NEAR launches new scalability measure originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin

NEAR Protocol launched Nightshade 2.0 — its latest development in its sharding roadmap — on its mainnet on Thursday. The update introduces stateless validation to the network, which is a concept originally proposed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. 

Stateless validation is a new approach to updating the status of data posted to the blockchain by allowing validators to retrieve necessary information from the network instead of having to store it locally. This reduces the burden on individual validators and increases network capacity, NEAR said in its press release. 

“The new sharding implementation will speed up NEAR’s already-fast transaction throughput by five times,” said NEAR One’s Head of Protocol, Bowen Wang. 

NEAR said Nightshade 2.0 also made the sharding protocol much more accessible, with lowered hardware requirements for running a validator.

The latest update is an addition to NEAR Protocol’s Nightshade, a blockchain sharding solution that divides the network into smaller, more manageable parts called shards. “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 in the release.

Unlike other sharded blockchains that use separate chains for each shard, NEAR maintains only one blockchain in managing multiple parallel shards, which reduces complexity, the press statement added.

“With Nightshade 2.0, NEAR sharding now enables the network to support hundreds of millions of users with high performance and speeds across consumer apps, modularity, Chain Abstraction, DeFi, and User-Owned AI,” NEAR Co-Founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin said.