NEAR’s House of Stake has passed proposal HSP-027, removing the protocol’s developer gas rebate and redirecting all network gas fees to burn.
Under the current design, 30% of gas paid when a smart contract is called goes to the contract owner, while the other 70% is burned. According to a delegate who participated in the vote, that split will change once nearcore v2.14 goes live, with the rebate dropping to 0%. The release is expected around August 2026, which would leave 100% of gas fees subject to burn.
Vote passed by a wide margin
The result was decisive. There were 46 votes in favor, representing 4.66 million veNEAR, versus 2 votes against, representing 1,819 veNEAR. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin confirmed the outcome on Monday, calling it a step toward making NEAR Protocol “simpler” and “cleaner.”
Why NEAR is removing the rebate
NEAR’s developer relations account had flagged the vote in early July and warned builders not to include the gas reward in their dApp budgets. The project’s governance account described the proposal as an effort to reduce “protocol complexity” and cut “misaligned incentives” aimed at developers.
Polosukhin said the rebate was originally created to encourage developers to build reusable components. He also said the mechanism no longer reflects how most NEAR applications generate revenue. In many cases, teams pay gas costs themselves and then recover that spending through spreads, subscriptions, or advertising rather than relying on on-chain rebates.
He also pointed to an accounting issue, saying the rebate can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary user deposits.
A test run for economic governance
Polosukhin described the vote as a “great test” for House of Stake as it takes over NEAR’s core economic parameters. He said he was glad to have a clear governance process for the economic model of $NEAR ahead of future proposals.
The change removes one exception from the fee-burn framework, making NEAR’s issuance model more deflationary. At the same time, it does not alter the network’s broader value-capture model.
Part of a wider reset in L1 token economics
As competition among L1 networks intensifies in 2026, the move puts NEAR in a broader shift from subsidy-based token incentives toward deflationary design. The earlier idea of rewarding developers through fee rebates has increasingly clashed with a market where application teams often front gas costs and rely on the product itself to generate income.
With the rebate removed, NEAR is leaning more heavily on burn as the direct mechanism affecting token supply. Each on-chain transaction now reduces circulating supply rather than channeling part of the fee to a specific class of participants. For token holders, that creates a cleaner deflationary structure. For developers, it pushes the incentive question back to whether the product can create value on its own.