NEAR Protocol, a prominent L1 blockchain offering developer-friendly, user-friendly, and scalable platform for dApps, has announced an exclusive mainnet upgrade. As per NEAR Protocol, it has now effectively upgraded the mainnet thereof from six to eight shards, denoting a significant 33% increase in network capacity. The platform revealed this development in a recent thread of posts on X.
NEAR Protocol’s Increase from Six to 8 Shards Increases Capacity by 33%
NEAR Protocol’s latest upgrade from the previous 6 to 8 shards has improved its network capacity by up to 33%. NEAR One team as well as Bowen Wang, a crucial NEAR Protocol developer spearheaded the respective upgrade. The transition offers noteworthy improvements to the overall infrastructure of the Near Protocol. One of the top enhancements that this upgrade enables deals with the single-block resharding’s employment. This eliminates the requirement for lengthy state rebuilds. This technological improvement minimizes downtime while also leading to a relatively effective scaling toward increased shard numbers in the future.
While discussing this shard upgrade, Bowen Wang stressed its significance. He highlighted that the former shard expansions needed validators to redevelop the whole shard states anew. It was a very time-consuming procedure that would take nearly one hour. Nonetheless, the latest single-block resharding permits the breakdown of the state trie of a shard along pre-established boundaries.
Hence, it enables computing of exclusive state roots within the logarithmic time. With this,the validators are allowed to accomplish the procedure within one block. Apart from that, it significantly improves efficiency while also readying the protocol to carry out dynamic resharding. The upgrade plays a vital role in improving the dynamic resharding which is a notable feature for scalability. It lets network automatically customize shard counts to prevent congestion.
Paving Way for Reaching Fifty Shards in Future
According to NEAR Protocol, it smoothly executed the upgrade due to the NEAR team as well as the wider development community’s efforts. It included two shards’ splitting to enhance the ability to simultaneously tackle more than one shard splits. The respective capability is necessary for attaining NEAR Protocol’s objective of reaching fifty shards on its mainnet at some time in the future.
