NEAR Launches the NEAR Community Treasury
March 21, 2023 — Today, The Governance Working Group (“GWG”) of the NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) and the NEAR Foundation announced the launch of the NEAR Digital Collective Special Purpose Trust (the “NEAR Community Treasury” or “Community Treasury”).
The Community Treasury is intended to serve as a decentralized, community-led treasury for the NEAR Ecosystem, unlocking decentralized funding for grassroots initiatives for the first time.
The Community Treasury is vital in the delivery of the NDC’s purpose of decentralized governance of community-owned funds and is the first and most significant milestone delivered by the GWG in the formation of the NDC and NEAR ecosystem decentralized governance.
There has been a call to action by the wider community of NEAR, as well as its founders, to move past the confines and trappings of centralization, and to innovate in governance, technology development, on-chain voting and asset sharing to actualize the vision of Blockchain.
The NEAR ecosystem is made up of over 1,000 projects, regional hubs, funding nodes, infrastructure providers, and more than 20 million wallets. The NDC was established to help all those involved take an active role in how NEAR evolves.
Whether that’s how funding is allocated, how elections take place, or who represents the mosaic of interests that make up this thriving and diverse ecosystem. The NDC wants to give everyone on NEAR a voice, and for those voices to be recorded on chain.
The Community Treasury is structured within the legal framework of a purpose trust. A trust is a mechanism for holding assets so that the legal title to those assets is separated from the beneficial interest in those assets. One or more trustees are appointed as the ‘legal’ owners of the assets in question, and those trustees are bound by various duties and obligations to hold those assets either:
a) for the benefit of one or more beneficiaries;
b) to further one or more specific purposes, more on those specific purposes later
In v0 of the NDC Governance, the main role of the Community Treasury will be distributing funds to the Grassroots DAOs and working groups factually reenabling bottom-up funding in NEAR and sustaining working groups such as the GWG to continue to create, propose and deliver further NDC framework iterations. In further stages of NDC Governance the Community Treasury will follow NEAR Consent decisions made by the community under the framework of the NDC and act as a treasury mechanism for the NDC and its bodies.
The Trust Instrument sets out the duties and obligations of the Trustees and Enforcer, and also the various purposes that the NEAR Community Treasury was created to support. The Community Treasury is governed by Guernsey law at its inception (although this can be changed by the Trustees with NEAR Consent, more on that later).
What are the purposes of the Community Treasury?
The purposes of the Community Treasury are set out in Schedule 3 of the Trust Instrument, and consist of two types of purpose:
(i) Core Purposes: to support and promote the operation and/or development of the NEAR Blockchain and/or associated ecosystem. These Core Purposes cannot be changed by anyone, although new Core Purposes can be added by the Trustees with NEAR Community consent.
(ii) Subsidiary Purposes: there are various Subsidiary Purposes including to stake the majority of the Trust Fund that is NEAR denominated, and to consider and if thought fit approve funding proposals from the NEAR community. Subsidiary Purposes can be added or removed by the Trustees with NEAR Community consent.
Any assets held in the Community Treasury must therefore be used by the Trustees to support one or more of these Core and/or Subsidiary Purposes.
Who are the Trustees and Enforcer of the Community Treasury?
The initial Trustees are the following individuals:
- Alina Tustanovska
- Antonio Morales Cordoba
- Carolin Geier
- Rahmat Albariqi (Riqi)
- Rune Bentien
The initial Enforcer is Francesco Paolo Patti, who is a law professor and experienced web3 lawyer.
The Trustees have been appointed through a lengthy and rigorous vetting procedure conducted by a working group within the GWG: the Legal Working Group, a group of legal professionals with ties to the NEAR community. You can find more information on the Initial Trustee selection process here.
What assets are held by the NDC Trust?
At the outset, the Community Treasury will hold approximately 5.7m NEAR that was donated to the NDC initiative by the NEAR community (along with a nominal amount of USDT that was contributed by the NEAR Foundation as part of the administrative set-up process). Moving forwards, the NEAR Foundation (as well as other NEAR ecosystem participants) can make further allocations of assets into the Community Treasury based on the needs of the ecosystem.
How will the NDC Trust operate in practice?
The Trustees provided NEAR addresses, as well as Twitter and Telegram handles (but not physical addresses), in the Trust Instrument. They are able to make decisions as they would normally in the absence of the Trust. The Trustees control the ndctrust.sputnik-dao.near multi-sig wallet, with a majority of Trustees required to approve/sign any transaction.
How do I find out more?
About the NDC
The NDC, originally proposed by NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, is now an independent movement led by the NEAR Community. Its goal is to establish a community treasury and governance model that allows the ecosystem to collectively make decisions on everything from funding intiatives to electing representatives. NDC’s purpose is to steward NEAR towards becoming a truly decentralized network that can self-organize and self-govern.
