NEAR protocol proposal: Reduce annual inflation rate from 5% to 2.5% to boost network performanceHOT Protocol and LiNEAR Protocol jointly launched a NEAR governance proposal at the NEAR Governance Forum: proposing to reduce the current 5% annual PoS inflation rate in NEAR by half to 2.5%. The proposal has now been voted on on the NEAR governance page, and once the support rate reaches 66.67%, the proposal will be passed, thereby reducing NEAR's inflation rate to 2.5%. Governance Voting Page: https://vote.linearprotocol.org/NEAR It is a public chain that was launched on the main network in 2020, and it has been 5 years now. At that time, the mainnet was set to reward PoS staking with 5% of the initial issuance volume (1 billion coins) generated by inflation each year to maintain the normal operation of the network. Because the gas fees generated by the NEAR network will be destroyed, we had a good idea at the time: to attract staking with 5% inflation, and then offset almost half of the inflation by destroying the network gas fees, so that the inflation rate could be maintained within the normal range of 2% to 3%: without excessive inflation pressure and with enough APY incentive network. However, over the years, inflation has been on the rise, but the destruction has not met expectations. Previously, it was expected that the gas fee could destroy 2% to 3% of NEAR annually, but in reality, it was much lower: only 0.1% per year. This leads to excessive inflation pressure and poor performance of the currency price. The low destruction cost of gas is mainly due to the fact that the performance of the NEAR network after multiple upgrades far exceeds the current demand, which leads to very low transaction costs and fewer NEAR destroyed. Now they are finally going to lower inflation, which will only benefit NEAR for now without any harm: firstly, the most direct is to reduce the annual inflation rate of NEAR from 50 million to 25 million. Directly reduce selling pressure by $50 million; NEAR is currently focusing on the AI track and is the second largest holder among the five targets of the Grayscale Decentralized AI Fund. If the AI track continues to take off, it will bring a huge amount of AI Agents and NEAR Intents network usage to NEAR. With a healthy inflation rate of 2.5%, the use cases brought by AI will push NEAR closer to deflation for every 0.1% increase in transaction fees. Another benefit is that a 5% inflation rate gives current PoS staking 9% APY, which makes current NEAR holders more inclined to stake for retirement and interest rather than participate in DeFi. After the inflation rate drops to 2.5%, the yield under the same staking ratio will decrease to around 5%. This should result in a considerable number of NEARs withdrawing from staking and participating in on chain protocols to seek higher yields, which can be seen as indirectly promoting the NEAR on chain ecosystem. This is basically a combination of cost cutting (reducing inflation rate) and open-source (AI track), and we are still looking forward to the network performance of NEAR after inflation decreases.