NEAR Protocol Shatters Limits: How Sharding Unlocks 1 Million TPS for Next-Gen Blockchain Scaling
Forget everything you know about blockchain bottlenecks. A new architecture is emerging that doesn't just tweak the old model—it dismantles it entirely.
The Scaling Breakthrough
The secret weapon? Sharding. It's not a new concept in computing, but its application here is revolutionary. Instead of forcing every single node to process every single transaction, the network splits the workload. Parallel processing replaces the linear queue, turning a congested highway into a multi-lane superhighway.
This isn't incremental improvement; it's a paradigm shift. The approach bypasses the traditional trade-offs between decentralization, security, and speed that have plagued earlier generations. By dynamically allocating resources, the system can scale near-infinitely—theoretically hitting that magic number of one million transactions every second.
Why This Matters Now
The timing couldn't be more critical. As decentralized finance and global applications demand more than legacy chains can deliver, scalability becomes the ultimate moat. Projects that can't handle the traffic will be left behind, mere footnotes in the next bull run's white papers. It’s the kind of infrastructure upgrade that makes venture capitalists swoon and legacy blockchain architects sweat.
Of course, in the world of crypto, a theoretical maximum is often just that—a number to dazzle retail investors before the next 'technical difficulty' delay. But the engineering here suggests something more substantive: a path forward that doesn't require sacrificing core principles for mere utility.
The race for true scalability is on. And the finish line is being redrawn.
NEAR Uses Sharding to Scale TPS and Cut Costs
Unlike many blockchains that rely on monolithic designs, NEAR Protocol uses a sharded architecture where execution, storage, and state are distributed across multiple parallel shards.
This approach allows TPS to increase linearly as shards are added, supports decentralization with modest validator hardware, and keeps costs predictable even under heavy usage.
A recent upgrade called Nightshade 2.0 introduced stateless validation and gave the network a huge boost in speeds. The mainnet currently boasts nine shards, 600 milliseconds for block time, and 1.2-second finality.
This recently introduced Deterministic Accounts mechanism for shard execution of smart contracts ensures that NEAR remains a blockchain optimized for large-volume cross-chain DeFi and e-commerce.
NEAR Shows High-Speed Performance for DeFi and AI
The benchmark was meant to be more representative of practical use cases as opposed to lab environments. They utilized 1 million accounts for each shard and represented cross-shard traffic accurately.
Only native token transactions were used. All transactions were added directly to the mempool. Simulated network traffic was distributed across three Google Cloud regions.
Hardware used: C4D series VMs with 8-core CPUs. They were priced at less than $1,000 a month.
The system continued to handle more than 1 million transactions per second across 70 shards. In this test, critical optimizations included faster execution, faster checks for signatures, optimizing tree and database performance, and more powerful consensus paths.
Additionally, open-source scripts for this benchmark were available on NEAR for verification of any performance claim.
This milestone proves that NEAR has the capability to execute future-oriented blockchain applications, such as on-chain AI, fast DeFi trading, and enterprise-level software.
Future research directions include dynamic re-sharding, sharded smart contracts, and other performance tweaks to maintain affordability and scalability while maintaining decentralization.
