New York, Monday, September 02, 2024-NEAR Protocol has implemented a significant upgrade, known as “Nightshade 2.0,” designed to enhance the blockchain’s scalability and performance.
The update, deployed on NEAR’s main network, introduces “stateless validation,” a concept extensively discussed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Stateless validation allows NEAR validators to validate transactions without maintaining the entire state of a shard locally. Instead, they can retrieve necessary data, known as “state witnesses,” from the network.
This innovation is expected to improve single-shard performance and increase the network’s capacity to support more shards, enhancing NEAR’s overall scalability.
The Nightshade 2.0 upgrade is a key part of NEAR’s long-term strategy to implement sharding, a technique that divides the blockchain into smaller, more manageable segments.
This method is designed to enable the network to process more transactions at a lower cost. Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain, is also working on similar scalability solutions, having recently introduced proto-danksharding.
Nightshade 2.0 is a fundamental reworking of NEAR’s sharding and marks a major milestone in the development roadmap NEAR said.
It said that the new sharding implementation would accelerate NEAR’s already-fast transaction throughput by five times and lower the cost of operating validators, thereby promoting greater decentralization.
The NEAR Protocol, although currently ranked as the 25th largest blockchain by total value locked according to DeFiLlama, is closely watched in the crypto community.
The project is led by Illia Polosukhin, a former Google engineer known for his work in artificial intelligence.
