.
And there's, they've been shipping pretty well
and the front end is already live on testnet.
So yeah, just kind of wanted to get your thoughts
on what do you think about the whole front end
and the tooling that Agora has built.
Yeah, sorry. Did you want me to just comment on like an update on the agora tooling or
both both an update if you have one and at the same time uh just your personal thoughts on on
how it looks like yeah absolutely um i mean we got we got a chance to play around with it and use it on testnet.
And I think the Agora team is always very talented at providing a nice UX, right? I think you get in there, you go through the workflow of staking your near, of getting vNear.
It's all broken down in a pretty clear user flow that I think will resonate well with people.
And then on the voting side,
I think they have kind of their hallmark design
that ports really well to voting on Nier as well
and really integrates with a whole new kind of contract set
that FastNier had built really smoothly on the front end side.
So props to the Accora team for getting that together.
I think it looks really good.
As far as updates, I think we're getting close.
There's, you know, many implications of the user flow when you talk about locking up Near,
of the user flow when you talk about locking up NIR,
when you talk about having multiple delegates,
endorsed delegates,
and then you have this process
where you need to stake your NIR into an LST,
stake your LST in contracts,
and then choose someone to delegate to.
So we're just refining the workflows
and trying to make it as clean as possible. But yeah, we're close to the finish line here and it looks great. I'm
really excited about it. Yeah, I've played around it myself a bit and I'm quite pleased with how
easy it is to kind of navigate different steps. Because when you explain how to stay to someone who's new to this,
there are many steps involved.
And there is a chance that you might get lost halfway through.
So I think they've done a pretty decent job at making sure everyone's kind of been walkthroughed with all the steps.
through with all the steps. But yeah, kind of touching back on the stuff that was,
that House of Stake was doing at ETC, the workshops and the rest, I kind of
wanted to get your takes around marketing and comms. Governance, as we all know, is
not, as Lane would call it, is something that is considered unsexy in Web3.
And even judging by the attendance in the space,
like if it was about something else,
about meme coins or some other exciting stuff,
we'd probably have hundreds of people join,
whereas there's only a handful of us.
So my question was,
based on your gauntlets experience
in governance and in Web3 ecosystem overall,
how can we make House of Stake more palatable
for one, people to care
and two, for people to participate in it?
Just general ideas and thoughts if you have.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I've seen a lot of DAOs come and go over time
and governance is definitely unsexy.
You know, I think depending on what DAOs you've engaged with in the past,
it can certainly be kind of traumatizing.
And a lot of people have PTSD from bad experiences.
That said, there are also really great experiences, right?
And DAOs kind of provide an opportunity to be a launchpad for people and kind of start their careers being involved as a contributor all the way up to having a full-time gig in this space,
which I think is super powerful.
So from a marketing and comms perspective,
we definitely want Near to be set up to be the ladder of those two.
And in order to do so, I really think the key goal that the DAO should have,
and I've talked with the NIR Foundation about this,
is really just having a clarity of vision of what it wants to accomplish, right?
Once you have kind of a clear roadmap for two or three things that you really want the DAO to
achieve and govern, it gives people kind of a rallying cry to get around. It allows contributors
to find places to be valuable, and it actually attracts external parties who are kind of, you know, have expertise or are well equipped to navigate those specific challenges.
impart their specific vision or priorities or goals and it becomes kind of a mess, it
gives like a nice organizational scaffolding for people to jump on.
And so I think that's something we're really excited about building.
And especially as House of Stake launches, I think we want to be working, you know, directly
with the working groups, directly with the endorsed delegates and with the NIR Foundation to make
sure that we have really clear goals and a clear vision that will help propel that marketing and
comms in a productive manner. Yeah, I agree it's going to be a challenge, but I think we are kind
of targeting the right approach in terms of like making sure everyone has one that is as clear
as possible in terms of comms on how to participate, what's going on. And there's good coordination
between all of the stakeholders, particularly the working groups, as you mentioned.
