NEAR Launches Nightshade Sharding
NEAR blockchain introduced the first phase of their sharding mechanism - Simple Nightshade.
NEAR Protocol completed an instrumental step in building their sharding mechanism. It's a part of an ongoing 4-stage rollout of upgrades that looks into overcoming some of the limitations of competing systems.
Let's dive into its key aspects.
The Blockchain Trilemma
Many blockchains are working on solutions to the three-way pull of the infamous blockchain trilemma. Essentially, the trilemma says that it's easy to have a blockchain with two of three key attributes: decentralization, security, and scalability.
What's difficult is getting all three as blockchains are forced to make trade-offs. These networks have been fighting this problem for very long, and to get around Near is trying to solve it with sharding.
A sharded blockchain is capable of scaling more efficiently. Protocols that claim to have thousands of transactions per second will eventually reach an upper limit due to their non-sharded design. NEAR protocol's approach to sharding is called the Nightshade.
What is sharding ?
Blockchains require nodes to store all the information on-chain & process all transactions. This makes the network secure, but it also renders it slow. Sharding divides the database into smaller pieces allowing the network to be fast, secure & scalable at the same time.
Simple Nightshade(Phase 0)
Phase 0 is the first major step in NEAR’s Simple Nightshade sharding approach. In this phase only state sharding is used i.e state will be split into four shards, foucsed at increasing the throughput of network. Processing is not sharded yet – meaning the blockchain will still be validated by all the network’s validators.
State sharding
Practically, under State Sharding the nodes in each shard are building their own blockchain that contains transactions that affect only the local part of the global state that is assigned to that shard. Therefore, the validators in the shard only need to store their local part of the global state and only execute,and as such only relay transactions that affect their part of the state, reducing the requirement on all compute power & storage.
For developers
Developers will not be exposed to the details of sharding from the very beginning & they will essentially remain unaffected by this upgrade. They will not have to change existing processes in order to take advantage of the increase in speed and scalability.
Increasing throughput
Due to its sharding mechanism, NEAR has some technical advantages that are arguably its biggest selling point. One shard could process about 800 TPS, four shards scale it to minimum 2500-3000 TPS. This makes NEAR’s Nightshade scaling capabilities theoretically limitless (by increasing the number of shards) and able to handle millions of transactions per second.
Phaso 1 - Chunk only validators
The next phase of this rollout will begin early in 2022. It will introduce us to chunk-only producers, who only validate one shard. They produce chunks (shard blocks) for some specific shard & only need to run inexpensive hardware, without sacrificing the security of the network.
Phase 2 - Nightshade
In phase 2 the need for the validators to track all the shards will be eliminated. Hence, both state & processing will be fully sharded. This will also further lower the hardware requirements of running a block producer on NEAR, making the network more accessible for validators.
Phase 3 - Dynamic Resharding
Phase 3 will look into creating the ability for the network to dynamically split & merge shards based on resource utilization. This will make NEAR almost infinitely scalable and resilient to short-term usage spikes. Eventually network will itselfy adjust the number of shards based on their utilization and no validators will need to validate all the shards.
Conclusion
NEAR is creating an ecosystem for a broader audience to thrive with ambitious funding programs including $800 million worth of global ecosystem funding (now valued at $1.2 billion). NEAR's DeFi might still be at an early stage but it is quickly building its infrastructure.
NEAR protocol is an emerging player in blockchain space looking to address the limitations of older systems with sharding mechanism at its core. The way this protocol is moving forward on its plans opens up opportunities for new protocols, applications, and experiments.
Endnote
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