NEAR Protocol: Plans for the Future

Recent Achievement: Stateless Validation

In August 2024, NEAR Protocol launched a new feature called “stateless validation.” This is a big step forward, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Current Success and Future Goals

NEAR has over 110 million users, which is great! But their goal is even bigger – they want to reach 1 billion users. To do this, they need to make their system even better:

• More scalable (able to handle more users)
• More performant (work faster and better)
• More secure (safer to use)
• Faster (quicker in doing tasks)

Plans for the Rest of 2024

After the August launch, the team will work on these improvements:

1. Make “state witness” smaller: This will help more transactions happen at once.
2. Make storage operations cheaper: This will also allow more transactions.
3. Improve “resharding”: This will help NEAR grow even more.
4. Make node synchronization better: This will help NEAR work more smoothly.

Plans for Early 2025 and Beyond

1. Add transaction priority fees: This will help users who need their transactions done quickly.
2. Create dynamic resharding: The network will adjust itself based on how busy it is.
3. Improve how NEAR runs: This will make everything work faster.
4. Create “leaderless consensus”: This will help NEAR work better even if some parts are offline.
5. Make “sharded smart contracts”: This will allow for even more users and new ways to use NEAR.

What This Means

All these changes will make NEAR able to handle hundreds of millions, or even a billion, transactions every day. This will help NEAR grow and support new features like Chain Abstraction, Modularity, and User-Owned AI.

The NEAR team will share more updates later in the year about their future plans.