NEAR’s Simple Nightshade: A Primer
As part of the Simple Nightshade launch, NEAR Foundation is publishing a series of articles on our sharding approach, including pieces on how it works, why it matters, and more.
As a NEAR developer, user, or observer, you’ve surely heard of our sharding approach by now, which we call Simple Nightshade. It’s a major part of what we’re doing at NEAR for the platform and community.
On November 15th, NEAR announced the completion of Phase 0 — the launch of state sharding on the Mainnet. This is part of an ongoing 4-stage rollout of Simple Nightshade sharding protocol upgrades. It’s exciting news and we’re here to explain why in the primer below.
Phase 0 is the first major step in NEAR’s Simple Nightshade sharding approach (details below). Taken together, the 4 sharding stages will, amongst other things, help expand adoption of Web3 and encourage multi-chain interoperability with an elegantly simple, fast, and secure protocol for all.
Sharding will help reimagine finance, community and creativity in new and exciting ways. Let’s find out how.
Note: Parts 2, 3, and 4 of this Simple Nightshade series will delve into topics with more specificity, so stay tuned for those installments over the next few weeks.
What is sharding?
Before getting into sharding, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of NEAR’s Proof-of-Stake protocol. Unlike Proof-of-Work, where miners run computations to claim individual blocks of crypto, PoS works by having “validators” verify transactions or blocks (for a fee). NEAR’s PoS works by a voting mechanism: once a validator is chosen, they then work on solving the block.
Now with that out of the way, let’s get into the world of sharding.
If you’re a little confused about what exactly sharding is, don’t worry, it can be explained quite simply. To understand sharding, think of a blockchain protocol as being composed of multiple other blockchains. Each of these component blockchains is called a “shard,” and each has their own set of validators.
In the next section, we’ll focus on the Simple Nightshade approach, which differs from the type described above.
What makes Simple Nightshade unique
In contrast to the sharding described in the previous section, NEAR’s Simple Nightshade system is modeled as a single blockchain, with each block containing all transactions from all shards. As a consequence, each block changes the entire state of all shards.
On a physical level, no participant downloads either the full state or the full logical block. Instead, they maintain the state that is connected to the shards for which they validate transactions. The list of all transactions in a block is split into physical chunks. That’s one chunk per shard.
On a practical level, what does this mean for users and the platform as a whole? Well, amongst other things, it significantly speeds up transactions (TPS, or transactions per second) and enhances security both for the community and any cross-platform or multi-chain projects. It also makes NEAR more energy efficient and carbon neutral since the hardware required for PoW mining will be unnecessary.
For a deeper dive into the specifics of sharding, stay tuned and read Part 2: How Simple Nightshade’s Sharding Works and Part 3: Why Sharding Matters.
Essential Takeaways
NEAR protocol is Proof-of-Stake, and the Simple Nightshade approach is NEAR’s interpretation of a proof-of-stake network. The Phase 0 announcement is the transition of the NEAR mainnet from a single shard to four shards.
The great thing is that this doesn’t change the NEAR community’s smart contracts. You don’t have to upgrade them! Just carry on as normal.
Remember, the Simple Nightshade approach is unique in that each block contains all transactions from all shards. No participant downloads either the full state or the full logical block — instead, they maintain the state connected to the shards for which they validate transactions.
When Phase 1 is complete by the end of 2021, the NEAR protocol will launch sharded processing. The community will get even more validators and decentralization — more on that later.
Community members will also be able to become validators without the need to buy expensive equipment and with less staking, and this will mean cheaper hardware required for most validators.
As a result, Simple Nightshade and its regular upgrades make NEAR incredibly fast and secure, without any of the considerable gas fees associated with other blockchains.
Read the Simple Nightshade white paper here.
About NEAR
NEAR is a high-performance blockchain that is designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. NEAR’s vision is to create a network that enables people to re-imagine finance, creativity and community in new and inclusive ways.
NEAR is built by an award-winning team of engineers and entrepreneurs to be simple to use, inclusive and good for the environment. NEAR is backed by top VCs such as A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.
Join NEAR’s community:
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UY9Xf2k
Twitter: @NEAR_Blockchain & @NEARProtocol
Want to hear from the NEAR team directly? Check out our company blog.
