Near Protocol, a popular Layer 1 network, aims to innovate its shard architecture by deploying the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade.

On August 22, Nightshade 2.0 went live on the mainnet, introducing stateless validation to the network. While previously each validator managed the state of Near locally, they can now retrieve all the information needed to validate network state changes directly from the chain – increasing the efficiency of transaction validation.

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

“Nightshade 2.0 is a fundamental overhaul of Near sharding and a major milestone in Near’s development roadmap that will significantly increase Near’s efficiency and scalability,” said Bowen Wang, protocol lead at Near One, the development team behind Near Protocol. “The new sharding implementation will increase Near’s already high transaction throughput by five times.”

Near uses a shard architecture to improve network performance and throughput. Shard networks divide the state of a network into several smaller shards that can be processed by validators, reducing the computational burden of validators compared to monolithic blockchains.

“Nightshade aims to reduce congestion and increase throughput, similar to how a store has multiple checkout lanes instead of just one,” Near said.

With Nightshade 2.0, validators will only need to track a single shard, rather than syncing with each of Near’s six shards as they currently do. Near expects to increase the number of shards to 10 by 2025.

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

Near peak activity

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

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

Daily transactions also increased by 1,530% from 432,000 in 12 months to a high of 7 million on August 20 – that’s 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 in the last 24 hours, according to DappRadar.

According to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds, NEAR’s price has increased by 4.5% in the last 24 hours.

Read more: Near aims for Bitcoin interoperability with Aurora Light Client