The NEAR Protocol team launched Simple Nightshade as the first step toward a fully sharded and scalable blockchain.
Sharding is built into the protocol’s design, but when preparing for the mainnet launch in 2020, NEAR developers said there was no point in implementing it at that time.
According to the blog, daily transactions have risen to 300,000. The project team expects this figure to continue increasing in the coming months as new projects built on the protocol come online.
«Although the network is currently using only about 13% of total capacity, the statement said, they decided to start transitioning to sharding now to avoid unpleasant surprises and to support all NEAR applications.»
Simple Nightshade is the initial phase of the transition. After its deployment, state validation in the network is divided into four shards. However, all validators still participate in block finalisation.
A mechanism for further shard division has also been created, which will allow linear scaling of the protocol.
It is expected that Simple Nightshade will already significantly increase the network’s throughput.
In early 2022, the team plans to move to the next phase, during which some validators will operate in a specific shard. They will be able to use less powerful and cheaper hardware.
After the implementation of the next phase, there will be no need for any validators to track all shards. The network will be fully segmented, but with a fixed number of shards. This phase is planned to be completed in the third quarter of 2022.
During the final phase of the transition, the protocol team intends to enable dynamic splitting and merging of shards depending on network load.
«This will make NEAR almost infinitely scalable and resilient to short-term spikes in usage», the developers said.
The last phase is expected to be completed in Q4 2022.
In October, the NEAR team launched a fund of $800 million to finance developers and individual projects in the ecosystem in the form of grants.