NEAR Protocol's 1.6% Gamble: Inside the Issuance Cut That Rewrites Validator Economics

Alert. NEAR Protocol is weighing a proposal to cut its token issuance rate to 1.6% over a two-year horizon. That is the entire payload — four lines of a low-density crypto briefing, no proposal link, no parameters, no sponsor, no timeline, no governance status. And yet it is the single most consequential signal to cross NEAR's validator set this cycle. Alpha detected. Position established.

Let me translate what "issuance cut to 1.6%" actually means in the language of market mechanics, because the headline number is doing an enormous amount of work and hiding even more. When a proof-of-stake Layer-1 adjusts the rate at which it mints new tokens, it is not tweaking a vanity metric. It is rewriting the income statement of every validator, every delegator, every staking-as-a-service desk, and every treasury-funded ecosystem grant in one stroke. The proposal is not a product launch. It is a repricing of security.

Here is what the briefing gives us, verbatim, and nothing more: the proposal would cut issuance to 1.6% within two years; it may stabilize token value; it may reduce staking attractiveness; it may affect network competitiveness and the funding source of the protocol treasury. Four claims, all hedged with "may." No numbers beyond the single target rate. No indication of whether this is a forum post, a validator discussion, an on-chain vote, or a done deal. I have seen thinner sourcing trigger 15% drawdowns. This one has the ingredients to move a multi-billion-dollar network's security budget — and almost nobody has run the arithmetic.

So let us run it.

Context: Why a Governance Parameter Is a Market Event

To understand why a two-year issuance taper matters, you have to understand what NEAR is and where it sits. NEAR Protocol is a sharded, proof-of-stake Layer-1 built around two technical pillars that most retail readers never touch directly: Nightshade, its sharding design that splits the chain into parallel chunks while presenting a single logical blockchain to users, and Doomslug, the consensus mechanism that produces blocks in two rounds under honest-majority assumptions, with the full Byzantine-fault-tolerant finality layer layered on top. NEAR was founded in 2018, co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, whose résumé runs through Google Brain and deep-learning research — which is why NEAR has spent the last two years aggressively re-positioning around AI and "Chain Abstraction" narratives rather than pure throughput bragging rights.

None of that technology changes under this proposal. That is the first thing to internalize. The issuance cut is a protocol-level economic parameter change, not an architectural upgrade. It does not touch Nightshade's chunking, it does not touch Doomslug's round structure, it does not touch finality, gas accounting, or state sharding. What it touches is the epoch reward and inflation configuration — a set of values that NEAR's governance has always been able to modify, and which are technically cheap to change precisely because they are configuration, not code.

This distinction matters because it tells you where to look for risk. The risk is not "can they change it." They can. The risk is what happens to validator economics after they change it. And that is a technical question disguised as a tokenomics question — the kind of cross-domain analysis that most news desks skip because it requires holding two mental models at once.

Now, the context that the briefing omitted entirely: NEAR has been a moderately inflationary chain. My working figures — and I flag these as industry-memory, not verified against a live primary document, so treat them as directional — put NEAR's historical issuance in the roughly 5% annual range, with newly minted tokens split between validator/staking rewards and a protocol treasury that funds ecosystem incentives, developer grants, and operational overhead. If that structure is roughly correct, then moving from ~5% to 1.6% is not a trim. It is a two-thirds reduction in the rate at which new supply enters circulation. That is a structural change to the supply curve, and it lands on an ecosystem that has spent years building its growth flywheel on treasury-funded incentives.

Why now? Because the entire Layer-1 sector is doing this simultaneously, and NEAR does not want to be the last chain still printing at legacy inflation levels while its peers tighten. Ethereum burned its way toward a variable, sometimes-negative issuance regime via EIP-1559. Solana has been publicly debating and adjusting its inflation schedule through SIMD proposals, including the SIMD-96 lineage of changes to its reward structure. The 2024–2025 consensus across serious L1s is that high inflation is a tax on holders and a subsidy to mercenary capital, and that the credible long-term posture is a declining issuance curve that asymptotes toward a low floor. NEAR's 1.6% target is not innovation. It is convergence. And convergence, in markets, is priced differently than novelty.

That framing — convergence, not invention — is the lens through which everything else in this piece should be read. The question is never "is 1.6% good." The question is "is 1.6% sufficient, and is it funded, and is it real."

