The proposal projects gross staking yield falling from 5.268% to 3.372% and daily issuance dropping from about 89,500 NEAR to roughly 57,300, phased in over 24 months. Security Council ratification, a 90-day grace period and a validator-adopted upgrade all come before the lower ceiling binds.
NEAR Protocol's House of Stake has approved HSP-029, a proposal that lowers the network's maximum annual token issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months. NEAR said the ballot passed on November 2. The result does not change the ceiling yet, and three separate steps stand between the vote and a lower cap.
The proposal adjusts one parameter and leaves the emissions mechanism in place. Newly issued tokens keep their existing split, 90% to staking participants and 10% to the protocol treasury. Once implementation starts, the ceiling falls by roughly 3.75 basis points each month until it reaches 1.6% in month 24. That schedule is internally consistent: the cut is 90 basis points, and 90 basis points spread evenly across 24 months is 3.75 a month.
For validators and the holders who delegate to them, the relevant number is the yield. The proposal projects gross staking yield falling from 5.268% to 3.372% once the lower ceiling is fully in effect, holding the September staking participation rate constant. Daily issuance would drop from about 89,500 NEAR to roughly 57,300. Both are projections at a fixed participation rate rather than observed outcomes, and a change in how much of the supply is staked would move the yield in either direction. The two figures also move together: 89,500 to 57,300 is a 36.0% reduction in daily issuance, and 5.268% to 3.372% is a 36.0% reduction in yield. The match is a consequence of holding participation constant, not independent confirmation of either figure.
The Block described NEAR's validator set as oversubscribed. Neither the proposal as reported nor the coverage of it supplies a validator count or models how a reward rate roughly a third lower would affect the number of operators competing for those seats, so the effect on the validator set is unquantified.
Across longer horizons the proposal puts the avoided issuance at about 11.8 million NEAR over two years and 66.1 million over six, leaving total supply roughly 4.36% smaller than it would be under the 2.5% ceiling.
The case the proposal makes is a distributional one. Roughly 57% of NEAR's supply is unstaked, and tokens issued to stakers dilute holders who are not staking. Cutting the ceiling narrows that transfer without ending it, because issuance continues at a lower rate and the 90/10 split is unchanged. The parameter being changed is a maximum rather than a target, and neither the proposal as reported nor the coverage of it states whether actual issuance currently runs at the 2.5% ceiling or below it, so the realized saving could be smaller than the headline figures.
What the vote has not done is set a date. The outcome goes to the House of Stake Security Council for review and ratification, a 90-day grace period applies, and validators have to run a protocol upgrade before the lower ceiling binds. That last requirement has a record of mattering. Ethereum's Sepolia testnet fork to a 200 million gas limit depended on validators running a client build that shipped about 16 hours beforehand, without which they would have kept proposing at the old 60 million limit, and Solana's handoff to Alpenglow was scheduled around which client implementations could support it. A governance result that depends on node operators installing software is a statement of intent until they install it.
This is the second reduction in about 13 months. The ceiling was 5% until October 2025, when it was cut to 2.5%. At 1.6% it would sit below a third of that earlier level. Starknet's vote on leaving Ethereum in October is a reminder that a near-unanimous governance tally can authorize less than its framing suggests, since a yes there funded research rather than a migration. HSP-029 is more concrete than that, since it changes a parameter rather than authorizing a study.
Altcoin Buzz reported that the proposal carried with 99.96% support through on-chain governance. None of the outlets covering the result published a link to the House of Stake voting record, so that tally rests on a single account. The proposal also commits the network to quarterly reporting of actual issuance against the published schedule and to monitoring of validator participation, which would make any gap between the plan and the outcome visible.
NEAR announced the outcome itself on November 2, and the figures above come from the proposal as described by The Block, Altcoin Buzz and Crypto Economy. Until the Security Council ratifies the result and validators upgrade, the maximum annual issuance rate on NEAR remains 2.5%.
