NEAR Protocol has rolled out a major update to its mainnet known as Nightshade 2.0, expected to improve scalability and efficiency.
Features of Nightshade 2.0
The Nightshade 2.0 update is part of NEAR's ongoing efforts to use sharding, a technique that divides the blockchain into smaller pieces to increase scalability. This allows the network to process more transactions at lower costs.
Implementation of Stateless Validation
According to a press release from the NEAR Foundation, this update allows NEAR validators to operate without maintaining the state of a shard locally. Instead, they can pull the necessary information from the network to verify transactions. This not only improves the performance of individual shards but also expands the network's capacity.
History and Future Prospects
Nightshade has been a major part of NEAR's roadmap for several years, with the first version introduced in 2022. Despite being ranked as the 25th largest blockchain by DeFiLlama, NEAR continues to garner significant attention, thanks in large part to its founder Illia Polosukhin, a former Google engineer who played a key role in the development of AI systems.
Nightshade 2.0 represents a significant advancement for NEAR Protocol in terms of scalability and overall performance.
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