NEAR continued to gain despite a 2% market decline Today. Accordingly CoinGeckoNEAR, the platform’s native token, has managed to gain almost 23% since last week. This is largely due to positive on-chain developments and shows that the altcoin has enough strength to maintain its current position in the market.
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Just recently, NEAR announced that Nightshade 2.0, NEAR’s much-vaunted “novel sharding design,” has been deployed on the platform’s mainnet, further improving the already robust and reliable system that users have enjoyed for years.
Nightshade 2.0 brings new light to validators
According to a recent Blog postNetwork upgrades have introduced stateless validation, the new sharding architecture for the protocol. This new architecture has improved the single-shard performance of the network. NEAR has already deployed six shards on the network and is aiming for ten by the end of the year.
It also lowers the hardware requirements to become a validator. Nightshade 2.0 improved the validator experience by removing the need to track all of NEAR’s shards, thus stimulating the growth of the validator side of the cryptocurrency.
“In particular, the new sharding implementation paves the way to significantly increase the coin’s already fast transaction throughput,” said Bowen Wang, Head of Protocol at NEAR One.
According to Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR protocol and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, the network upgrade “addresses the fundamental bottleneck problem for most L1s, which is scaling while maintaining usability and security.”
Rejection candle shapes mark the beginning of the NEAR correction phase
Due to the market deviations in today’s trading activity, NEAR is currently trading with a red candle as the token faces rejection from the $5.2 ceiling, reversing the momentum to the bears in the short term. This will make losses inevitable in the short term.
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As the market decline shifts the momentum to the bearish side, it will continue to affect the cryptocurrency’s performance if the bearish trend continues. However, the recent developments in NEAR could curb the fear, uncertainty, and doubts as the recent development will promote the network growth in the long term.
Once Nightshade’s impact takes hold, NEAR will have a solid foundation for investor confidence.
Currently, there are two possible paths that NEAR could take in the medium term. If the market recovers after the current decline, it has the potential to break the $5.7 mark in the coming weeks. However, if the decline continues to intensify day by day, NEAR could return to $3.8, and in the worst case scenario, even $3.0 if the situation worsens.
Currently, investors should be cautious and monitor the overall market development as any fluctuation can affect the performance of the altcoin.
Featured image by Rebank, chart by TradingView
