NEAR's annual inflation rate is cut in half, community vote fails but still drives progress.

According to ChainCatcher news and The Defiant report, the NEAR protocol launched a network upgrade on October 30, reducing the annual inflation rate of NEAR tokens from 5% to about 2.4%. This upgrade is expected to decrease the number of newly minted tokens by nearly 60 million each year, while also lowering the staking yield. However, the community governance vote originally scheduled to authorize this change did not meet the threshold, only receiving 45.06% support, which is below the technically required 66.67%, resulting in the proposal not being approved. Despite the vote failing, the NEAR core team still incorporated the relevant halving of inflation into the protocol upgrade, leading to criticism from some validators. The well-known staking service provider Chorus One stated that the core team ignored the results of the governance vote and forcibly promoted the upgrade, “jeopardizing the integrity of the protocol governance,” and called on other validators to refrain from upgrading their nodes, pointing out that this action sets a “dangerous precedent” for governance.