Layer-1 blockchain Near’s upcoming upgrade will enable the network to scale dynamically without human intervention.
The market gives it a thumbs-up, sending the native token’s price significantly higher. NEAR has gained more than 27% in the last 24 hours to trade at $2.25.
“Dynamic resharding is coming to NEAR. The upcoming network upgrade will enable the protocol to add shards automatically as demand grows,” the protocol announced on X. “This delivers on NEAR’s fundamental vision of building the world’s most scalable blockchain protocol at the highest level of performance.”
Shards are smaller, independent partitions of the blockchain network that process transactions and smart contracts in parallel. Imagine a grocery store with multiple checkout lines. This helps Near handle more traffic than typical blockchains with a single checkout line.
The catch? Until now, opening a new partition on Near has been a slow, manual process that has required weeks of validation coordination, a vote, and an incremental rollout.
The upcoming dynamic reassignment in June will automate this process. In other words, when the network sees a specific check-out line, a shard that’s getting too full, it doesn’t wait for a human to fix it. It automatically splits, not in two, but by adding more independent parallel validators to the system, just as the grocery store would hire new cashiers and customer staff.
“Adding shards has required a full protocol upgrade: weeks of validator coordination, a poll, an incremental rollout. Dynamic resharding does it automatically: a shard hits a state size threshold, splits deterministically, and is validated by state witnesses without human intervention,” Near said in an explanation.
The new feature is especially fundamental to an AI-led onchain economy where bots do business with each other, it explained.
Quantum safe
Scaling isn’t the only thing that changes with the upcoming upgrade. Near also adds “post-quantum-secure signing.”
Quantum fear has gripped the developer community ever since Google researchers warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might be able to crack today’s blockchains with significantly less firepower than originally expected.
Near is therefore installing new locks so that years from now these super quantum machines will not be able to touch Near users’ funds.
Native token NEAR is the best performing cryptocurrency among the top 100 coins by market capitalization over the last 24 hours thanks to the rally. Bitcoin is down 0.4% to $77,360.
NEAR’s external performance is supported by strong demand for the Bitwise Near Staking ETF (exchange-traded product) listed in Europe. This week, the ETP has pulled in $7 million in investor money, according to data shared by Bitwise’s CEO Hunter Horsley.
