🔹 NEAR Protocol – Sharding 2.0, 1 Million TPS & Q1/2025 Revenue!
(Data updated until 07/2025 and is just basic information about the project to help facilitate basic assessment – Not investment advice)
1/ Overview & Position
- $NEAR is a layer 1 sharding blockchain, supporting smart contracts, focused on AI and using Nightshade 2.0 to optimize performance. By Q1/2024, the number of shards is expected to increase from 4 → 10 before the end of 2025, with over 110 million accounts and 20 million MAU by mid-2024.
- Q1/2025: market cap ~3 billion USD, NEAR price ~2.5 USD, global ranking 21.
2/ Key milestones 06/2024–07/2025
- Q1 2024: Development Phase 2 Sharding (Nightshade) → stateless validation, increase performance by 10x.
- Q3 2024: Launch Nightshade 2.0 on Mainnet (August 2024), paving the way for dynamic resharding.
- Q1 2025: Nearcore v2.5.0 – Resharding V3, block time reduced to 600 ms, finality 1.2 s.
- 05/2025: Set a goal to reach 1 million TPS, finality 400 ms, support AI agents, micropayments.
- 07/2025 Proposal from Hotdao to reduce inflation from 5% to 2.5%. This is also an important part of investment.
3/ 💸 Quarterly revenue (NEAR chain)
- Q1/2025: Network fee revenue: 1.4 million USD (down 33% QoQ).
- Average fee/trans: 0.0023 USD (down 25% QoQ).
- Q2/2025 no data available.
Other notes: 70% of fees are burned, 30% paid to the source contract and Staking & storage funds are not included in revenue queries.
4/ Technology & Dev
Stateless validation + dynamic sharding (Nightshade 2.0) enhances speed and scalability.
Resharding V3 handles cross-shard bandwidth, while Nearcore v2.5 improves parallel validation performance.
Block time improved from ~1.1s to 600ms; finality 1.2s.
5/ Ecosystem & integration
- Omni Bridge: from Hybrid → Chain Signatures for cross-chain interaction across multiple EVMs, BTC, Solana… .
- AI-focused growth: 20 million USD fund for AI agents (DefAI, Sender,…), DeFi TVL increased 5x to 430 million USD, stablecoin flow ~760 million USD.
- Intents feature (tx cross-chain): processing ~9.8 million USD swap, 12k transactions, 1.3k addresses.
6/ 🚀 Roadmap & future direction
Q2–Q3/2025:
- Deploy dynamic resharding, congestion control, transaction priority.
- Release Omni Bridge Phase 2 (full Chain Signatures).
- Support meta-transactions, zero-balance accounts, Secp256r1 keys, zkWASM, global storage.
End of 2025:
- Reach 1 million TPS with AI agent support, finality 400ms.
- Expand BOS, EVM support (Aurora), AI/Web3 agents applications.
7/ ✅ Opportunities & ⚠️ Challenges
✅ Scalability & speed: sharding 2.0 + stateless + dynamic resharding.
✅ AI alignment: DeFi TVL increased, intents, AI grant & ecosystem development.
✅ Strong cross-chain: Omni Bridge, Chain Signatures.
⚠️ Low revenue: only 1.4 million USD/quarter.
⚠️ Competition: Aptos, Solana, other zk-chains focused on AI.
⚠️ Roadmap execution: dynamic resharding, 1M TPS needs careful validation and high security.
8/ 🧾 Conclusion
NEAR is advancing strongly in a performance-driven, AI-native, cross-chain-first direction with sharding 2.0 and dynamic resharding. Fee revenue may not be high yet, but the tech stack promises great opportunities. If NEAR achieves 1M TPS and effectively implements Chain Signatures, they could lead the AI/Web3 blockchain wave.
#NEARProtocol #AI #Nightshade2 #Sharding #StatelessValidation #ChainSignatures #1MTPS #AIBlockchain #DeFi #CrossChain
