NEAR Protocol’s Increase from Six to 8 Shards Increases Capacity by 33%
NEAR Protocol, a prominent L1 blockchain offering a developer-friendly, user-friendly, and scalable platform for dApps, has announced an exclusive mainnet upgrade. As per NEAR Protocol, it has now effectively upgraded the mainnet from six to eight shards, marking a significant 33% increase in network capacity. The platform revealed this development in a recent thread of posts on X.
- Around 33% increase in overall network capacity
- Single-block resharding eliminates hour-long state rebuilds
- Supports faster scaling toward higher shard counts
NEAR Protocol’s Increase from Six to 8 Shards Increases Capacity by 33%
NEAR Protocol’s latest upgrade from the previous six to eight shards has improved its network capacity by up to 33%. The NEAR One team, as well as Bowen Wang, a crucial NEAR Protocol developer, spearheaded the respective upgrade. The transition offers noteworthy improvements to the overall infrastructure of the NEAR Protocol. One of the top enhancements enabled by this upgrade deals with the implementation of single-block resharding. This eliminates the need for lengthy state rebuilds, minimizing downtime while also leading to relatively efficient scaling toward higher shard numbers in the future.
While discussing this shard upgrade, Bowen Wang stressed its significance. He highlighted that former shard expansions required validators to redevelop the whole shard states anew, a time-consuming procedure that would take nearly one hour. Nonetheless, the latest single-block resharding permits the breakdown of the state trie of a shard along pre-established boundaries. Hence, it enables computing exclusive state roots within logarithmic time. With this, the validators can accomplish the procedure within a single block. Apart from that, it significantly improves efficiency while also preparing the protocol to perform dynamic resharding. The upgrade plays a vital role in improving dynamic resharding, a notable feature for scalability. It allows the network to automatically customize shard counts to prevent congestion.
Paving Way for Reaching Fifty Shards in Future
According to NEAR Protocol, it smoothly executed the upgrade due to the efforts of the NEAR team and the broader development community. This included splitting two shards to enhance the ability to simultaneously tackle multiple shard splits. This capability is essential for achieving NEAR Protocol’s objective of reaching fifty shards on its mainnet at some point in the future.