NEAR Protocol Unveils Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade Enhancing Scalability and Usability

NEAR Protocol Launches Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade

NEAR Protocol has successfully rolled out a significant upgrade known as Nightshade 2.0 on its mainnet, aimed at enhancing both the scalability and usability of the blockchain. This upgrade introduces several innovative features, including the concept of “stateless validation,” which has been extensively discussed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, as highlighted in a press release from the NEAR Foundation, the organization backing the blockchain.

Currently, NEAR holds the position of the 25th largest blockchain according to DeFiLlama, but it remains a focal point of interest in the crypto technology community, partly due to the impressive credentials of its founder, Illia Polosukhin. Before founding NEAR, he served as a leading engineer at Google, where he worked on advanced AI systems.

This upgrade is a pivotal part of NEAR’s strategy to integrate “sharding” into its core architecture. Sharding involves partitioning the blockchain into smaller segments, which is intended to enhance the network’s ability to process a higher volume of transactions at a lower cost. Ethereum is also pursuing a similar roadmap towards full sharding and has recently introduced proto-danksharding, the initial phase of this concept.

According to the press release, “NEAR validators no longer need to maintain the local state of a shard. Instead, they can access all necessary information to validate state changes, referred to as ‘state witnesses,’ directly from the network. This enhancement not only boosts performance within a single shard but also increases the capacity for additional shards across the network.”

Nightshade has been a critical component of NEAR’s development roadmap for several years, with the initial version being launched in 2022. In fact, Illia Polosukhin published a detailed white paper outlining the original Nightshade framework back in 2019.

Bowen Wang, the head of protocol at NEAR, commented, “Nightshade 2.0 represents a fundamental overhaul of NEAR’s sharding mechanism and marks a significant milestone in our development journey. This upgrade will markedly enhance NEAR’s efficiency and scalability.” He further explained, “The new sharding implementation is set to accelerate NEAR’s already impressive transaction throughput by a factor of five. Additionally, it substantially reduces the operational costs for validators, lowering the barriers for individuals to participate as validators, which will ultimately foster greater decentralization within the network.”

Read more: Near Blockchain Moves Ahead With Phase One of Sharding Upgrade