NEAR Protocol expands mainnet shards from 8 to 9…throughput increases 12.5%

NEAR Protocol said it expanded the number of mainnet shards from 8 to 9, increasing network throughput by 12.5%.

On the 6th, according to industry sources, Bowen Wang, founder of NEAR One, said on X (formerly Twitter) that "the shard expansion upgrade was completed smoothly with no network downtime, and the network maintained stability throughout the entire process." He explained that "the previous expansion from 6 to 8 shards was a technical challenge that required introducing resharding and stateless validation, but this increase has become a simpler and more repeatable procedure."

Wang also said, "Although the state of a particular shard could grow too large and require chunk producers to demand more memory, this could be elegantly solved by separating the state through resharding," and added, "we have secured a clear path to continue increasing the number of shards in order to expand network capacity."