The upcoming Near layer 1 blockchain upgrade will enable the network to dynamically scale without human intervention.
The market gives it a boost, causing the price of the native token to rise significantly. NEAR gained over 27% in the last 24 hours to trade at $2.25.
“Dynamic resharding is coming to NEAR. The next network upgrade will allow the protocol to automatically add shards as demand increases,” the protocol announced on
Shards are smaller, independent partitions of the blockchain network that process transactions and smart contracts in parallel. Imagine a grocery store with multiple checkout lines. This helps Near handle more traffic than traditional blockchains with a single payline.
The trap? Until now, opening a new shard on Near has been a slow, manual process, requiring weeks of validator coordination, voting, and staged deployment.
The next dynamic reharding in June will automate this process. In other words, when the network detects a specific payline, a shard that’s too full, it doesn’t wait for a human to fix it. It splits automatically, not in two, but by adding more independent parallel validators to the system, just as the grocery store would hire new cashiers and customer service staff.
“Adding shards required a complete protocol upgrade: weeks of validator coordination, voting, staged deployment. Dynamic repartitioning makes it automatic: a shard hits a state size threshold, splits deterministically, and is validated by state witnesses without human intervention,” Near said in an explanation.
The new functionality is particularly fundamental for an AI-driven chain economy, in which robots do business with each other, he explains.
Quantum proof
Scaling isn’t the only thing changing with the impending upgrade. Near also adds a “secure post-quantum signature”.
Quantum fears have gripped the developer community since Google researchers warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might be able to crack current blockchains with significantly less firepower than initially anticipated.
Near is therefore installing new locks so that in a few years, these super quantum machines will no longer be able to touch the funds of Near users.
The NEAR native token is the best performing cryptocurrency among the top 100 coins by market cap over the last 24 hours thanks to the rally. Bitcoin fell 0.4% to $77,360.
NEAR’s external performance is supported by strong demand for the European-listed Bitwise Near Staking ETF (exchange-traded product). This week, the ETP raised $7 million from investors, according to data shared by Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise.
