Near’s emission vote misses threshold, triggering governance crisis

The post Near’s emission vote misses threshold, triggering governance crisis appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

NEAR Protocol, the Layer 1 blockchain, is facing a major disagreement amongst its community members over inflation reduction. The community is divided about how many new NEAR tokens should be printed every year. For months, people in the community have been talking about cutting the network’s inflation rate from 5% to 2.5%. The goal was to balance NEAR token emissions with generated fees. Near is operating at a loss At the moment, the NEAR Protocol pays around $140 million worth of tokens annually to the network validators. But this amount does not make sense compared to NEAR’s total value locked (TVL) and generated revenue. The protocol has around $162 million in total value locked (TVL). To make things worse, NEAR Protocol has a lifetime revenue of only $17 million since its inception in 2020. The protocol generated $259,116 in revenue in the last 30 days based on DeFiLlama data. Securing the network is expensive compared to the generated revenue. That’s why the community is trying to fix this issue. They voted on reducing the inflation rate from 5% to 2.5%. More than 50% of voters said yes, but that’s not enough. The voting result should hit a supermajority, which is 66.67% or more. This is part of the protocol’s required rules to count the proposal as an official change. The vote has technically failed to reduce NEAR’s inflation. Devs might cut NEAR emission Some of NEAR’s core developers are hinting that they might still include the emission cut in the next software update anyway. A validator group called Chorus One called that out, saying it’s basically breaking the rules. They wrote on X, “We believe this sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the integrity of NEAR. It gives the impression that decisions can be unilaterally enforced by the core team.”…