According to Foresight News, the NEAR Protocol's Chinese official account announced that the team will initiate the second phase of sharding in 2024. This phase will introduce stateless validation, expanding the original Nightshade design to prevent fraud proofs. The state of each shard will be entirely moved to memory, increasing the performance of each shard by 10 times or more. Currently, there are four shards, with plans to expand to five soon.
In the next step, the addition of zkWASM on the existing foundation will compress execution proofs, enabling greater decentralization for validators. This development aims to enhance the overall performance and security of the NEAR Protocol, while also promoting increased decentralization among validators.
