Thread by @near_insider

Recently, there have been questions surrounding @NEARProtocol's delaying its roadmap by 9 months. Is that true? To conclude, we need to deep dive into NEAR's Roadmap!

Read more in the thread below 👀

#NEAR $NEAR

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On NEAR's homepage and in the NEAR June Town Hall event, it is very clear about the development stages of NEAR, which can be summarized as follow:

🔸Stage 0: Simple Nightshade
🔸Phase 1: Chunk-only producers
🔸Phase 2: Nightshade
🔸Phase 3: Dynamic Resharding

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🔸Phase 0

This period began on November 15, 2021. The "Simple Nightshade Near" phase works with 4 shards, but all validators follow these shards so the network still ensures its security.

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The expansion of sharding on NEAR doesn't affect projects. NEAR claimed "internally we treat cross-contract calls the same regardless of whether two contracts are on the same shard. Therefore, developers should expect no changes to their experience of developing on NEAR."

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Sharding also helps NEAR's TPS increase. E.g: a shard can only handle 800-1000 Txs, but with changes and updates in simple sharding, TPS can be up to 2500-3000. This makes NEAR the top L1 blockchain with the fastest transaction speed on the market.

https://twitter.com/near_insider/status/1546696945917636608

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🔸Phase 1: Chunk Only

In a nutshell, "Chunk" is a mechanism to increase the number of validators, minimizing the investment in hardware.

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In the past, a validator could validate many shards for rewards. Now, he only has 1 shard to validate, which in turn reduces the hardware requirement. Current validators only need a computer with a minimum config of 4-Core CPU, with 8GB of RAM, and 200 GB of SSD of storage.

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That each person only validates 1 shard reduces the requirements to become a validator. This helps NEAR increase its validators to become more decentralized. It is expected to have 200-400 validators on NEAR when this phase finishes.

Phase 1 will begin in September 2022.

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🔸Phase 2: Nightshade.

At this stage, NEAR will completely eliminate the situation of validators with multiple shards to make the protocol become completely "Sharded", further enhancing decentralization across the ecosystem.

Phase 2 is scheduled to begin in Q2 2023.

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🔸Phase 3: Dynamic Resharding

In this final phase, NEAR will complete all of the above stages and proceed to the separation and integration of the shard based on existing resources. This will make NEAR almost "infinitely scalable".

The phase is expected to be in Q3 2023.

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And that's an overview of NEAR's roadmap. Now let's head back to the question of whether NEAR is slow compared to its original roadmap. The answer is "YES". Thread 7 mentioned that phase 1 will start in September 2022. However, this phase should have started in Q1 2022.

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The delay of this important period will affect phase 2 and phase 3. In our opinion, this is partly due to the fight taking place in Ukraine, where many of the core members of NEAR are located.

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However, good things take time, slowing down will help NEAR minimize unintended security incidents and bring better products to users.

Currently, to kick off phase 1, "Stake Wars" has been launched, enabling users to become validators.

Read here: near.org/blog/join-stak…