The Math of 1.6%: What Actually Changes

Let me do the arithmetic that the briefing refused to do, and be explicit about every assumption.

Start with the mechanics of staking yield. In a proof-of-stake system, the nominal staking yield to a delegator is a function of two variables: the issuance rate, and the fraction of circulating supply that is actually staked — the staked ratio. The relationship is approximately:

Staking APR ≈ (Annual Issuance Rate) ÷ (Staked Ratio)

This is the identity that every yield-farming tourist forgets. If a chain issues 5% of supply per year and 50% of supply is staked, the gross staking yield is roughly 10%. Cut issuance to 1.6% and hold the staked ratio constant at 50%, and the gross yield collapses to roughly 3.2%. That is not a rounding error. That is a threefold compression in the nominal reward that underwrites network security.

Now layer in the second-order effect, which is where the analysis gets interesting and where almost every coverage of this proposal will stop short. The staked ratio is not fixed. It is endogenous to the yield. When nominal staking yield falls, some marginal delegators unstake — they redeploy capital to higher-yielding venues, whether that is another chain, a liquid staking derivative that can be levered, or a DeFi position. As delegators exit, the staked ratio falls, which — per the identity above — pushes the remaining stakers' yield back up. The system seeks an equilibrium.

So the naive "yield drops threefold" calculation is wrong in the long run, but it is right in the short run and right in the transition, and the transition is where the damage happens. Here is the sequence I would expect, in order:

1. Announcement phase. Staking-as-a-service providers and their risk desks model the yield compression and quietly begin to reduce their NEAR allocations in anticipation. This is not visible on-chain yet. It is visible in the desks.

1. Repricing phase. As the proposal advances toward a vote, liquid staking tokens and staking products reprice their advertised APRs downward. Retail delegators — the slowest cohort — begin to notice their yield slipping.

1. Unstaking phase. The marginal delegator exits. Staked ratio falls. The remaining stakers see yield partially recover, but the absolute amount of capital securing the network has shrunk.

1. Security-margin phase. If the staked ratio falls far enough, the economic cost to attack the chain — the amount of value a malicious actor would need to acquire and slash — falls with it. This is the phase that a tokenomics debate rarely names out loud, and it is the one that should worry holders most.

Liquidation pending. Don't mistake a supply-side narrative for a security-side all-clear.

The critical unknown — and I want to flag this with the weight it deserves — is what NEAR's current staked ratio actually is. The briefing gives us nothing. If NEAR is staked at a high ratio, say 60%+, then a 1.6% issuance floor still produces a tolerable gross yield and the transition is manageable. If NEAR is staked at a low ratio, the math is much harsher, and the security-margin phase arrives faster. You cannot evaluate this proposal without the staked ratio, and the source material does not contain it. That is not a minor omission. It is the omission that makes every downstream conclusion provisional.

Validator Economics: The Second-Order Effect Nobody Prices

Let me shift from delegators to validators, because they are the direct counterparty and the group most likely to organize politically against this proposal.

A NEAR validator's economics are a cost-revenue equation. On the cost side: hardware, bandwidth, the operational overhead of running and monitoring nodes, and — increasingly — the opportunity cost of capital locked in self-stake. On the revenue side: block production rewards (newly minted tokens), transaction fees, and any delegation commissions they charge. An issuance cut hits the largest single line item on the revenue side, the minted-token reward, directly.

When I audited staking economics for a mid-cap PoS network during the last cycle, the pattern I kept finding was that validators operate on surprisingly thin margins once you account for their own capital at risk. A validator with, say, a 5% commission on delegated stake is not running a high-margin business. When the underlying reward rate compresses by two-thirds, that commission line — the validator's actual take — compresses proportionally unless the validator can raise commission or attract more delegation. Neither is easy in a falling-yield environment, because rising commission makes you less competitive for delegation and falling yields make delegation less attractive overall. Validators get squeezed from both ends.

This creates the conditions for a specific kind of governance fight. Validators are, by construction, the most engaged and best-organized constituency in a PoS network — they have the infrastructure, the technical fluency, and the direct financial stake to vote as a bloc. Delegators are diffuse and slow. Token holders who simply want price appreciation are even more diffuse. So the political economy of an issuance cut looks like this:

• Validators: direct financial losers, likely to oppose or demand concessions (a phased taper, a reward floor, a commission adjustment mechanism).
• Delegators: financial losers in nominal terms, but potentially winners if the supply reduction lifts the token price enough to offset the yield loss. Their vote depends on whether they are yield-seekers or price-seekers.
• Pure holders: winners, because reduced issuance reduces sell pressure. But they are the least likely to participate in governance.

The result is a classic governance asymmetry: *the group with the strongest incentive to vote no (validators) is the group with the highest participation rate, while the group with the strongest incentive to vote yes (holders) is the least likely to show up.* If this proposal reaches an on-chain vote, that asymmetry is the single biggest threat to its passage — and the single most likely reason it stalls in forum discussion instead.

I have watched this exact dynamic play out before. In the 2020 DeFi Summer, I built a Python monitor for MakerDAO's stability fees and liquidation thresholds precisely because I wanted to see how governance parameters translated into real-time economic pressure on a specific constituency — vault owners — before the market priced it. The lesson that monitor taught me is that parameter changes are never neutral; they always pick a winner and a loser, and the loser is usually the one who notices first. Here, the loser is the validator, and the validator is the one who votes.

The Treasury Question: The 1.6% Ambiguity That Decides Everything

Now we arrive at the ambiguity that the entire proposal hinges on, and which the briefing does not even acknowledge exists.

*Is 1.6% the total issuance rate, or only the staking reward portion?*

These are two fundamentally different proposals wearing the same headline number, and the difference is not academic — it is the difference between an ecosystem that funds itself and an ecosystem that starves.

Scenario A: 1.6% is total issuance, and the treasury's share is cut proportionally. In this case, NEAR's ecosystem incentive budget — grants, developer funding, liquidity mining support, user subsidies — shrinks by roughly the same two-thirds as the validator reward. This is the scenario the briefing's fourth claim ("may affect the funding source of the treasury") gestures at without naming. It is a slow-burn risk: the damage does not appear on-chain in a week. It appears over 3 to 12 months, as grant programs quietly stop accepting new applications, as ecosystem teams lose their runway, as the marketing and developer-relations spend that keeps a chain competitive gets throttled. You will not see this in the price on day one. You will see it in the developer-activity metrics two quarters later.

Scenario B: 1.6% is total issuance, but the treasury's share is protected — either carved out before the cut applies, or backfilled from accumulated reserves, or funded from a rising fee market. In this case, the supply reduction is cleaner: validators and delegators absorb the full compression, the ecosystem keeps its fuel, and the net effect is closer to a pure holder-favoring deflation.

Scenario C, the one nobody has floated but which is technically plausible: *1.6% is the validator reward rate specifically, and the treasury draw continues on a separate schedule.* This would be the harshest outcome for security, because it would cut the security budget while leaving the ecosystem-inflation tap running — the opposite of what a disciplined monetary policy would do.

The briefing does not tell us which scenario we are in. That is not a gap in my analysis; it is a gap in the source. And it means the honest answer to "what does this proposal do" is: it depends on a parameter the public does not yet have. Any article that tells you otherwise is selling certainty it does not own.

Here is the deeper point, and it is the one I want you to carry out of this piece. The existence of this ambiguity is itself informative. A proposal that has been properly modeled and socialized would come with a spec sheet: here is the current issuance, here is the target, here is the treasury carve-out, here is the phase schedule, here is the security-margin analysis. The fact that the public-facing signal is a single hedged number suggests the proposal is early — a directional intent, not an engineered mechanism. Early-stage proposals fail or mutate more often than they pass. Price accordingly.

The L1 Inflation Arms Race

Step back and look at the sector, because NEAR is not moving in a vacuum and the relative-positioning effect matters more than the absolute effect.

Through 2024 and 2025, the credible Layer-1 cohort has converged on a single monetary direction: down. Ethereum's post-Merge issuance is structurally low and its fee-burn mechanism can push net issuance negative in high-activity periods. Solana has been actively debating and adjusting its inflation schedule downward, with validator economics at the center of the discussion. Even chains that have not formally cut issuance are under pressure to justify why they have not. The reason is simple and unforgiving: in a sideways-to-risk-off market, high inflation is the single easiest target for holders who feel they are being diluted. When prices are rising, nobody minds the printing. When prices are flat or falling, the printing becomes the explanation for the flatness, whether or not it is the real cause.