One thing that I particularly think could also attract people to participate in VE-NEAR, and that is something that I've seen a couple of mentions about, is incentives.
So I'm not sure if it was either in the original proposal or in subsequent suggestions that there were talks about having incentives for people to lock up their near as VE near.
So just wanted to get an idea on if there is anything concrete in that regard, and if
there isn't, what kind of incentives do you think we would require to make it enticing
for near holders?
Yeah, Jake, you want to jump on this one?
Yes, and my audio wasn't super good there.
So just to confirm, Mr. Potato,
we're talking about incentives
for people transitioning to v-near
to incentivize different flexibility, right?
Yes.
Yeah, so yeah, the idea of incentivizing,
you know, house of stake adoption
is, you know, cribbing from other, you know, programs that Gauntlet and other ecosystems have been using, you know, for all of DeFi now at this point, where you basically want to incentivize users to shift to the new paradigm of the governance ecosystem and use the new mechanism that will encourage growth and governance participation for NIR moving forward,
transitioning away from one-to-one voting to stake-weighted voting.
So the idea is that especially in the beginning stages of House of Stake 1.0 going live,
we want to make sure that the yield for staking your NIR tokens or your LSTs
that are integrated into House of Stake is high enough to incentivize users
to participate and get VE NEAR so that the initial proposals that are going live on the
House of Stake launch have a ton of people in the NEAR ecosystem that are ready to engage and vote
on those proposals. So if you think of these things more mathematically or quantitatively,
you can see how we might need to make sure that the yield is competitive enough, of course, not too high and not too low, so that people who are staking near or finding yield opportunities within the near ecosystem system elsewhere have, you know, the right amount of, you know, excitement to join this new mechanism.
All right.
Do we have any insights into like
what those incentives might look like?
When you say look like, do you mean like numbers?
Yeah, just like ballpark numbers, if possible.
So I don't have ballpark numbers ready to like
commit to at this moment.
I think, you know, we're thinking between like three to 6%, you know, I think is generally a good range to shoot for when you think of people who are staking stables or staking
blue chip assets.
And that's typically the yield that they are getting as well as staking yield for near.
We want this to be, you know, a safe amount of yield that's risk adjusted.
And we don't want this to be over incentivizing to, you know, have low spend efficiency for the near foundation or
the near treasury. So we're still figuring out exactly where those funds could come from and
that, you know, the budget and sources of those incentives, of course, dictates the range. But I
think that's, you know, something that's been discussed. Again, we're more so looking at this
from like an objective standpoint to make sure that the mechanism is adopted. And that's been discussed. Again, we're more so looking at this from an objective standpoint to make sure that the mechanism is adopted and that's how we'll find the right numbers.
We expect that number to fluctuate as well.
Okay.
Yeah, that's pretty insightful.
So that would be on top of your usual near-staking yield, right?
The mechanism itself is not finalized, so i can't say for sure but yes the
idea is that there's additional incentives to lock up whatever whether it's your lsts or your near
um into this uh lockup contract yeah the only reason i ask is because um people have been playing
uh with the testnet recently and there was this mention when people were locking up their NIR.
Obviously, the number displayed there is not accurate to what might be the case on mainnet.
I think last time I saw it was around 5%.
So that kind of prompted a few questions in the community around how would these incentives
look like?
But I think an equally exciting part about this spaces
would be to kind of discuss on the next steps.
So we know that we are kind of close to the finish line
to kind of get V1 out the door.
But there's, at the same time, Lane's kind of been hinting
and I think there's
been mentions in this space itself, where you're referring to the current state as V1.0.
I just kind of wanted to get your thoughts and ideas on what is Gauntlet currently working on as next steps besides in the initial rollout?
Yeah, I would love to talk about that.
So as Trevor mentioned, Gauntlet Scope is multifaceted.
We're both looking to be governance contributors and governance supporters
from more of a bureaucratic or operational standpoint, which Trevor's
mentioned with the screening committee, as well as just contributing to forum feedback
and research on growing near in general, whether that's ecosystem incentives or just responding
to proposals as House of State goes live.
