NEAR Protocol governance votes to eliminate developer gas rebate

NEAR Protocol just rewrote its economic rulebook. The protocol’s on-chain governance body, House of Stake, passed proposal HSP-027 between June 20 and 27, 2026, voting to eliminate the developer gas rebate entirely. Starting with a nearcore upgrade expected around August 2026, every eligible execution fee on the network will be burned rather than partially returned to smart-contract owners.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin confirmed the vote’s outcome, endorsing the shift toward full fee burns as a step in the right direction for the NEAR token’s long-term economics.

What was the rebate, and why kill it now?

The 30% developer gas rebate let smart-contract owners reclaim a slice of the gas fees their contracts generated. The average rebate per contract fell from roughly 27.6 NEAR in June 2025 to just 1 to 5 NEAR per month by 2026.

Proposal HSP-027, authored by NEAR One’s Anton Astafiev, made the case that the rebate had diluted to the point of irrelevance. No significant dissent was recorded during the discussion period.

The implementation timeline is tied to the nearcore v2.14 upgrade, currently scheduled for around August 2026. Until that upgrade ships, the existing rebate mechanics remain in place.

The deflationary mechanics behind the vote

Under the old model, 30% of eligible execution fees were recycled back to contract developers. Under the new model, those same fees get burned, permanently removing NEAR from circulation.

What this means for developers and investors

For developers currently building on NEAR, if your dApp was accounting for gas rebates as any part of its revenue model, that line item disappears when nearcore v2.14 ships. For most projects, 1 to 5 NEAR per month was barely worth the accounting overhead. The governance proposal acknowledged this, with the community framing the change as a push toward more sustainable business models.

HSP-027 passed without significant opposition. Watch the August nearcore v2.14 upgrade closely, as the on-chain burn data in the weeks following implementation will be the first real-world test of how much additional supply pressure the rebate removal generates.

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