NEAR Protocol Update: Dynamic Sharding, 1M TPS, and Omni-Chain Expansion (September 2025)

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1. 0:00

   Hey there, Josh with NearDev. Excited to give you some protocol updates for September of 2025 and our continued path towards scalability. Here's a quick update on some charting milestones that we've hit so far this year. Ship shards 7 and 8 in May. In August, we released Shard 9. And in November or December of this year, we plan on releasing our 10th shard.

2. 0:24

   overall giving us a 250% capacity increase since earlier 2024. In active development, we are currently working on dynamic sharding. So currently when you're a developer building smart contracts, you are deploying your contract more or less evenly across shards. The problem arises when one of these contracts starts heating up and it gets a lot more traffic. this traffic from this particular contract can be problematic for some of the other contracts on the shard that are suffering as a result of this. Um

3. 0:58

   therefore we create another shard for this contract and then migrate that over. Um currently this process is done manually as you saw in the previous slide. Each one of those shards was a release that we had to complete. But with dynamic sharding we have ondemand shard splitting. This will not require new releases and will auto adjust based on the current or predicted traffic.

4. 1:22

   Really truly is the holy grail of sharding and we're really excited to be in active development for that. Additionally, we are working on sharded contracts. So earlier this year we introduced global contracts that enables contract code to be shared across multiple accounts and this process builds upon that concept. For example, you might have a contract that even though it's on its own shard, the

5. 1:43

   contract state and/or traffic could get rather large and become limited by the capacity of that single shard. So having the ability to shard a contract state and balance across multiple shards removes those current limitations and unlocks another milestone in our path towards scalability.

6. 2:00

   This powers us to have unrestrained contract growth and truly unlimited composability. We're super excited that it'll be coming to mainet in 2.10 10 release. This year, we've set an ambitious goal of achieving 1 million transactions per second. And to help us accomplish this, we've created a new specialized team.

7. 2:20

   They're called the performance optimization V team, or POV for short. This team has one mission, and that's to push the infrastructure limits while preserving chain security. We're going to fine-tune the network hardware and database parameters, eliminate any unnecessary database rights, and leverage optimistic data processing.

8. 2:41

   So far, this team's recent achievements have been taking our network from 10,000 transactions a second on 10 shards to an impressive 200,000 transactions per second on 20 shards. At this rate, they are on track of hitting 1 million transactions per second by the end of the year.

9. 3:00

   Additionally, we're also working on making significant block production improvements. So far this year, we've reduced our block production time in half from 1.2 seconds to 600 milliseconds. But we haven't stopped there. As we continue to push forward and ask ourselves, how can we reduce it even more?

10. 3:18

    Well, to answer this, we need to take a look at our current architecture and see what ways we can make improvements. At the core, we have data, execution, and consensus layers, all tightly coupled with each other to produce each block.

11. 3:32

    But what if we could take these layers and separate them from each other to operate independently? That's exactly what our new initiative, Spice, is doing, the separation of consensus and execution. This will create clean layers of separation to operate and evolve independently. As this modular architecture enables higher performance, it has a much simpler and cleaner chain progression with less of these edge cases we've run into in the past such as

12. 3:57

    uh chunk miss or ever growing state witness. This gives us the ultimate asynchronous environment. It improves our data transfer rate and unblocks nodes from external delay. It also is resilient to heavy traffic by by allowing consensus operations to proceed unhindered and enable progressive slowdowns without these sudden drops. It also has the potential to reduce our gas limits that could lead to larger transactions.

13. 4:25

    This new modular approach, we can get block production down to as low as 200 milliseconds. That's an additional 300% increase from our current 600 millisecond rate. We've also been making improvements to our seamless crosschain experience. As your near account is omni chain, it can control countless accounts across multiple networks thanks to chain signatures. With chain signatures, we've been working hard to make improvements in both performance and reliability.

14. 4:54

    We've increased through the throughput by 100x, reduced the latency for signature requests by four to 5x, and ultimately reduce signature requests from 16 to 20 seconds down to only 3 to 4 seconds. We also have some new MPC node updates as we now have 10 independent node operators and growing. We're also assisting all of our node operators in migrating to trusted execution environments for even more enhanced security measures with everything being

15. 5:24

    controlled and orchestrated all on chain. And finally, as the omni bridge was created using chain signatures, we're happy to announce that the omni bridge has been deployed across seven networks. This now gives users an ability to control accounts across Bitcoin, Ethereum, arbitum, base, Salana, Zcash, and B&B chain. All controlled by one NA near account.

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    For more information about any of the technology behind near protocol, check out docs at docs.near.org. Or if you want to chat with our developer community and get support on something you're building, be sure to join our Telegram chat at NearDev.