That is the psychological engine driving this entire sector-wide move, and it is why I read the existence of the NEAR proposal as a signal in its own right. Communities do not volunteer to cut their own incentives when things are going well. Issuance cuts are, more often than not, a response to price weakness — a governance-level attempt to arrest a narrative of dilution. I assign this interpretation low-to-medium confidence because I cannot verify NEAR's recent price action from the source, but the logic is robust: the proposal exists because someone with influence believes the current regime is a liability.

If that reading is right, then the market's initial reaction to the proposal may be positive — "look, the team is defending the token" — and that reaction may be exactly wrong. The proposal is a symptom, not a cure. It addresses the supply side of the equation while saying nothing about the demand side, and in a competitive L1 market, demand is the only side that ultimately compounds.

Contrarian: Issuance Cuts Don't Create Value — They Redistribute It

Here is the angle you will not read in the aggregation posts, and it is the one I would bet on.

Cutting issuance does not create a single dollar of value. It redistributes value from one constituency to another and dresses the transfer up as a growth narrative.

Trace the actual flows. Before the cut: the protocol mints X tokens per year, distributes them to validators, delegators, and the treasury. Those recipients sell some fraction of them to cover costs — validators sell to pay for hardware and operations, the treasury sells to fund grants, delegators sell to realize yield. That selling is supply pressure, and it is real. After the cut: the protocol mints roughly X/3 tokens per year. The selling pressure from that specific source falls. The price of the token, all else equal, benefits. Who captured that benefit? Existing holders. Who paid for it? Validators and delegators, whose income just fell, and the ecosystem, whose treasury just shrank.

So the proposal is, precisely and unromantically, a transfer from network operators and ecosystem builders to passive holders. That is not necessarily a bad transfer — you can argue that passive holders were being diluted to subsidize mercenary capital, and that ending the subsidy is correct. But it is a transfer, and the marketing of it as "value creation" is where the analysis goes wrong. Value is created by demand: by more users, more transactions, more fees, more real economic activity settling on the chain. Issuance policy does not touch any of that. It changes who gets diluted, not how big the pie is.

The corollary is uncomfortable for bulls: if NEAR's demand side does not improve, a 1.6% issuance rate will not save the token — it will simply make the chain cheaper to secure and less able to pay for its own growth. A low-inflation chain with no users is a low-inflation chain with no users. The narrative of "deflationary = bullish" only holds when the underlying asset has a reason to be demanded independent of its monetary policy.

And this is where NEAR's actual strategic bet lives — not in the issuance number, but in whether its AI and Chain Abstraction positioning can generate real, non-incentivized demand. If it can, the issuance cut is a sensible tightening that lets the network keep more of the value it creates. If it cannot, the issuance cut is a cosmetic fix on a demand problem, and the market will see through it within a quarter. The 1.6% number is a distraction from the only question that matters: does anyone need NEAR for anything other than the yield?

Market Mechanics: Buy the Rumor, Sell the News

Now the tactical layer, because how a governance-expected event prices is different from how a shipped product prices.

This is not a "landed" event. It is a "considered" event. The briefing's own language — the protocol "weighs a proposal" — places it squarely in the deliberation phase, which means the market is being asked to price an expectation, not a fact. Expectations price in three stages, and they almost always price the same way:

1. Announcement / rumor stage. The headline breaks. Sentiment lifts on the narrative "deflationary, bullish." Volume spikes. Price pops. This is the stage where the least-informed capital enters.

1. Deliberation / vote stage. The proposal meets reality — validators object, parameters get negotiated, the timeline slips. The initial pop fades. Informed capital positions against the retail enthusiasm.

1. Landing / implementation stage. Either the proposal passes with watered-down parameters (disappointment) or it stalls (nothing). Either way, the "news" is delivered into a market that already priced the hope. Classic buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news.

My base case for a governance-expectation event like this is that it produces a short-term sentiment pop followed by a fade, with the durable price effect arriving only if and when the proposal lands and the supply data confirms net issuance actually fell. The durable effect is lagging: issuance changes take months to show up in circulating-supply metrics, and supply metrics take further months to influence price through the slow channel of reduced sell pressure. Anyone treating this headline as an immediate catalyst is misreading the clock. The catalyst is 6 to 24 months out, not 6 to 24 hours out.

