NEAR Protocol’s Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade: Enhancements in Scalability and Usability
The NEAR Protocol has recently deployed a significant upgrade known as Nightshade 2.0 on its main network. This upgrade aims to enhance the scalability and usability of the blockchain, positioning NEAR as a competitive player in the evolving landscape of decentralized networks. The introduction of features such as stateless validation marks a pivotal shift in how transactions are processed and validated on the NEAR blockchain.
Stateless validation is a concept that has been extensively discussed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. By implementing this approach, NEAR aims to streamline the validation process, allowing validators to operate more efficiently. Instead of maintaining the state of a shard locally, validators can now retrieve all necessary information from the network, significantly improving the performance of single shards and increasing the overall capacity for additional shards on the network.
Despite its current ranking as the 25th largest blockchain according to DeFiLlama, NEAR Protocol has garnered attention in crypto tech circles, largely due to the impressive credentials of its founder, Illia Polosukhin. Before founding NEAR, Polosukhin was a senior engineer at Google, where he worked on advanced AI systems. This background brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the NEAR team, further enhancing the protocol’s credibility.
The Nightshade upgrade is a crucial part of NEAR’s roadmap to implement sharding within its core architecture. Sharding involves splitting the blockchain into smaller, more manageable pieces, which is intended to facilitate higher transaction throughput and lower costs. Ethereum is also pursuing a similar path with its own sharding roadmap, having recently introduced proto-danksharding, the first step toward achieving full sharding functionality.
According to NEAR’s press release, the new sharding implementation is expected to accelerate NEAR’s already impressive transaction throughput by a factor of five. This enhancement is not merely about speed; it also aims to reduce the operational costs for validators, consequently lowering the barriers to entry for new participants. By making it easier for more individuals to become validators, NEAR seeks to improve the decentralization of its network, which is a fundamental principle in the world of blockchain technology.
The Nightshade 2.0 upgrade has been a long time in the making, with the first version of Nightshade introduced in 2022 and the original concept discussed in a white paper published by Illia Polosukhin in 2019. This historical context underscores the thoughtful and methodical approach that NEAR has taken toward its development.
“Nightshade 2.0 is a fundamental reworking of NEAR sharding and is a major milestone in NEAR’s development roadmap that will greatly increase NEAR’s efficiency and scalability,” stated Bowen Wang, the head of protocol at NEAR, in the press release. This bold assertion highlights the potential impact of the upgrade on the future trajectory of the NEAR Protocol.
As NEAR continues to evolve, its commitment to enhancing scalability and decentralization reflects broader trends in the blockchain space. Stakeholders, developers, and users alike will be closely monitoring the performance of Nightshade 2.0 and its implications for the future of the NEAR ecosystem.
Read more: Near Blockchain Moves Ahead With Phase One of Sharding Upgrade