Nightshade 2.0 Launches on NEAR Mainnet, Introducing Stateless Validation and Greater Scalability

TLDR:

• Introduces stateless validation: an innovative approach to validating state transition, or the process of updating the status of all the data posted to the blockchain. Now, NEAR validators no longer have to maintain the state of a shard locally.
• Scalability, usability improvements: Nightshade 2.0 Improves single-shard performance significantly and adds capacity for more shards: NEAR currently has 6 shards and the plan is to have 10 shards by the end of 2024.
• Advancing towards NEAR vision: Upgrades NEAR’s already high-performance and scalable infrastructure to support the growing number of users and activities in the NEAR ecosystem, including consumer apps, Chain Abstraction, modularity, DeFi, and User-Owned AI, to a billion users and beyond. NEAR saw over 20 million monthly active users in July 2024, with over 110 million accounts overall. 

Nightshade 2.0, the latest advancement in the NEAR Protocol sharding roadmap, is now live on Mainnet. This upgrade introduces stateless validation and improves the scalability, performance, and decentralization of the protocol. Nightshade 2.0 is a major milestone for the NEAR network, marking the biggest change to the protocol since mainnet launched in October 2020. 

Introducing Stateless Validation

Introducing stateless validation to the sharding architecture of NEAR Protocol both improves single-shard performance as well as adds capacity for more shards on the network. The upgrade happens live, without affecting mainnet users and applications. Currently at six shards, NEAR aims to have ten shards by the end of 2024. 

Stateless validation is an innovative approach to validating state transition, or the process of updating the status of all the data posted to the blockchain. Sharding is NEAR’s unique approach to scaling, which partitions the blockchain into multiple parallel “shards.” With Nightshade sharding, both the state and processing are divided among shards. Now, NEAR validators no longer have to maintain the state of a shard locally and can retrieve all the information they need to validate state changes, or “state witness,” from the network. Stateless validation was originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2017 and NEAR is one of the only blockchain networks to implement the approach. 

Unlocking Even Higher Performance & Scalability

In Nightshade 2.0, validators no longer need to track all shards and there are lower hardware requirements and costs for running a validator, potentially allowing more validators to join the ecosystem—which will further decentralize the network and enhance its security over time. 

“Nightshade 2.0 is a fundamental reworking of NEAR sharding and is a major milestone in NEAR’s development roadmap that will greatly increase NEAR’s efficiency and scalability,” said Bowen Wang, Head of Protocol at NEAR One. “In particular, the new sharding implementation paves the way to significantly increase NEAR’s already-fast transaction throughput. It also substantially lowers the cost of operating validators, lowering the barrier to entry for  more people to become validators, which will improve the decentralization of the network. These performance and scalability upgrades will ensure that NEAR remains fast, cost-effective, and efficient even with millions more users.” 

“Nightshade 2.0 solves the fundamental bottleneck issue on most L1s of how to scale while preserving both usability and security,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of the NEAR Foundation. “By improving the performance of each shard and adding more shards, while also further decentralizing the network, NEAR sets yet another new technical standard with this upgrade. With Nightshade 2.0, NEAR sharding now enables the network to support hundreds of millions of users with high performance and speeds across consumer apps, modularity, Chain Abstraction, DeFi, and User-Owned AI.”

What’s Next for NEAR Sharding?

How does Nightshade 2.0 fit into the long-term sharding roadmap for the NEAR Protocol? Nightshade 2.0 is a shift in direction from the original Nightshade sharding architecture NEAR launched with in 2020, bypassing some fundamental roadblocks in that protocol design around the implementation of challenges in the initial idea of Phase 2, while also unlocking additional benefits. 

From here, the focus for the remainder of 2024 will be on making further performance improvements and optimizations on top of those unlocked by Nightshade 2.0. These include introducing a new method of resharding, reducing gas costs for storage operations, and optimization of state witness size. Starting in early 2025, planning for the next phase of NEAR scalability and sharding will begin, including on dynamic re-sharding, the holy grail of sharding, where the network dynamically adjusts the number of shards based on the load. The Near One team will share a more detailed roadmap update in the coming days. 

For more information on Nightshade 2.0, watch Bowen Wang and Illia Polosukhin’s Whiteboard Series unpacking the NEAR Protocol. For deep technical details on how NEAR sharding and stateless validation works, read the Nightshade 2.0 whitepaper.