#NEAR is a blockchain for AI. It’s built from the ground up to support applications, agents, and users at a global scale. Sharding gives NEAR the speed and capacity to handle massive demand. Chain Abstraction makes it simple for users and AI agents to interact across multiple blockchains with one account. Privacy and verifiability are built into the core, enabling agents to own assets, make decisions, and act independently.

Each part of NEAR’s design—scalability, multichain access, private AI—works together to power an open, user-owned internet where AI isn’t just an add-on. It’s a first-class participant.

Whether you're building consumer apps, finance platforms, or autonomous agents, NEAR provides the infrastructure to run them fast, securely, and across chains.

Sharding 

NEAR uses a sharding design called Nightshade 2.0 to scale its infrastructure. Sharding lets NEAR split the network into multiple parallel shards—each processing transactions independently. This means the network’s capacity grows with demand.

As of 2025, NEAR runs 8 active shards, and thanks to recent upgrades, it achieves transaction finality in around 600 milliseconds—one of the fastest speeds in Web3.

NEAR also introduced stateless validation, allowing validators to process transactions without storing the full state of a shard. This reduces hardware requirements and improves decentralization.

Sharding is what enables NEAR to support high-throughput applications like AI agents, multichain protocols, and consumer apps—at internet scale. It also powers cross-chain infrastructure like OmniBridge, which relies on NEAR’s speed and scalability to move assets securely between major networks.