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NEAR votes to end developer gas rebate, moving to full fee burning
The House of Stake backed proposal HSP-027 with 46 votes representing 4.66 million veNEAR, and the rebate is slated to drop to 0% around August 2026.
NEAR’s on-chain governance body, the House of Stake, approved proposal HSP-027 to scrap the protocol’s developer gas rebate, changing how transaction fees are allocated on the network. The update will send all network gas fees to be burned, rather than partly rebating them to smart contract owners, with implementation expected around August 2026 alongside the nearcore v2.14 release, according to The Defiant.
Under the current design, 30% of gas fees generated by calls to a smart contract go to that contract’s owner, while 70% is burned. Once the proposal takes effect, the rebate drops to 0%, meaning all gas fees are burned, based on a delegate’s account of the vote.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the mechanism is intended to incentivize developers to build reusable components, but no longer matches how most NEAR applications monetize. He also pointed to an accounting problem, saying the rebate was difficult to separate from ordinary user deposits, and framed the vote as a test of the House of Stake’s role in governing NEAR’s economics, The Defiant reported.
The vote tally, as reported by a delegate who voted on the measure, showed 46 votes representing 4.66 million veNEAR in favor versus two votes representing 1,819 veNEAR against. The change is expected to make NEAR’s token issuance more deflationary by removing a carve-out from fee burning, although it does not alter the network’s broader value-capture model, according to The Defiant.