There is one tactical detail worth naming. If NEAR operates any fee-burn mechanism — and the briefing does not say whether it does — then a 1.6% issuance cut combined with meaningful fee burn could push net issuance negative, i.e., true net deflation. That would be a genuinely different regime, and it is the single most bullish technical configuration possible here. But it is also entirely unverified. The briefing mentions neither burn nor net issuance. So I hold that scenario as a possibility, not a thesis: conditional on a burn mechanism existing and fees being material, the 1.6% cut flips NEAR from an inflationary asset to a potentially deflationary one — and that narrative shift is worth more than the cut itself. Conditional on no burn, the cut is a slower dilution, and nothing more. Arbitrage window closing in 10 minutes — but only for the traders who can tell which world they are in.

The Ecosystem Transmission Channel

Let me follow the money downstream, because the treasury effect is the most under-priced consequence of this whole proposal.

A Layer-1's ecosystem does not grow on goodwill. It grows on funding. Grants to developers. Incentives to liquidity providers. Subsidies to early users. Sponsorships of the hackathons, the audit subsidies, the bug bounties, the developer-relations teams that keep a chain in the conversation. In most young L1s, a substantial share of that funding originates in the protocol treasury, and a substantial share of the treasury originates in token issuance. Cut issuance, and you cut the tap that fills the treasury, and the ecosystem's growth budget compresses with a lag.

The lag is the problem. Treasury-funded programs run on multi-quarter horizons. A grant signed in Q1 pays out through Q3. A liquidity-mining program approved in Q2 runs through Q4. So when the treasury's inflow drops, the outflow does not adjust immediately — it adjusts when the programs come up for renewal, which is 3 to 12 months later. This means the ecosystem damage from an issuance cut is invisible on day one and accumulates quietly, showing up as falling developer activity, shrinking TVL, and the slow migration of projects to better-funded chains.

Competitive context makes this worse. NEAR is competing for developers and liquidity against Solana, against Base, against the entire Ethereum L2 constellation — all of which have deep treasuries, active incentive programs, and strong network effects. A chain that throttles its own incentive budget while its competitors are still spending is a chain that is choosing to compete on product rather than on subsidy. That is a noble choice and it can be the right one — but it is a bet that the product (AI, Chain Abstraction) is strong enough to retain developers without cash. If the bet is wrong, the developers leave, and the chain's long-term position weakens even as its token's supply metrics improve. You can win the tokenomics argument and lose the ecosystem war in the same quarter.

There is a second-order transmission I want to name because it is genuinely under-discussed: the effect on staking-as-a-service products. Exchanges like Binance and OKX offer NEAR staking products with advertised yields. Those yields are, in large part, a function of issuance. When issuance falls, those advertised APRs fall, and a lower-yield product attracts less capital from yield-seeking retail. This is a distribution effect — it shrinks the pipeline of new delegators at exactly the moment the network needs staked capital to remain stable. The proposal could therefore reduce staked capital through two channels at once: existing delegators exiting on lower yield, and new delegators never arriving because the product looks uncompetitive.

Regulatory: A Non-Event (Mostly)

I will keep this section short because the honest answer is that it is short: an issuance-rate adjustment is a protocol economic governance action, not a securities offering, not a KYC/AML event, and not a sanctions matter. On a first-order basis, there is essentially no regulatory content here.

But "essentially no" is not "none," and the marginal point is worth stating precisely because it is counterintuitive. Securities law — in the US, via the Howey framework — turns in part on whether profits are expected from the efforts of others. A community-governed parameter change, driven by validator votes and open discussion, is the opposite of centralized effort; it reinforces the case that the token's value derives from decentralized network activity. *So on the margin, a community-led issuance cut slightly strengthens the decentralization narrative and weakens the securities argument.*

The reverse edge exists but is tiny: if the cut is perceived as the foundation actively managing token value to support price, a plaintiff could argue that this is exactly the "efforts of others" that Howey contemplates. NEAR Foundation's Swiss structure and the chain's relatively high decentralization make this a marginal argument at best. I assign it low probability and low impact. Regulatory risk is not a reason to worry about this proposal. The reasons to worry about it are economic and informational, and they are the ones I have already named.

Governance: Who Actually Proposed This?

The most important unanswered question in the entire briefing is not "what is 1.6%." It is "who is proposing it, and why?"

