NEAR was built to shard from day one, not retrofitted. At the core is Nightshade 2.0, NEP-509, stateless validation. Validators no longer store the full state of the shards they secure; each block carries a compact state witness proving just the relevant slice. That decouples validation from state storage, so NEAR adds shards to increase capacity without forcing validators onto progressively heavier hardware, the exact pressure that pushes most high-throughput chains toward centralization. Supporting it, per-shard congestion control creates isolated fee markets, so an overloaded shard raises fees only locally instead of slowing the whole network. Post-activation, NEAR has sustained roughly 4,000 TPS on real hardware when needed, and hit 1 million TPS in a controlled 70-shard benchmark. Dynamic resharding, shipped in v2.13, removes the last human bottleneck. When a shard crosses a state-size threshold, the network splits it automatically at the next epoch boundary, validated by the same state witnesses, typically within a matter of hours. No upgrade or vote needed. Capacity tracks demand in real time. Complemented by sharded smart contracts, an application or agent workload can now expand horizontally across shards as it grows. NEAR is no longer merely sharded. It reshards itself,  exactly what a settlement layer for millions of autonomous agents requires. Read the full breakdown below 👇

NEAR was built to shard from day one, not retrofitted. At the core is Nightshade 2.0, NEP-509, stateless validation. Validators no longer store the full state of the shards they secure; each block carries a compact state witness proving just the relevant slice. That decouples validation from state storage, so NEAR adds shards to increase capacity without forcing validators onto progressively heavier hardware, the exact pressure that pushes most high-throughput chains toward centralization. Supporting it, per-shard congestion control creates isolated fee markets, so an overloaded shard raises fees only locally instead of slowing the whole network. Post-activation, NEAR has sustained roughly 4,000 TPS on real hardware when needed, and hit 1 million TPS in a controlled 70-shard benchmark. Dynamic resharding, shipped in v2.13, removes the last human bottleneck. When a shard crosses a state-size threshold, the network splits it automatically at the next epoch boundary, validated by the same state witnesses, typically within a matter of hours. No upgrade or vote needed. Capacity tracks demand in real time. Complemented by sharded smart contracts, an application or agent workload can now expand horizontally across shards as it grows. NEAR is no longer merely sharded. It reshards itself,  exactly what a settlement layer for millions of autonomous agents requires. Read the full breakdown below 👇

Source:https://x.com/NEARProtocol/status/2091173424735392031