NEAR Ditches Developer Gas Rebate, Burns All Fees

The NEAR Protocol's governance body, House of Stake, has approved a proposal to eliminate its developer gas rebate mechanism. The decision was made in favor of burning all fees generated by smart contract calls on the network.

Under current protocol design, 30% of gas fees were refunded to smart contract owners, while the remaining 70% were burned. However, with the introduction of nearcore v2.14 (expected around August 2026), this refund percentage will be reduced to 0%, meaning all fees will be fully burned.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin confirmed the result and viewed it as a step towards simplifying and cleaning up the protocol going forward. He noted that the original reimbursement mechanism was designed to incentivize developers, but its design has diverged from real-world business models, where projects typically cover gas costs upfront.

This change makes NEAR's token issuance more deflationary by eliminating an exception in the fee burn mechanism and reducing the complexity of protocol economics. Polosukhin also sees it as a test for House of Stake taking control of core economic parameters on the network.