NEAR Protocol introduced Chain Signatures in 2024 to address these issues head-on, unlocking fast and secure cross-chain liquidity. Now MoreMarkets is using Chain Signatures to introduce a revolutionary model of verticalized DeFi. Unlike traditional bridging, which requires users to transfer and wrap tokens, MoreMarkets retains token security and native integrity. Users deposit tokens, such as XRP, directly into dedicated vaults on their native chains, triggering cryptographic proof creation through NEAR’s Chain Signatures. Smart contracts on destination blockchains then trustlessly validate these proofs, creating a digital representation: “More” tokens that mirror the locked assets. This model encourages broader DeFi participation without traditional bridging complexity.

Understanding NEAR’s Chain Signatures

Chain Signatures represent NEAR Protocol’s groundbreaking solution for secure cross-chain transactions. Chain Signatures enable NEAR accounts, including smart contracts, to authorize transactions on external blockchains securely. This system leverages a decentralized multi-party computation network, which combines NEAR staking with Eigenlayer ETH restakers to safeguard cross-chain interactions.

The technical infrastructure of NEAR’s Chain Signatures encompasses three core elements:

• Native Asset Vaults: Assets remain securely on their native blockchain, protected by smart contracts which trigger cryptographic signature events when deposits occur.
• Threshold Multi-Party Computation: Multiple independent “guardian nodes” manage distributed cryptographic proofs. When an asset deposit is made, guardians collaborate to generate a cryptographic proof, attesting to the locked asset’s status. The result is a system that eliminates single points of failure, isolates risks, and minimizes attack vectors inherent in traditional bridging solutions.
• Cross-chain Messaging via NFFL: Cryptographic proofs are communicated through the NEAR-enabled NFFL protocol, a secure cross-chain messaging framework, verifying asset status to receiving blockchains.

Unlike traditional bridging that requires tokens to physically move off their native chains—often causing complexity, security vulnerabilities, and fragmented liquidity—Chain Signatures keep tokens securely locked on their original blockchain. Through cryptographic proofs, Chain Signatures verify these locked states trustlessly across other blockchains, enabling asset utilization without physical token movement.

For users and developers, this means:

• Reduced Risk: By avoiding traditional multisig structures, Chain Signatures lower vulnerabilities traditionally associated with bridge exploits.
• Enhanced User Experience: NEAR’s efficient consensus and verification algorithms offer substantially reduced latency, allowing quicker, smoother cross-chain interactions.
• Increased Asset Utilization: By transforming previously idle tokens into productive assets, token holders benefit from significantly higher yields and capital efficiency.

Real-World Use Case: XRP on MoreMarkets

Consider XRP, a widely-held asset with historically low utilization rate in DeFi (0.07% AUR). With MoreMarkets and NEAR Chain Signatures, users can deposit XRP securely into a native XRP Ledger vault. This deposit triggers NEAR’s MPC-based chain signature system to cryptographically confirm XRP’s secure state. MoreXRP tokens are then minted on Solana or any other demand chain, representing the XRP locked in its home chain. Strategists deploy these MoreXRP tokens into yield-generating strategies across DeFi, funneling yield directly back to the user’s original vault.

A New Era of Global Liquidity

MoreMarkets and NEAR Protocol’s Chain Signatures embody a shift toward a more interconnected, efficient, and secure DeFi ecosystem. The integration of Chain Signatures promotes deeper liquidity pools, improved yields, and a simpler user experience. By ensuring assets remain secure on their native chains, NEAR Protocol drives a robust foundation for truly global liquidity.

Disclaimer:

This post is intended solely for informational and educational purposes. It does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. NEAR Protocol’s Chain Signatures and their integration with MoreMarkets and cross-chain liquidity solutions involve innovative technologies that may carry inherent risks, including but not limited to technical vulnerabilities, market volatility, regulatory uncertainty, and potential loss of digital assets. Users should independently evaluate the technology and associated risks before interacting with the protocol or related products. Past performance or technical capabilities do not guarantee future outcomes or security. The publisher makes no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the information provided herein. Users are solely responsible for their own decisions and actions.

The post How NEAR Protocol’s Chain Signatures Power MoreMarkets and Cross-Chain Liquidity appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

The launch of stateless validation in August 2024 marks an important milestone for NEAR Protocol, but it is by no means the end state of the protocol. There is still a lot of ambitious work to be done.

