Near Protocol (NEAR)

An under-explored architectural bet NEAR made years ago was how accounts function on NEAR. While others shipped hash-based addresses, NEAR built human-readable accounts decoupled from cryptography, controlled by rotatable access keys, and not bound to a single key pair. This one early decision is what now makes Intents scale, Chain Signatures work, and quantum migration possible.

Case in point: quantum. Because NEAR accounts aren't tied to breakable cryptography, they can be easily rotated to a quantum-safe signing scheme. NEAR is adding the first post-quantum-safe signing scheme (FIPS-204) in the next protocol upgrade: https://t.co/etZZFUeAFi

The account model is just one example of NEAR's key early architectural bets.  On the @therollupco, @ilblackdragon walked through how NEAR solved the hard primitives like Chain Signatures, Intents, and privacy to lay the foundation for the agent economy. https://t.co/1dv9uHwAgW

NEAR governance protocol is going independent! -- or it is, at least, making the right moves to do so • from a ten-month $1.18M budget request • to a one-year $200K + Ⓝ60K budget request House of Stake (HoS) is a governance protocol built to become a community-driven hub for decentralized NEAR ecosystem and protocol decision-making I just cast my FOR vote on HSP-026 to establish a one-year operational budget for HoS and gradually fade its dependency on the NEAR Foundation This is not yet a fully independent status, but is an important first step and I really like how this proposal was built and managed More below +↓

2/ The first version of a 'HoS operational budget' proposal surged in April 16, with public discussions being held for over a month and a lot of community feedback The OP on gov.near[.]org had 37 comments and @akrtws hosted multiples community calls for community feedback and discussions It requested a total of $1.18M operational budget between April and December 2026: • $533.2k for operations • $150k buffer • $500k described as “skin in the game” source: https://t.co/FW0YqA0ckG +↓

3/ The current proposal now is more clean, have better per-activity descriptions and removes both the emergency buffer and the skin-in-the-game allocation The lack of buffer, however, will still make HoS dependent on the Foundation for emergencies, but I believe it makes sense as a first step while the program is still maturing and being validated Same thinking for the "skin in the game" budget source: https://t.co/29Yq4MZqgT +↓

4/ This first year of HoS operating (and reporting) with this budget will be super important to gather data and insights for the next steps I'll be watching closely Anyone who holds NEAR can participate in HoS, either directly (by staking and delegating veNEAR to themselves) or indirectly (by staking and delegating veNEAR to someone else) I currently have over 290K veNEAR from community delegations that are being used to vote on this and other proposals I also actively engage in discussions and post my reasoning having the best interest of the ecosystem in mind -- feel free to delegate veNEAR to me (vinibarbosa.near) I'm not a NEAR Foundation endorsed delegate, btw -- fully independent! https://t.co/IfrtUmG6S0

5/ I'll soon post my opinion on the "Remove the NEAR Developer Gas Rebate" proposal by Anton Puhach (NEAR One), submitted on June 15 and approved by AK Follow me here on X and on Substack (https://t.co/N8bVMUSaLZ) https://t.co/E5G8YZAD82