This update was a project that NEAR had been planning for a long time, and its first version was introduced in 2022. The goal of Nightshade 2.0 is to increase the transaction capacity of the network and process transactions faster and more cost-effectively.

In the statement made by NEAR Foundation, it was stated that the “stateless validation” feature was also introduced with the new update. This concept has been discussed extensively by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and is seen as an important technology to improve the performance of the blockchain.

Stateless validation ensures that validators can retrieve necessary information from the network without having to store the state of a shard locally. This both improves performance on a single shard and makes it possible to add more shard capacity in the network.

This update to the NEAR Protocol, which aims to improve the efficiency of the blockchain, is part of a broader design that includes “sharding” technology. Sharding aims to increase the scalability of the network by dividing the blockchain into smaller pieces. This approach allows performing more transactions at lower costs.

Ethereum similarly aims to implement full sharding in its roadmap and has recently implemented the first phase of this concept, called proto-danksharding.

The main goal of NEAR Protocol’s sharding strategy is to increase the transaction capacity of the network and reduce the costs of validators. “Nightshade 2.0 will radically restructure NEAR’s sharding, greatly improving the efficiency and scalability of the network,” explained Bowen Wang.

Wang emphasized that the update will increase NEAR’s transaction speed by five times and significantly reduce the costs of validators. In this way, it will be possible for more people to take part in the network as validators and the decentralization process of the network will be supported.

NEAR Protocol constantly plans and implements such updates to contribute to the development of blockchain technology and appeal to a wider range of users.

As one of the founders of NEAR, Illia Polosukhin explained the future potential and importance of this technology in the white paper about Nightshade 2.0 published in 2019. With the update, NEAR Protocol’s processing efficiency will increase and the ease of use and accessibility of the network will greatly improve.

These innovations that NEAR Protocol has achieved with this update are considered an important step in blockchain technology. So far, such technological advances have led to significant changes and improvements in the cryptocurrency world.

NEAR Protocol’s Nightshade 2.0 update stands out as a step that continues this trend and aims to maximize the future potential of blockchains.