NEAR Chinese official account announced that the team will launch the second phase of sharding in 2024, introducing stateless validation and extending the original Nightshade design to avoid fraud proof.

The state of each shard will be completely moved to memory, thereby improving the performance of each shard (currently 4, soon to be 5) by 10 times or more. The next step is to add zkWASM on top of the existing foundation to compress the execution proof, thereby achieving greater decentralization for validators.