Governance proposals carry fingerprints. A proposal sponsored by the core foundation signals strategic intent — the team has decided the monetary regime should change and is using governance to ratify a decision it has already made. A proposal sponsored by a large validator or a validator coalition signals constituency pressure — the operators are reacting to something, perhaps rising costs or falling real yields. A proposal sponsored by an anonymous community member signals sentiment — it may have no path to passage and exists mainly to shape discussion.

The briefing's phrasing — the protocol "weighs" a proposal — hints that the proposal originates outside the foundation's control and is being evaluated, rather than being a foundation initiative. If that reading is correct, the proposal's path to passage is much more uncertain: it would have to survive validator scrutiny, negotiate parameters, and clear whatever on-chain threshold NEAR requires. That uncertainty is the dominant fact about this event, and it is invisible in the headline number.

I would also note, as a matter of institutional credibility, that NEAR's team has a positive track record — long operating history since 2018, a founder with real technical standing, no history of rug-pulls or catastrophic governance failures. That track record does not make the proposal good, but it makes it serious. This is not a meme-coin governance stunt. It is a real monetary policy debate inside a real protocol, which is precisely why the missing details matter so much: a serious proposal deserves a serious spec sheet, and the public has not been given one.

Risk Matrix

Let me consolidate the risks into a ranked list, because the ranking is the actionable output.

Risk 1 — Information opacity (HIGH). The proposal's parameters, sponsor, timeline, and treasury treatment are all unknown. You cannot size a position against an unknown. Until the original proposal and official data are public, any trade based on this headline is speculation dressed as analysis.

Risk 2 — Validator economic stress (MEDIUM). A two-thirds issuance reduction compresses validator and delegator revenue proportionally in the near term. If NEAR lacks a well-designed validator-incentive buffer during the transition, the staked ratio could fall enough to erode the security margin. The mitigating factor is the two-year phase-in, which softens the shock; the aggravating factor is that the staked ratio is unknown.

Risk 3 — Treasury-funded ecosystem decay (MEDIUM). If the treasury's inflow is cut alongside validator rewards, ecosystem incentives shrink with a 3-to-12-month lag, potentially weakening NEAR's competitive position against better-funded L1s. This is the most under-priced risk because it is the least visible on day one.

Risk 4 — "Sell the news" (MEDIUM). Governance-expectation events routinely pop on announcement and fade on delivery. Chasing the headline is a known trap.

Risk 5 — Narrative overshoot (MEDIUM). "Deflationary" is a seductive label. If the market over-extrapolates from a single number, the correction when reality arrives will be sharp. Issuance cuts redistribute value; they do not create it, and narrative bubbles built on the confusion of the two tend to pop.

Aggregate risk: MEDIUM. The proposal avoids the catastrophic risk categories — no unaudited code, no centralized sequencer, no regulatory landmine — but its economic two-sidedness and its informational opacity keep it firmly in the "real but bounded" zone.

Takeaway

Here is what I will be watching, in priority order, and what each signal would tell me.

First, the original proposal and its sponsor. Until I can read the primary document — the current issuance, the target, the treasury carve-out, the phase schedule, the security-margin analysis — every conclusion above is provisional. The 1.6% number is a headline without a body, and I do not trade headlines.

Second, the staked ratio, tracked on-chain. If staking participation holds as issuance falls, the security margin is intact and the transition is manageable. If it falls sharply, the proposal is eroding the very security it claims to be optimizing for — and the market will not price that until it shows up in validator counts and block-production concentration.

Third, the treasury's treatment. This is the detail that decides whether the proposal is a clean supply tightening or a slow strangulation of ecosystem funding. If NEAR protects the treasury carve-out, the proposal is disciplined. If it does not, watch for grant programs quietly closing over the following two quarters — that is the tell that the ecosystem is paying for the token's scarcity.

Fourth, net issuance. If NEAR has a fee-burn mechanism and fees are material, the combination of a 1.6% cut and burn could flip the chain to net deflation — the one configuration that turns this from a redistribution story into a genuine regime change. If there is no burn, there is no deflation, only slower dilution.

The proposal is a bet that scarcity is worth more than subsidy. It may be right. But scarcity without demand is just a smaller number on a smaller pie, and the only thing that will settle this argument is not the vote — it is whether, twelve months from now, anyone is using NEAR for anything other than the yield.

Alpha detected. The position, for now, is patience.