NEAR Proposes $57M Token Fund to Cut Inflation

NEAR Protocol co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin has proposed creating a protocol sovereign fund, which would use roughly 30 million NEAR tokens as its initial capital base. At current prices, this equates to around $57 million. The fund's purpose is to provide long-term sustainability for the network by using part of its returns to pay for public goods such as network security and validator support.

The proposal combines existing protocol revenue with future revenue selected through governance. This approach differs from burning revenue, which only temporarily reduces supply. Polosukhin wants to use revenue to acquire NEAR, generate yield, and create a continuous funding source.

He compared the fund's structure to sovereign wealth funds in Norway and Singapore, as well as university endowments, which preserve a capital base while using part of its returns for recurring costs. However, unlike these models, the NEAR fund would hold the network's native token and measure returns in NEAR.