We're also very excited to help the adoption of House of State grow as it launches and making sure that that launch with Agora goes well.
Beyond that, we are working with the Nier Foundation and Agora on future iterations of House of Stake.
And some parameters that are within our scope and things that we're researching right now are related to things like validator rewards and staking rewards for through house of stake.
So, you know, we, as we all know, there's a goal for the Neera Foundation and Neera
ecosystem to grow validator slots. And we're looking for ways to basically
just to dynamically adjust the parameters that lead to validator revenue and validator payments,
while also making sure that security is not jeopardized at all. And what that looks like is
putting the parameters of validator rewards and the inflation parameters under the control of
your ecosystem through house at stake. So what we'll probably anticipate is, you know,
put out some research. We're still working on that, you know, right now and thinking of mechanism
enhancements to house of stake to allow for the near community to optimize the parameters that
pay validators, make sure security and the staking protocol is still maintaining near
long success of, you know, not having any exploits while making sure that inflation spend is also optimized.
So this should lead to potential savings that could increase the near treasury,
but we're still working in the early stages of that research,
and we'll let everybody know once we have updates to share.
Awesome. Yeah, I think the evolution of, and I think this kind of also ties into the current
proposal that's been floating around with reducing near inflation to 2.5%.
Would you be willing to kind of share your thoughts on that? I know it's like
not directly related to house estate. Yeah, I would say I think that, you know,
retesting and stress testing old assumptions is always really important in DeFi. And, you know,
testing and experimenting with hypotheses of lowering the inflation percentage to limit,
you know, near token emissions, I think is a great idea. We're really excited to see that proposal,
you know, either progress and then give our own feedback on it. But it sounds like it's
directionally something that we would support. And that's exactly right. This is House of Stake 2.0 is very directly aligned and integrated with this idea.
House of Stake 2.0 basically builds on this proposal, allowing for that inflation percentage number to change based on things like market dynamics and new assets and protocols launching.
And of course, validators joining the network to secure NIRS infrastructure.
Awesome. Yeah. And my kind of final question is, when do you guys start working on this
second iteration of House of Stake, if you've not already been working on it already?
Yeah, so we're already in the process of doing research on how, aside from the end state solution of having a dynamic parameter in place to change validator rewards, the right ways to understand security monitoring, making sure that we understand what are the different ways that near security is both improved and weakened and how
parameters like these changing could affect security. So none of this is worth it or valuable
if near security takes a hit. So we're trying to find ways to maintain your security or if not
improve it while also identifying paths to reduce near emission spend. We're also testing out stress testing scenarios for different ways that the protocol could change based on these parameters changing, you know, let's say once a year or once every quarter.
So we're in the research and design phases now.
And then eventually we'll be proposing a solution to the New York community through, you know, through House of Stake, like we did for our first kind of major
proposal to the Neur ecosystem. Yeah, that's great to hear. I would like at some point to kind of
House of Stake to be more integral in making these protocol changes. But nonetheless, I think
we're kind of tinkering the waters and it seems pretty exciting to kind of
so there's been a few people in the ecosystem that have been very reluctant to change of any
sorts whereas I'm kind of of the view that we should be willing to consider other options on
the table and see if they make sense it's always nice to kind of have these discussions. So the inflation proposal is still live and it runs live till the end of the month.
So hopefully we might have a positive outcome. But if not, then I think it will be revisited
at some point. But yeah, I think that's kind of all of the questions I had.
It's been great to kind of have you on the space
to break down some of the work you've been doing behind the scenes
and look forward to hosting you in the not too distant future.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mr. Potato,
and thank you to the NIR community for having
us. Very excited to continue our research and contributions to the ecosystem and help
NIR continue to scale.
Yeah, thank you.
All right. Yeah, we don't have any questions from the audience, and I've done my best to
kind of relay any that were spotted both in the telegram chats and on the forum that
was put out so i think we could wrap it up here thanks everyone for joining and have a great rest
of your day bye-bye Thank you.
