NEAR inflation rate halved, community vote failure still drives progress

According to Mars Finance, The Defiant reported that the NEAR protocol launched a network upgrade on October 30th, reducing the annual inflation rate of the NEAR token from 5% to approximately 2.4%. This upgrade is expected to reduce the number of newly minted tokens by nearly 60 million annually and simultaneously lower staking yields. However, the community governance vote that was supposed to authorize this change failed to meet the threshold, receiving only 45.06% support, below the technically required 66.67%, resulting in the proposal's failure to pass. Despite the vote's failure, the NEAR core team still included the related inflation halving content in the protocol upgrade, drawing criticism from some validators. Chorus One, a well-known staking service provider, stated that the core team's disregard for the governance vote results and forced the upgrade "endangers the integrity of protocol governance," urging other validators to temporarily refrain from upgrading their nodes and pointing out that this move sets a "dangerous precedent" for governance.