Near Protocol Deploys Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade On Mainnet

Near estimates the upgrade will speed up transaction execution by 400%.

Near Protocol, a popular Layer 1 network, is seeking to revamp its sharded architecture with the deployment of the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade.

On Aug. 22, Nightshade 2.0 went live on mainnet, introducing stateless validation to the network. While every validator previously maintained the Near’s state locally, they can now retrieve all of the information required to validate network state changes from the chain directly — bolstering the efficiency of transaction validation.

Near said the upgrade will improve validator performance, lower the cost of operating a node, speed up transaction execution by 400%, and increase the network’s shard capacity.

“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,” said Bowen Wang, head of protocol at Near One, the development team behind Near Protocol. “The new sharding implementation will speed up Near’s already-fast transaction throughput by five times.”

Near employs a sharded architecture to improve network efficiency and throughput. Sharded networks split a network’s state into multiple smaller shards for validators to process, reducing the computational requirements of validators when compared to monolithic blockchains.

“Nightshade aims to reduce congestion and increase throughput in a manner similar to that of a store having multiple checkouts instead of just one,” Near said.

With Nightshade 2.0, validators only need to track a single shard, rather than sync with each of Near’s six shards as before. Near expects to increase its number of shards to 10 by 2025.

Most sharded networks typically maintain each shard as a separate chain, such as Harmony, Zilliqa, and Elrond. Polkadot and Cosmos similarly leverage a Layer 0-based sharding architecture, where a base layer with limited functionality provides shared security to an ecosystem of specialized Layer 1 networks.

Near Activity Surges

Near Protocol has enjoyed a surge in activity over the past 12 months.

The volume of cumulative Near transactions recently surpassed 2 billion, marking a 570% increase since August 2023, according to Flipsidecrypto. The number of Near wallets created also quadrupled to 116 million over the same period. Near launched on mainnet in April 2020.

Daily transactions also surged 1,530% from 432,000 in 12 months ago to a peak of 7 million on Aug. 20 — equating to 81 transactions per second. The leading dApps in the Near ecosystem are Hot Games, a Telegram wallet, with 1.5 million daily users, and Kai Ching, a shopping rewards app, with 996,000 active wallets over the past 24 hours, according to DappRadar.

The price of NEAR is up 4.5% over the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.