Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One, and Mally Anderson, writer at NEAR
NEAR is making a major upgrade towards delivering the world’s most scalable blockchain protocol. By the end of Q2 2026, the Near One team will release Dynamic Resharding – a protocol upgrade that delivers on the protocol’s scalability promise at the highest level of performance. Dynamic resharding will enable NEAR to add shards automatically with demand, supporting the growth of NEAR Intents and the agent economy that NEAR Intents and NEAR AI will underpin. The NEP has been approved by SMEs and will soon be up for a vote by the protocol working group. Dynamic resharding is scheduled to launch as part of the upcoming network upgrade 2.13.
NEAR sharding is not a monolith, but rather a multi-layered approach to horizontal scaling that has undergone many upgrades since the first iteration in 2019. NEAR has advanced the network’s scalability across several phases:
- Mainnet launch, 2020: sharded blockchain with Nightshade 1.0 and Doomslug consensus
- Nightshade 2.0 with stateless validation, 2024
- 1 million transactions-per-second scaling, 2025
- Sharded smart contracts and deterministic account IDs, 2025
- Dynamic resharding, coming in Q2 2026
The best way to understand the accomplishment of dynamic resharding and the improvements it unlocks is to understand how things worked in each previous phase of NEAR sharding.
Building on the Original NEAR Sharding Vision
In October 2019, when the white paper was published, the early NEAR team declared that they would make NEAR “the world’s most usable and scalable decentralized platform” that could support global-scale adoption with a sharded architecture. The primary benefit of sharding is that it allows for horizontal scaling: the network scales by increasing the number of shards to provide more throughput to the network. This is the same as Google or Amazon adding more servers when there are more users interacting with their services. The idea was, developers can build and not have to worry about throughput or scaling: the more usage you get, the more demand and transactions you have, the network will scale to meet it – without slowdowns, outages, or increasing transaction fees (as happened, for example, in early Ethereum).
NEAR has increased the number of shards 5 times since mainnet: going from 1 shard (or Simple Nightshade) at launch in 2020, to 4 shards in 2022, to 6 shards in 2024 as part of launching Nightshade 2.0, to 8 shards in early 2025, to 9 shards today (as well as a private shard powering Confidential Intents).
Resharding until now has been a manual and therefore slow process to prepare, although the actual resharding itself takes place within a block, i.e. less than 2 seconds (and without any interruption to users). Because resharding happens as part of a protocol upgrade, it has required weeks of coordination with validators to decide to make the upgrade and progress through the release schedule. This will soon change with dynamic resharding, which makes the addition of new shards automatic – the network can detect when a split is needed and carry it out with no effect on validators, developers, and users.
Improving Performance with 1 Million TPS and Sharded Smart Contracts
A sharded blockchain doesn’t scale linearly in reality. To solve sublinear scaling challenges that affected performance, the Near One team introduced the 1 million transactions-per-second (TPS) research initiative in 2025, done in an experimental environment (basically a fork of NEAR). They found that things scaled well up until approximately thirty shards, although the NEAR Nightshade sharding architecture allows for a theoretical 70-100 shards. Above thirty, adding shards introduced overhead that ate up the added capacity. So Near One undertook months of optimization work to reduce that overhead.
A trace visualization tool built by Near One, mapping the critical path of NEAR's block and chunk production pipeline across validator nodes during 1M TPS benchmark profiling.
The result, which enabled NEAR to achieve 1 million TPS in a publicly verifiable benchmark, now allows the network to scale to at least 70 shards without any sacrifice in performance (not perfectly linear scaling, but close). This would be around 10x scaling from today’s network capacity, which means NEAR would be able to scale far beyond the throughput of current high-usage networks like Visa. Adding shards now works as intended in the protocol design and developers are able to utilize this capacity.
In late 2025 via NEP-616, NEAR added another scaling unlock: sharded smart contract support. Before, a single smart contract always lived on a single shard. Since applications logically live on one smart contract, this presents a potential limitation for an app that has millions of users or a lot of transactions. Sharded smart contracts let state live on multiple shards and even allow for a sharded fungible token. Thanks to the NEAR account model, every user is effectively a smart contract and each balance is a separate account. So those can move across shards and spread out a given application or user base.
Combined, sharded smart contracts and 1 million TPS optimizations introduced significant performance improvements for apps on NEAR and also paved the way for full dynamic resharding.
Accelerating the NEAR Future with Dynamic Resharding
The next major protocol upgrade for NEAR introduces dynamic resharding, a major upgrade for the protocol’s promise of true horizontal scaling that builds on sharded smart contracts. (For those interested in reading the NEP, see GitHub.) Now, dividing shards gets substantially faster and lets apps adapt to demand spikes or usage growth as it happens. The entire process is deterministic, validated through state witnesses, and requires no human intervention – also making the protocol more resilient.
The primary improvement of dynamic resharding is speed of adaptability. Resharding v3 (completed in early 2025) allowed a shard to split quasi-instantly, within one block, but doing so required a protocol upgrade. Since these are hard-coded, the update is static rather than dynamic, meaning it requires someone to put it into motion, go through the preparation and coordination with validators, a vote, and finally the actual update. Protocol upgrades are generally 1-2 months apart to allow for smooth coordination with validators, which means getting to 70 shards would take multiple years if done this way.
Now, dynamic resharding happens dynamically, meaning that a shard can split automatically when it reaches a certain state size. Now, an application on NEAR can scale at the pace builders need it to scale––within hours, i.e. 1.5 epochs on average. Neither storage nor throughput are blockers to dynamic scaling on demand.
The Next Era of Scaling NEAR: The Settlement Layer for Millions of Agents
In addition to scaling to 70 shards and powering 1 million TPS, dynamic resharding also helps support the growth of NEAR Intents and the agent economy. NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin has predicted that AI agents will carry out the majority of commerce in the future, potentially billions of them. Supporting agentic commerce will require a high-throughput infrastructure that can handle large transaction volume and demand spikes.
Dynamic resharding future-proofs NEAR Protocol to ensure it can support agentic commerce, as well as near.com and projects and infrastructure that integrate NEAR Intents. NEAR Intents is already utilizing sharded contracts for wallet contracts and the global deployer, and is exclusively writing and adding new contracts as NEP-616 sharded smart contracts to ensure long-term scalability. Another near-term upgrade will be to introduce sharded RPC and archival nodes, which is a work in progress (in a sharded system, all components must be sharded, including these nodes).
Over time, Intents is starting to function as an integrated part of the core NEAR protocol, benefiting from all the horizontal scaling benefits of sharding as well as delivering the benefits to users across many other chains.
Stay tuned for more updates on protocol upgrade 2.13, which will not only launch dynamic resharding but also introduce a post-quantum-safe signing scheme for NEAR. The upgrade is expected to go through in June 2026.