In close proximity of the estimates, the upgrade will accelerate transaction execution by 400%.
Near Protocol, a well-known Layer 1 network, is currently in the process of overhauling its sharded architecture through the implementation of the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade.
Introducing stateless validation to the network, Nightshade 2.0 went live on mainnet on August 22. Previously, each validator was responsible for locally maintaining the Near’s state. However, they can now directly retrieve all the necessary information to validate network state changes from the chain, thereby increasing the efficacy of transaction validation.
According to Near, the upgrade will enhance the efficacy of the validator, reduce the cost of operating a node, accelerate the execution of transactions by 400%, and expand the network’s shard capacity.
According to Bowen Wang, the director of protocol at Near One, the development team responsible for Near Protocol, “Nightshade 2.0 is a significant milestone in Near’s development roadmap that will significantly enhance Near’s efficiency and scalability.” This is a fundamental revision of Near sharding.
In order to enhance network efficacy and throughput, Near implements a sharded architecture. In contrast to monolithic blockchains, sharded networks divide a network’s state into multiple smaller fragments for validators to process, thereby reducing the computational requirements of validators.
“Nightshade’s objective is to enhance throughput and alleviate congestion in a manner that is comparable to a store that has multiple checkouts rather than a single,” stated Near.
Validators are no longer required to coordinate with each of Near’s six fragments, as they are now required to monitor only a single shard with Nightshade 2.0. By 2025, Near anticipates that its shard count will reach 10.
The majority of sharded networks, including Harmony, Zilliqa, and Elrond, typically maintain each shard as a distinct chain. Polkadot and Cosmos both employ a Layer 0-based sharding architecture, in which a base layer with restricted functionality offers shared security to an ecosystem of specialized Layer 1 networks.
Over the past year, Near Protocol has experienced a significant increase in activity. Flipsidecrypto reports that the cumulative volume of Near transactions has recently exceeded 2 billion, representing a 570% increase since August 2023. During the same period, the quantity of Near purses generated quadrupled to 116 million. April 2020 marked the debut of Near on the mainnet.
In the past year, the number of daily transactions increased by 1,530%, from 432,000 to a zenith of 7 million on August 20, which is equivalent to 81 transactions per second. According to DappRadar, the top two dApps in the Near ecosystem are Hot Games, a Telegram wallet with 1.5 million daily users, and Kai Ching, a purchasing rewards app with 996,000 active wallets over the past 24 hours.
Also Read: Latin American e-commerce giant releases new stablecoin backed by the US dollar
