You'll need velcro tap shoes to dance to this narrative: A saga of NEAR Protocol funding

I

In the beginning there were grants. The ledger lay open, pristine and waiting for architecture, but the gatekeepers of the treasury chose instead to build a theater of permanent dependency. Millions in public capital were deployed not to underwrite native engineering, but to subsidize a transient class of charlatans. Sleek graphics heralded an era of unprecedented adoption, yet beneath the veneer lay nothing but vaporware. When the state allocations ceased, the illusion dissolved, leaving behind an immutable trail of abandoned contracts and expired domains. This remains the permanent archaeological record of an institutional grift.

"Initeio" Status: Vaporware

"DepocketFinace" Status: Dead. Launched a token on BNB, not NEAR

 

"Jumbo Exchange" Status: Zombie. Passed over for the dominant and better connected Ref.Finance, which is now Rhea.Finance

 

"ZKPanther", Status: Not active on NEAR. Launched on Polygon

 

"Autonomy Network" Status: Vaporware. Never launched on NEAR

 

"YouMinter", Status: Launched, tokens sold and rugged.

 

"Spin.Fi", Status: Dead. 

 

"Solace.Fi", Status: Dead and rugged.

 

The GamingDAO finally awarded Pumpopoly a small 5k grant after 2 years on the mainnet. We are thankful for their support. Of all of the GamingDAO grantees, Pumpopoly is the only Dapp that still has active users today.

There were others which double and even triple dipped into this pot. They are all dead today.

 

In total, FewAndFarNFT took 10M in investment. One of the founders fled to Brazil after losing the treasury on sports betting. One of the darker sagas in NEAR grants. Today they are defunct. 

If climate neutral NFTs sound ridiculous to you, dear reader, remember that for all of the millions the NEAR Foundation has poured into hackathons, not one has resulted in a live app with users. Of course, that's a perfect reason to be "fast tracked" into the grant program.

Status: Dead. Domain for sale with Godaddy marketplace

 

This concludes our basic, cursory search of the NEAR Protocol Twitter feed. We did not need an exhaustive multi-month cryptographic audit or a privately commissioned research brief to uncover these systemic failures; we simply executed the exact, basic query that any functional ecosystem commentator is entirely capable of typing into a search bar.

The fact that these multi-thousand-dollar vaporware entries appear immediately upon scrolling reveals the profound depth of Vini’s performative laziness.

 

 

Vini: [Sealioning]
Me: DYOR
Vini: I did
Me: "....start with a basic search for grant recipients"
Also Vini: it's not up to me to "debunk"

— Pumpopoly.com (@pumpopoly) July 4, 2026

 

 

Either he did the research or he didn't. He cannot have it both ways here. If the sealion were genuinely curious and "just asking questions", one would expect that a basic search wouldn't be too much, but I digress. Our research continues.

 

All of these projects are either dead, vaporware or not on NEAR at all. HumanGuild preceeded the GamingDAO. It was much the same, but with even lower standards. Of course, Pumpopoly as a complete and functioning Dapp, was not included at all. It didn't fit the theme of insider connections and vaporware.

 

 

On May 6th, NEAR's price was approximately 5 USD. This puts the total amount at around $135,000. Of course this project never launched at all. HashRush is vaporware today as it was vaporware then. 

 

 According to yellow.com

: 

NEAR has supported over 800 projects through its funding initiatives. More than 45 million dollars has been awarded to builders and innovators across the ecosystem. Notable funded projects include Battlemon, NEAR Lands, Shroom Kingdom, Inite, DragoNEAR, Mintbase, 3XR, AnyToNFT, CURA, Nativo NFT, Fayyr and ARterra. This grants program demonstrates NEAR's commitment to ecosystem development and provides capital for projects that might not otherwise secure venture funding. 

 

All of these projects and sites are currently defunct or never launched. We've barely scraped the surface of the grift. We could spend days tracking down citations and still not cover the most transparent era of graft, grants.

 As we bring this section to a close, I will remind you dear reader, that while all of this was going on, Pumpopoly wasn't just excluded from funding, but it was actively suppressed. Other projects received funds and promotion from the core team and their teams of tap-dancers. Here is a final quote from the former NEAR social media manager:

 

 

Of course we politely requested that David forward us memo from the legal team before it came to this. Ultimately his excuses were debunked. Only after outlasting all of their insider slop, did it became appropriate to mention us in passing. By that time they had already burned through the public's goodwill, by promoting rugs, pre-sales and vaporware.

 The vaporware once touted as "1000 projects building on NEAR" ceased to be as important as VCs received their unlocks. The facade of building was ultimately in service of dumping on retail. In that regard, an active and released game was less valuable than a grand promise for tomorrow.

 In our next document we will cover the more opaque, on-going era of graft. Projects that receive not public grants but, "undisclosed investments" or "gas subsidies" to spam the network. Some of these have already rugged.