In less than four years since launching mainnet, the NEAR network has over 110 million users – a great achievement for the ecosystem. But the goal for NEAR is to onboard a billion people to the User-Owned Internet. Achieving such widespread usage will require an even more scalable, performant, secure, and fast protocol. The Near One team is already working to make improvements to Nightshade 2.0 and has started planning the next round of advancements. In this post, we describe what the protocol roadmap looks like for the rest of 2024 and into next year.

First of all, while the stateless validation launch is a major change to the protocol, it does not immediately improve the performance of mainnet. This is because we intentionally keep the upgrade as simple as possible to avoid adding more complexity into the already humongous upgrade. To fully reap the benefits of the new design, there are a number of improvements on top of the release that we will work on for the rest of 2024 following the August launch:

• Optimization of state witness size. In the current implementation, state witness size could be quite large, primarily due to the size of contract code included in a state witness. Optimization of state witness size will reduce the likelihood of a chunk hitting the size limit, thereby improving transaction throughput.
• Reduce gas cost for storage operations. One of the key benefits of stateless validation is that state accesses (reads and writes) are now fully in memory. It means that the gas cost of state accesses could be significantly reduced, which allows for higher transaction throughput.
• Resharding. The launch of stateless validation means that no validator node needs to track all shards, which enables scaling to potentially many more shards. However, due to the architectural change, the old method of resharding no longer works and a new method needs to be developed and tested. The new method of resharding will be quite fast and will lay the groundwork for dynamic resharding (see more about this development below).
• Node synchronization. While not strictly related to stateless validation, the synchronization time for a mainnet node has been a pain point for many node operators. Work will be done in this area both to improve the speed of synchronization and ensure that the synchronization process does not depend on centralized services.

In addition to the immediate priorities listed above, there are some long-term improvements that we intend to work on starting in early 2025:

• Transaction priority fee. In the stateless validation launch, we introduced congestion control that provides better latency for accepted transactions under congestion conditions. However, users may want to pay more to get to the front of the queue for certain use cases such as trading or arbitrage. Establishing a transaction priority fee mechanism will make NEAR easier to use when there is short-term congestion.
• Dynamic resharding. The holy grail of sharding: the network dynamically adjusts the number of shards based on the load. When a shard is overloaded, it splits itself into two shards. Similarly, when two shards are both underutilized, they get merged back into one shard for the sake of efficiency.
• Runtime performance improvements. There are a number of ideas that we’d like to experiment with to improve runtime performance of NEAR, which includes pipelining contract execution, parallel execution of transactions and receipts, and using an optimizing compiler for wasm.
• Leaderless consensus. The current consensus mechanism degrades in performance when some nodes are offline, which could happen during a protocol upgrade. A leaderless consensus is much less sensitive to a small number of nodes being offline and can also provide higher throughput.
• Sharded smart contracts. Today each smart contract resides on a specific shard. While the more shards there are on mainnet, the better the overall throughput will be, a smart contract per se cannot take full advantage of NEAR’s sharding. Allowing a smart contract to be sharded (exist on all shards simultaneously) could unlock use cases that are not possible today and make it possible to build dapps with hundreds of millions of users on NEAR.

These initiatives will significantly improve the performance and scalability of NEAR and make it possible to support hundreds of millions, even a billion daily transactions. The new level of scalability lays a solid foundation for the different verticals of initiatives in the NEAR ecosystem, such as Chain Abstraction, Modularity, and User-Owned AI. Stay tuned for more on performance and efficiency improvements in the coming months and a more detailed future roadmap update towards the end of the year.

The post Near One Shares Q3 NEAR Protocol Roadmap Update appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

NEAR validators provided community feedback on how to improve the validator experience, and we collectively listened. Responses suggested that routes to secure funding were unclear, and that existing delegations from the NEAR Foundation lacked transparency.
The result of the community feedback process is a new NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposal and an open call RFP to coordinate the NEAR Protocol Institutional Validator Programme. The RFP will be open until Monday September 24th, 2023.

