NEAR Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

NEAR Protocol is mildly inflationary: the network created 8.01M NEAR for stakers and its treasury in the last 90 days, while the gas burn destroyed 72,580 NEAR, so supply grew +0.61% — and the next 90 days look the same. NEAR has no supply cap; the top issuance rate is 2.5% a year, and the NEAR Intents buyback keeps the coins it buys instead of burning them.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the 90 days to Oct 12 2026, NEAR supply grew a net +0.61%: 8.01M NEAR minted against 72,580 NEAR burned, out of 1.31B NEAR in circulation. Our monitor reads +0.83% for the same stretch, a gap of 0.22 percentage points, inside our 0.5-point tolerance, so no warning chip is shown. The next 90 days project the same +0.61%, because the NEAR mint runs at a steady rate and no supply change has a mainnet date yet. NEAR is a steady-issuance proof-of-stake chain: inflationary by design, with a burn too small to offset it.

Sell pressure: where new NEAR comes from

Protocol inflation is the only source of new NEAR: 8,006,996 NEAR in 90 days. NEAR mints at the start of every epoch, about every 7.3 hours, and 295 epochs began in this window, each adding between 26,196 and 29,461 NEAR. The size of each mint follows the clock, not the block count, and the total came to 99.5% of the full 2.5% yearly rate, the small shortfall reflecting validators who were not fully online. About 90% of each NEAR epoch reward goes to validators and the people who stake with them; about 10% goes to the protocol treasury account.

Vesting unlocks add 0. The NEAR launch vesting schedule has run out, unlock trackers show no future NEAR unlock, and circulating supply equals total supply, so even coins still sitting in old lockup contracts are already counted as part of the float.

Foundation and unscheduled unlocks add 0. NEAR has team-held pools — the protocol treasury, the buyback wallets and NEAR Foundation wallets — but every one of them is already counted as circulating. When they spend or sell, coins change hands; no new NEAR supply appears.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy supply adds 0. No estate, trustee or long lock is releasing NEAR. The first US NEAR fund, launched on Sep 29 2026, and the listed companies holding NEAR bought their coins in the open market.

Buy pressure: where new NEAR goes

The protocol fee burn is the only buy-side row that counts: 72,580 NEAR destroyed in 90 days, about 806 a day. Most of the gas fee on each NEAR transaction is burned and the rest is paid to the contract that was called. The NEAR burn is rising with use — 32,165 NEAR in the last 30 days, against about 19,000 to 21,000 in each of the two 30-day stretches before — but it still takes back less than 1% of what the mint creates.

The programmatic buyback books 0, even though it is real. Fees from NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap service, buy NEAR on the open market, and the three buyback wallets grew by 1,309,866 NEAR in the window. Those coins are kept, not burned, and the wallets are already part of the float, so the NEAR buyback moves coins from sellers to a team wallet rather than removing them. If governance ever burned them, this row would start to count.

Foundation buying adds 0: apart from the Intents buyback, nothing shows the NEAR Foundation or the treasury buying NEAR. New long-term locks add 0 too. About 558.7M NEAR is staked with 407 validators, roughly 43% of supply, but staked NEAR is still circulating, so more staking only shares out the same mint.

Foundation and overhang

We track three team-held NEAR pools. The protocol treasury account holds 1.35M NEAR, up from about 548,000 at the start of the window, and grows by about 2,640 NEAR every epoch from its share of the mint. The three NEAR Intents buyback wallets hold 3.84M NEAR together. The NEAR Foundation wallets we can see hold about 15,118 NEAR; any wider Foundation reserve is not public. We read the treasury and buyback balances on-chain at every rebuild and check the Foundation by hand.

All of these coins already count as circulating, so a sale from any of them would not raise the supply figure — it would add selling in the market. That is why we watch them: if any of these balances falls between our checks, the outflow is recorded as Foundation selling at the next rebuild.

How NEAR compares to other uncapped proof-of-stake chains

NEAR sits with the proof-of-stake Layer 1s that pay stakers in new coins and have no hard cap. Its rate is a flat percentage of supply — 2.5% a year since a validator vote halved it from 5% in late 2025 — rather than a rate that changes with how much is staked. Ethereum works the other way: its issuance rises with the square root of the total stake, and its fee burn is a much larger share of new supply in busy periods. Bitcoin, by contrast, has a fixed cap and a halving schedule, so its new supply shrinks on a timetable no vote can change.

Solana is the closest match: it also pays stakers from a percentage rate with no cap, its rate also steps down on a set path, and its stakers voted on Aug 28 2026 for a further cut. NEAR holders are now debating the same move: a draft House of Stake proposal posted on Oct 7 2026 would lower the NEAR top rate from 2.5% to 1.6% in small steps over 24 months.

The NEAR buyback is the other big difference. Many fee-sharing tokens burn what they buy back, which lowers supply. NEAR keeps its bought-back coins in team wallets, so the buying supports demand but does not shrink supply. On our measure, a held buyback is a pool of coins that could return to the market, not a burn.

What to watch in the next 90 days

The House of Stake proposal to cut NEAR issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months, posted on Oct 7 2026 and still a draft. Even if it passes, it waits a 90-day grace period, so it would slow the mint only after this window.

The mainnet date of nearcore 2.14, which carries the approved change (ratified Jul 3 2026) that ends the contract share of gas and burns all of it. Its third test release came on Sep 28 2026; once live, the NEAR burn should rise by up to about 40%, still small against the mint.

The buyback and treasury wallets. Any fall in the 3.84M NEAR buyback balance or the 1.35M NEAR treasury balance would be new selling, and any decision to burn the bought-back NEAR would turn the buyback into a real supply cut.

Network use. The burn grew to 32,165 NEAR in the last 30 days as activity rose; a lasting rise in gas use would lift the burn, though not near the size of the mint.

Summary

NEAR Protocol supply grew +0.61% in the 90 days to Oct 12 2026 and is projected to grow the same in the next 90: 8.01M NEAR minted at a 2.5% yearly rate against a 72,580 NEAR gas burn. The NEAR Intents buyback is real but its coins are held, not burned, so it does not cut supply. The key risk is the team-held pools — 3.84M NEAR in buyback wallets and 1.35M NEAR in the treasury — which already count as circulating and could be sold. NEAR has no supply cap; the only ceiling on new supply is the issuance rate, which a draft proposal would lower to 1.6% over two years.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of NEAR, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 12 2026.