On March 19 2025 NEAR Protocol has successfully completed an important upgrade to its mainnet, expanding from 6 to 8 shards. So now there are 8 shards! While the 33% capacity improvement is valuable, the technical achievements behind this upgrade represent significant progress toward NEAR’s scalability goals.
Revolutionary Resharding Approach
The most notable technical advancement in this upgrade is the implementation of single-block resharding. Previously, NEAR’s resharding process required validator nodes to build the entire state of new shards from scratch—a time-consuming process that could take an hour to complete. This approach became impractical after the Nightshade 2.0 launch introduced stateless validation to the protocol.
Instead of the old method, NEAR’s new resharding technique works by splitting the state trie of a shard along a boundary and computing two new state roots in logarithmic time (O(log n)). The state witness for this transition is also logarithmic in size, making it small enough for validators to verify efficiently. Most importantly, this entire process happens within a single block time.
This advancement brings NEAR significantly closer to achieving dynamic resharding—a capability where shards would automatically split on demand in response to network needs, all within a very short timeframe.
Multi-Shard Splitting Capabilities
Another key aspect of this upgrade was the simultaneous splitting of two shards. Though this might seem like a minor detail, it demonstrates NEAR’s ability to increase the number of shards rapidly when needed. If limited to splitting just one shard at a time, scaling to the targeted 50 shards would be a much lengthier process.
Looking Ahead
The successful implementation of this upgrade represents substantial engineering work from the NEAR team. With these technological foundations in place, NEAR Protocol is well-positioned to continue expanding its shard count in the coming months, further enhancing the network’s scalability and throughput.
The smooth execution of this upgrade demonstrates NEAR’s technical maturity and brings the protocol one step closer to its vision of a highly scalable blockchain infrastructure.
