The NEAR Foundation announced on Tuesday (30th) that the agreement working group will initiate the testing of Phase 2 of the Near sharding and is expected to launch on the mainnet in May this year.
One of the main benefits of the new sharding implementation is to significantly increase the already fast transaction throughput of NEAR by up to 10 times. Sharding is a unique scaling method of the blockchain, which divides the blockchain into multiple parallel “shards”.
Phase 2 will introduce the most significant changes to the NEAR Protocol since its mainnet launch in 2020, with the biggest change being the implementation of stateless validation. The NEAR Foundation stated that stateless validation is an innovative method of state transition, or the process of updating all data states published on the blockchain. NEAR validators no longer need to locally maintain the state of the shards but can obtain all the necessary information for validating state changes from the network, known as “state witnesses”.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, stated:
