The upcoming upgrade to the layer-1 blockchain Near will allow the network to scale dynamically without human intervention.
The market is appreciating this, due to which the price of the native token is increasing rapidly. NEAR is trading at $2.25, up more than 27% in the last 24 hours.
“Dynamic resharding is coming to NEAR. An upcoming network upgrade will enable the protocol to automatically add shards as demand increases,” the protocol announced on X.
Shards are small, independent divisions of the blockchain network that process transactions and smart contracts in parallel. Imagine a grocery store with multiple checkout lines. This helps Nearer handle more traffic than typical blockchains with a single checkout line.
Hunt? Until now, opening a new split on Near has been a slow, manual process, requiring weeks of validator coordination, a vote, and a phased rollout.
The upcoming dynamic resharding in June will automate this process. In other words, when the network sees a specific checkout line, a shard, getting too full, it doesn’t wait for a human to fix it. It automatically splits, not in half, but by adding more independent parallel validators to the system, just as a grocery store would hire new cashiers and customer employees.
“Adding shards requires a full protocol upgrade: weeks of validator coordination, a vote, a phased rollout. Dynamic resharding makes it automatic: A shard hits a state size threshold, is deterministically split, and is validated by state witnesses without any human intervention,” Near said in a explainer.
The new feature is especially fundamental for an AI-led onchain economy, where bots are trading with each other, it explained.
quantum proof
Scaling isn’t the only thing changing with the upcoming upgrade. Near is also adding “post-quantum-secure signatures.”
Quantum fear has gripped the developer community ever since Google researchers warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might be able to break today’s blockchains with significantly less firepower than initially expected.
Therefore, Near is installing new locks so that years from now, those 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 cap in the last 24 hours thanks to the rally. Bitcoin Falling 0.4% to $77,360.
NEAR’s external performance is supported by strong demand for Europe-listed Bitwise NEAR Staking ETFs (exchange-traded products). According to data shared by Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, ETPs have withdrawn $7 million of investors’ money this week.