NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Burn

Every NEAR transaction pays gas in NEAR and none of it goes to validators: fees on plain transfers are destroyed entirely, fees from contract execution are split 30% rebated to the contract's account and 70% destroyed. Network-wide, DefiLlama's holdersRevenue/dailyFees ratio is exactly 70.0%, so this ledger applies a 0.7 burn share to nearblocks' daily gas-fee total — the 3,300,708 NEAR figure is 70% of 4.72M NEAR in fees collected since genesis.

Against supply: on-chain total is 1,305,283,786 NEAR (3 Sep 2026) versus 1B at genesis; 308.6M minted for validators and the protocol treasury, 3.30M burned — 93 NEAR minted for every 1 destroyed.

Burn by year: 2020 (164 days) 2,381; 2021 59,531; 2022 260,145; 2023 480,693; 2024 1,229,113 — the peak year at 3,358/day; 2025 1,002,191 (2,746/day); 2026 to 31 Aug 266,654 (1,093/day). The three years 2023–2025 make up 82% of the total; 2026 is on track to be the lowest year since 2022.

Through November 2023 NEAR burned ~1,650/day. On 29 Nov it jumped to 12,224, on 30 Nov to 87,848 NEAR — the all-time record, 53× the normal pace and 2.7% of six years of burning — then 1 Dec 62,065, 2 Dec 5,573, and 3 Dec back to 1,022. The four days 29 Nov–2 Dec 2023 destroyed 167,710 NEAR, 5.1% of the lifetime total, in the NEAT inscription frenzy (the NRC-20 standard) as users wrote tokens on-chain through millions of mint transactions.

The frenzy left a long tail: November and December 2023 burned 144,966 and 146,359 — triple October (43,695). A second wave in late March–early April 2024 (30 Mar–6 Apr all at 6,400–7,035/day; 3 Apr: 7,035) lifted March 2024 to 137,966 and April to 129,458, coinciding with NEAR's memecoin season. All eight top days outside the NEAT episode fall in that week plus 29 Dec 2023 (7,548).

From May 2024 to October 2025 the curve flattened: 85–113K per month in 2024, then 102,508 (Jan 2025) sliding to 72,467 (Nov 2025). No burn rounds, no buybacks — only network usage times a fixed gas price of 100M yoctoNEAR per gas, so the burn line is a faithful copy of gas consumed.

Q1 2026 burned a steady 1,870–1,940 NEAR/day (January 59,708; March 59,236). On 1 Apr 2026 it was 1,444, on 2 Apr just 547 — and it stayed there: April 17,374 (579/day), May 19,680, June 20,431, July 17,524, August 17,825. Nearblocks shows the cause: daily transactions fell from 3.5–4.6M (late March) to 1.06M (2 Apr) and then ~0.9M, gas consumed fell proportionally, while active accounts held steady (~135K).

A source of roughly 3M transactions a day switched off within a day without taking any users with it — the signature of a high-volume contract or bot stopping, not users leaving. This ledger has not identified the contract; nearcore 2.11.0, released the same day (1 Apr, raising the contract gas limit from 300 TGas to 1 PGas), did not change the gas price and so is not the cause.

The lowest 2026 burn day was 25 Apr at 395 NEAR; the August pace is ~575/day, 31 Aug: 862 NEAR in fees × 0.7. Nansen recorded Q2 2026 averaging 854K transactions a day. At this level a full year burns under 220K NEAR — 0.017% of supply.

NEAR mints validator rewards at the end of each epoch, targeting 5% a year of total supply: 2021 50.2M, 2022 53.9M, 2023 56.4M, 2024 59.1M (4.9% of start-of-year supply). The daily series shows the epoch rhythm: 2025 days swing between 139K and 212K because some days close three epochs and some four, each ~53K NEAR.

On 30 Oct 2025 nearcore v2.9.0 activated a 2.5% annual inflation parameter. Minting on 29 Oct: 139,807; 30 Oct: 83,606; from November 2025 an average of 86–89K/day, ~26.5K per epoch — exactly half. October 2025 minted 5.17M, November 2.59M. Worth recording: the community vote that closed on 1 Aug 2025 reached only ~45% in favor, below the 66.67% threshold — the change still shipped in the release and took effect as validators upgraded.

Even after the halving the balance tilts hard: the trailing 12 months minted 36.87M NEAR and burned 549,401 — 67:1; the trailing 90 days 7.90M versus 52,852 — 149:1, since burning fell further after April 2026 while minting is fixed by parameter. Breaking even at the current pace would need ~88K NEAR burned a day — the NEAT record day, every day.

On 15 Jun 2026 House of Stake — NEAR's on-chain governance body — received HSP-027 to lower the developer rebate from 30% to 0%. The vote of 29 Jun–3 Jul 2026 passed with 46 votes (4.66M veNEAR) for and 2 (1,819 veNEAR) against; the new burn share is slated for nearcore v2.14, targeted for August 2026. As of 3 Sep 2026 mainnet still runs 2.13.3, protocol 86, so this ledger keeps the 0.7 share and will switch to 1.0 from the activation date.

The proposal's reasoning: the rebate had shrunk to very little — 61,372 NEAR in June 2025 down to 6,197 NEAR in April 2026, per-contract average 27.60 → 1.40 NEAR; in May 2026 the top recipient was v2.jars.sweat at 939 NEAR and only 14 contracts exceeded 100 NEAR a month. Illia Polosukhin — who designed the rebate — argued NEAR apps now monetize through sponsored gas, spreads and subscriptions, not fees. The rebate figures in the proposal exceed 30% of this ledger's fee series; the ledger has not been able to reconcile the proposal's counting method.

The effect on activation: daily burn rises ~43% (from 70% to 100% of fees) — at the August 2026 pace from ~575 to ~820 NEAR/day, about 90K NEAR more a year. The proposal itself priced the benefit at "0.57% value accrual vs inflation"; at 67:1, burning 100% moves the balance to ~47:1. HSP-027 matters as a precedent — the first time House of Stake changed a protocol economic parameter — more than for the NEAR involved.

CoinGecko lists 1,305,283,777 NEAR circulating — equal to total supply, meaning every genesis allocation (community, investors, team, NEAR Foundation) is fully vested under CoinGecko's method; there is no max supply. This ledger has no unlock-schedule source for NEAR — the Unlocks column is empty because no schedule remains, unlike newer tokens. Supply pressure from here is purely the 2.5% annual inflation, not vesting.

NEAR has no large locked tranche, so FDV is close to market cap. ATH $20.44 on 16 Jan 2022 — when all of 2021 had burned just 59,531 NEAR; ATL $0.53 on 4 Nov 2020 (CoinGecko). From the peak to early September 2026 the price fell 91%, total supply is up 30.5% since genesis, and the entire lifetime burn does not cover 11 days of current minting.

Daily source: nearblocks /v1/charts — gas_fee (total gas fees in NEAR) and total_supply per day since genesis. Burn = gas_fee × 0.7; mint = Δ total_supply + burn (supply conservation). Current total supply is read directly from the block header via mainnet RPC; the nearblocks series was checked against an archival RPC: the 29 Aug 2026 supply delta matched to the NEAR (81,530) and 250 consecutive blocks agreed within 0.2%. Today is dropped as incomplete.

The "burned" row is the daily series summed, not an on-chain reading — NEAR has no burn address to count; destroyed fees vanish from total supply inside the receipt. The 0.7 share becomes 1.0 from the day v2.14 activates; earlier days keep 0.7. USD in the state card = quantity × price at the time the page was last updated. There is no revenue, buyback or unlock column.