NEAR co-founder proposes sovereign fund to hold treasury, generate yield, and potentially cap token supply

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, has put forward a governance proposal to create what he’s calling the “NEAR Sovereign Fund,” a mechanism designed to consolidate the protocol’s treasury, generate yield, bankroll security costs, and fund public goods. The kicker: if the fund works as intended, it could pave the way for NEAR to transition to a fixed token supply. What the fund actually does The proposal, published on the NEAR Governance Forum on August 3, 2026, outlines a fund seeded with approximately 30 million NEAR tokens as its initial capital infusion. That pool would be put to work generating yield, with proceeds directed toward specific operational necessities. Those necessities include the Validator Support Program, which compensates the node operators who keep the network running. Payments to Multi-Party Computation providers, which handle critical cryptographic infrastructure, are also in scope. The fund would additionally cover broader public goods, essentially the shared infrastructure and tooling that benefits the entire NEAR ecosystem but doesn’t have a natural business model attached to it. The governance structure would run through what NEAR calls “House...