NEAR Foundation Partners With Gauntlet to Redefine Governance and Drive Long-Term Ecosystem Growth

NEAR's next phase of growth has arrived, and the NEAR Foundation (NF) is committed to helping reimagine the NEAR ecosystem governance structure to steer through this next chapter. To support NF in this endeavor, Gauntlet will harness years of research and experience in ecosystem optimization, incentive modeling, and community engagement to propose a new approach for NEAR.

Our partnership with NF is focused on two main pillars:

1. Governance — Design a new stake-weighted governance framework and prepare a community proposal
2. Ecosystem growth — Implement targeted initiatives to encourage meaningful onchain economic activity

Designing a stake-weighted governance framework

As part of our governance work with NF, we will help design and offer guidance on a new stake-weighted governance framework. To enhance ecosystem governance, engage stakeholders to participate, and ensure sustainable growth, our approach will include:

• New governance structure: Design a governance structure prioritizing transparency, accountability, and efficiency in managing funding streams, ecosystem intent budgets, and strategic upgrades to drive efficient and sustainable growth.
• Grant analysis: Analyze capital (grants) deployment and governance efforts to learn from previous efforts and optimize ongoing governance initiatives.
• Community renovation: Coordinate with delegates and other participants to ensure an active and robust governance process. This includes a) generating interest from major crypto governance actors, b) feedback on community proposals, c) feedback to service providers developing frameworks, and d) analysis of ongoing program efficacy.

We will accomplish this by researching NEAR infrastructure, the existing Near Digital Collective (NDC) model, and other governance mechanisms. We will further assess NEAR's historical capital allocations to uncover patterns and areas for optimization that can inform the structure of a new governance model. 

Driving ecosystem growth and onchain economic activity

The second major focus of our engagement will be assessing and implementing initiatives that encourage meaningful onchain economic activity. 

To do this, Gauntlet will: 

• Become an active contributor to the ecosystem governance framework and help develop and implement dynamic incentive programs. 
• Help evaluate the effectiveness of liquidity mining and incentive programs on an ongoing basis and provide recommendations for initiatives to improve liquidity. 

Central to our growth framework is an analysis of the flywheel effect — how incentives attract new users to the NEAR ecosystem.

At Gauntlet, we fully align with NEAR’s mission to build a resilient and transparent blockchain ecosystem shaped and controlled by the decentralized community of users and other stakeholders. Our work will ensure NF takes steps in the right direction to successfully reach its goals.

Gauntlet Team