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NEAR governance votes to end developer gas rebates

The proposal will remove the 30% gas-fee rebate to smart contract owners, making 100% of fees burned starting with the nearcore v2.14 release expected around August 2026.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Market Structure

NEAR’s on-chain governance body, the House of Stake, passed proposal HSP-027 to eliminate the protocol’s developer gas rebate, shifting the fee model so that all network gas fees are burned rather than partly rebated to smart-contract owners, according to The Defiant.

Under the current design, 30% of gas fees generated by smart contract calls go to the contract’s owner, with the remaining 70% burned. Once the change is implemented, expected around August 2026 with the nearcore v2.14 release, the rebate will drop to 0%, meaning all gas fees are burned.

The vote drew support from delegates representing 46 votes totaling 4.66 million veNEAR, versus two votes totaling 1,819 veNEAR against, with NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin confirming the outcome. Polosukhin said the rebate no longer fits how most NEAR applications monetize, noting that many projects sponsor gas costs and recoup revenue through spreads, subscriptions or ads, and he cited an accounting issue because the rebate was hard to distinguish from ordinary user deposits.

Polosukhin also framed the decision as a test of the House of Stake’s authority over NEAR’s core economic parameters, ahead of future proposals. He said the change is expected to make NEAR token issuance more deflationary by removing a carve-out from fee burning, without altering the network’s broader value-capture model.

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