The Near Protocol announced via X on Thursday that 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.
Stateless validation is an innovative approach to validating state transition or updating the status of all the data posted to the blockchain. Furthermore, in Nightshade 2.0, validators no longer need to track all shards, and there are lower hardware requirements and costs for running a validator. This could potentially allow more validators to join the ecosystem, further decentralizing the network and enhancing its security over time.
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. The network runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Nightshade, which aims to provide dynamic scalability and stabilize fees. NEAR is trading at $4.473, up 6% in the last 24 hours.