NEAR Achieves Blockchain Sharding, Solving the Blockchain Trilemma

• $NEAR’s sharding implementation enables true blockchain scalability without sacrificing decentralization, setting a new standard.
• Unlike Ethereum, $NEAR’s innovative approach combines shards efficiently, eliminating bottlenecks and enhancing performance.
• With perfect interoperability, $NEAR’s sharding solves composability issues, pushing the boundaries of what blockchain can achieve.

$NEAR Protocol has implemented sharding, marking a milestone in blockchain technology. This breakthrough solves the blockchain trilemma by offering scalability without compromising decentralization.

Horizontal Scaling: A Game Changer

The August 12th $NEAR 2.0 update completed the project, making $NEAR the second chain to achieve sharding in production, following in the footsteps of Elrond (EGLD). Stateless validation, the final piece of the puzzle, has enabled this massive scaling, creating a paradigm shift in the industry.

Horizontal scaling, $NEAR’s new approach, distributes workloads across node groupings, or “shards,” allowing for linear growth. This contrasts with the traditional method of every node verifying all states, which is fundamentally unscalable. Ethereum ($ETH), despite years of research, gave up on sharding in 2022, opting for Layer 2 (L2) scaling instead.

However, $NEAR’s success casts a shadow over $ETH’s compromises, as sharding proves to be a superior solution. The innovative architecture $NEAR introduces not only surpasses Ethereum but also demonstrates the power of blockchain to evolve.

Moreover, $NEAR’s sharding is novel. Instead of relying on a beacon or meta chain to coordinate shards, it combines chunks from different shards into a single block. This design eliminates bottlenecks, even at 1 million transactions per second (TPS), positioning $NEAR as a leader in blockchain scalability.

Interoperability and Efficiency: The Future of $NEAR

Stateless validation allows faster shuffling of nodes between shards, ensuring each shard benefits from full Layer 1 (L1) security. This leads to a reduction in state growth, as the network’s data is efficiently divided among the shards.

Significantly, $NEAR offers perfect interoperability between shards, integrating them into a coherent whole. This ensures seamless operations without fragmentation or composability issues. In contrast, L2 scaling introduces limitations. Besides, with $NEAR’s sharding, the only trade-off is a slight speed difference when compared to purely parallelized chains. However, this difference is marginal, measured in mere seconds.

Consequently, $NEAR’s sharding breakthrough deserves more attention. The technology’s potential to transform the blockchain landscape should not be underestimated. As the crypto evolves, $NEAR’s achievement may drive the industry toward a fully scalable, decentralized future.