NEAR Protocol has rolled out a major update to its mainnet known as “Nightshade 2.0.” The update is expected to improve scalability and efficiency.
This update introduces “stateless validation,” a concept widely discussed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin that is expected to push NEAR forward in terms of usability and network performance.
Despite being ranked as the 25th largest blockchain by DeFiLlama, NEAR continues to be a project that has garnered a lot of attention in crypto tech circles, thanks in large part to its founder, Illia Polosukhin, a former Google engineer who played a key role in the development of artificial intelligence systems.
The Nightshade 2.0 update is part of NEAR’s ongoing efforts to use sharding, a technique that divides the blockchain into smaller pieces (sharding) to increase scalability. This design allows the network to process more transactions at lower costs, similar to Ethereum’s own plans, which include the recent implementation of proto-danksharding as a precursor to full sharding.
According to a press release from the NEAR Foundation, this update allows NEAR validators to operate without maintaining the state of a shard locally. Instead, they can pull the necessary information, known as “state witnesses,” from the network to verify transactions. This not only improves the performance of individual shards, but also expands the network’s capacity to support additional shards.
Nightshade has been a major part of NEAR's roadmap for several years, with the first version introduced in 2022.
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