Drafted in collaboration with a number of ecosystem participants — Meta Pool, Banyan Collective, DevHub, Pagoda, Proximity, Validator Community, and NEAR Foundation — this proposal creates a framework for a refreshed validator delegation structure. It clearly defines a number of expectations for validators, aims to align incentives, assigns ownership, and enhances transparency around securing funding support.

The proposal’s framework addresses three delegation tracks — community validators, institutional validators, and 100% fee project validators — with the goals of improving transparency, strengthening the Nakamoto coefficient of the NEAR Protocol, and increasing validator selection at custody providers: 

• Community Validators — Individual participants or smaller entities within the NEAR Protocol ecosystem who choose to operate validator nodes. They are strong advocates of NEAR Protocol’s principles and values, and actively contribute to the decentralization and security of the blockchain. The proposal addresses issues that Community Validators face, including resource constraints, rewards, vulnerability to attacks, and limited influence, building on new proposals for Community validators put forward in June.
• Institutional Validators — Typically large entities, such as companies, financial institutions, or well-established organizations. They often have significant resources and stake in the NEAR Protocol, which allows them to operate powerful and reliable infrastructure to maintain the blockchain. This proposal addresses concerns around institutional validators such as network centralization, lack of community inclusivity, and inequality in influence.
• 100% Fee Project Validators  — A track to support growth activities resulting in onboarding of users to the NEAR Protocol, and continued engagement through retention programmes. 

Firstly, check out the full NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposal and provide any feedback publicly here. Your feedback is greatly appreciated to improve the proposal.

Secondly, since this is an open call RFP to run the NEAR Protocol Institutional Validator programme, please return any applications to finance@near.foundation.

Additionally, Restaking is coming to NEAR courtesy of Octopus Network. Under Octopus 2.0, $NEAR stakers will have the ability to secure appchains with their staked $NEAR. Find out more here

Many thanks for your continued support to improve the validator experience and help secure the NEAR Protocol.  

The post Open Call for Feedback on NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposals appeared first on NEAR Protocol.

What the protocol team accomplished in Q2

Pagoda made good progress on the protocol roadmap in Q2. For the experience section, there is now a NEP on account namespaces, a key stepping stone towards account extension. Account extension would allow users to easily compose different modules such as multisig, proxy, and so on. In addition, Aurora submitted a NEP on wasm submodules, which, if implemented, would enable a limited form of synchronous execution, or allowing transactions that touch multiple contracts to settle within a single block. Both proposals are still works in progress due to the complexity of the changes. 

On top of these two proposed changes, there is a NEP on shared storage for contract code which could significantly lower the cost of deploying a common contract. These proposals aspire to bring to life the account extension idea, which allows an account to install different modules to different functionalities such as multisig, recovery, proxy, and so on.

For the core section of the roadmap, Pagoda delivered a few important improvements this quarter. Flat storage with value inlining is live on mainnet and brings an 8x improvement to state reads. Work on background writes is also in progress and the protocol team’s initial experiments show that it can potentially reduce the cost of state writes by 3x. In addition, cold storage is fully live on mainnet and drastically reduces the cost of running an archival node.

Pagoda has also made good progress to revamp state sync. With the growth of mainnet state, the previous version of state sync was too inefficient and practically unusable. The new state sync, which uses flat storage to speed up state part generation, allows a node to finish syncing mainnet state within 3 hours. The team is expected to deliver the fully functional version of the new state sync in Q3.

The team has also delivered finite wasm and its integration with nearcore, which improves the security and robustness of NEAR’s contract runtime immensely.

Updates to the roadmap

The experience section of the roadmap remains mostly the same, with two changes worth highlighting. One shift is that the changes required to implement account extension are temporarily on hold as we would like to see the impact on user experience by first emulating the changes through smart contracts. Another change is that the protocol team will work on the storage refund problem to prevent potential faucet-draining attacks in the new onboarding experience.

For the core section of the roadmap, the focus in Q3 will shift to Phase 2 of sharding, which includes both resharding the current mainnet state and turning off the requirement that block producers have to track all shards. This endeavor will take more than one quarter to finish and we will post more updates as we iron out details of the design.

To stay up to date with protocol changes as they happen, or to participate in protocol governance, please join the protocol community group and follow the NEAR Enhancement Proposal (NEP) process.

The post NEAR Q2 Protocol Roadmap Update appeared first on NEAR Protocol.