NEAR Protocol Slashes Block Time to Lightning-Fast 600ms—Ethereum Eat Your Heart Out
NEAR just flipped the script on blockchain latency, announcing sub-second block times that leave legacy chains gasping. The 600ms benchmark—confirmed today—positions the layer-1 as a dark horse in the race for institutional adoption.
Why it matters: Near-instant finality could make NEAR the go-to for high-frequency DeFi traders tired of watching arbitrage opportunities evaporate during Solana’s ’network congestion’ episodes. The tech leverages sharding and stateless validation—no magic, just ruthless optimization.
The cynical take: Wall Street quant firms will exploit this faster than a retail trader front-running Coinbase listings. But for once, the speed advantage might actually trickle down to normies.
Moving Towards 200 Milliseconds
The announcement highlights that NEAR will not stop at 600-millisecond blocks. It plans to lower it to approximately 200 milliseconds by the end of 2025. They say that upcoming innovations surrounding consensus and block production will enable this achievement.
Meanwhile, the latest update came as a result of the recent ‘optimistic block’ implementation in, a major upgrade to the NEAR Protocol’s sharding mechanism. It has allowed shards to “act optimistically” and not wait for block arrival, thus reducing latency by 2x for fast transaction processing.
Gm! Feels good waking up to 600ms block time and 1.2 second finality on NEAR
Our builders and users enjoy one of the best-performing blockchains in the world. pic.twitter.com/VdkZtExfX6
Moreover, the speed update enables developers to reduce complexity around transaction confirmations, reorgs, and network delays.
Also, it advances NEAR’s work on intents, allowing AI agents and smart contracts to trigger on-chain actions in real time, and receive feedback almost instantly.
“’Blink and it’s final’ isn’t an exaggeration,” the announcement claims. “In the time it takes to blink, your NEAR transaction can finalize on-chain. This is about more than just speed, it also offers developers and end-users strong confidence in the network’s security and reliability. Builders no longer need to design around confirmations or delays—because there aren’t any.”
Meanwhile, at the time of writing,trades at $3.14. It’s up 1.7% over the past 24 hours, 35% in a week, and 44% in a month. It has decreased by 56% in a year.
The coin hit its all-time high of $20.44 in January 2022. It’s down 85% since.
