NEAR Blockchain Gets Major Upgrade to Add ‘Stateless Validation’

The announcement unveils new elements, one of them being “stateless validation” – a topic extensively discussed by Ethereum‘s co-creator, Vitalik Buterin. This term is championed by the NEAR Foundation, a key supporter of the blockchain technology.

The NEAR blockchain ranks as only the 25th largest according to DeFi Llama, but it’s often closely monitored within crypto tech communities due in part to the impressive background of its founder, Illia Polosukhin. In his earlier career, he was a leading engineer at Google where he specialized in AI systems.

The upgrade is a step towards integrating “sharding” into NEAR’s fundamental structure – a method that breaks down the blockchain into smaller segments, which theoretically increases the network’s capacity to handle more transactions at lower costs. Similarly, Ethereum has set its own path towards full sharding implementation, and recently introduced proto-danksharding, an initial version of this concept.

According to the announcement, validators in the NEAR network no longer need to store the state of a single shard themselves. Instead, they can access all necessary information, known as ‘state witnesses,’ directly from the network. This change enhances the performance of individual shards while also allowing for more shards to be added to the network.

For quite some time now, Nightshade has been a planned feature on the NEAR platform, and its initial release came to fruition in the year 2022. Back in 2019, one of NEAR’s co-founders, Illia Polosukhin, published a proposal document detailing the original concept of Nightshade.

According to Bowen Wang, the head of protocol at NEAR, Nightshade 2.0 represents a significant overhaul of NEAR’s sharding system, marking a crucial step forward in NEAR’s development plan that significantly boosts its efficiency and scalability, as stated in a recent press release.

“The enhanced sharding feature is expected to boost NEAR’s transaction speed by a factor of five. Additionally, it significantly reduces the operational costs for validators, making it more accessible for a larger number of individuals to join as validators. This increase in participation will, in turn, enhance the decentralization of the network.”