Silverberg

Some news: SVRN has acquired FastNEAR. If you’ve used a wallet or an app on @NEARProtocol, there’s a good chance @fast_near answered the request. Billions of them a month. Founders @ekuzyakov and @mikedotexe built that, kept prices low so the network could grow, and now they’re building it with us. Holding NEAR gives us a stake in the network, but running part of it gives us a hand in it, and a front row view of what developers need next. More on why here: svrn.net/news/why-svrn-acqui…

Sometime in the next few years most transactions on the internet will be initiated by software acting on someone's behalf. I've been thinking about what money looks like when the buyer is a machine. So, I wrote about why NEAR is the money agents will choose: svrn.net/news/near-money-age… An agent has no tax bracket, no nationality, and no bank branch. What it needs from a monetary instrument is narrow. Finality it can verify, privacy it can rely on, security it can measure, and a supply schedule it can price without guessing what a committee might decide next year. A machine will route around any asset that fails those tests. Instantly, at scale, forever. I still contend the networks that win the agentic era are the ones that take those tests seriously. @NEARProtocol has already built the demand side. Chain Signatures for settlement on any chain. Confidential Intents for private execution. An Agent Market where agents bid, escrow, and get paid. @near_intents has settled $32B+ and cleared $1B in a single week. Since February, that revenue buys $NEAR on the open market and removes it from circulation. And the bigger market is still ahead: private inference is meeting demand for confidentiality at exactly the moment businesses are asking for it. The one piece that hasn't caught up is the monetary policy of the token. NEAR launched with 1B tokens. There are 1.3B+ today. At 2.5% issuance the network mints ~89,500 new NEAR every day, and 57% of supply isn't staked. A majority of holders pay for a transfer they don't receive. So next week SVRN is bringing one change to a House of Stake vote. Ramp max issuance from 2.5% to 1.6%, every epoch, over 24 months. Same 90/10 split. Guardrails can pause it, but can't reverse it. A permanence covenant so this is the final scheduled issuance debate. Over six years that keeps ~66M NEAR from ever existing. The costs are real and they're in the piece, like yield moving from ~5.4% to ~3.4%. When NEAR halved issuance last October, the validator set grew from 342 to 413 anyway. Phase 2 is the destination. I believe NEAR's issuance should eventually end. Fixed supply. Every NEAR a permanent share of the network, which pays for what it needs out of what it earns. No oracle, no registry, no discretionary allocation. Mechanics to be designed with the community, in the open. SVRN holds ~56M NEAR. This costs us roughly 855K NEAR a year in yield and creates no program we benefit from. I'll trade a revenue line for a balance sheet in the billions, built on an instrument no one can dilute by decision. That is the sovereignty mission applied to money. For Phase 1: read the proposal when it posts on @NEARGovernance, check the numbers, tell us where you disagree. For Phase 2: join us. The agents are coming and they'll need money. Let's build the instrument they choose. Thanks to @ilblackdragon and the @NEARProtocol community for the discussion that shaped this.

Six months ago we published our first NEAR report with @TheTieIO, built bottom-up from real fee data. With lots of momentum around NEAR's growth, I'm taking a quick look back at the report's key ideas, and what's transpired in the time since it published. We said @near_intents was real economic activity worth modeling, $14B in volume in its first 14 months. Now it’s $32B+, and its first $300M day last week. We said the Feb fee switch would turn every swap into demand for NEAR. Since then: fees have passed $50M, roughly double the $25M in our report. We said the market was valuing NEAR like any other L1 and missing the revenue flowing through Intents. Since then, the market has started to reprice it. We said a US ETF would open NEAR to traditional investors. Since then, Bitwise's NEAR ETF was just cleared to list (today). The supply side is still catching up. near:native's repricing pushed the threshold higher, so volume has more ground to cover than it did in March. An area I think we were most conservative is AI. Intents proved that NEAR's economics live in coordination between users, solvers and chains. Agents are the next wave of that coordination. Every agent paying for private inference, settling a trade or renting compute on NEAR creates demand we didn’t model. That’s coming next… For a peek back at the report, here’s the link. svrn.net/research/near-proto…