The post Near One Shares Q3 NEAR Protocol Roadmap Update appeared first on NEAR Protocol.
]]>The launch of stateless validation in August 2024 marks an important milestone for NEAR Protocol, but it is by no means the end state of the protocol. There is still a lot of ambitious work to be done.
In less than four years since launching mainnet, the NEAR network has over 110 million users – a great achievement for the ecosystem. But the goal for NEAR is to onboard a billion people to the User-Owned Internet. Achieving such widespread usage will require an even more scalable, performant, secure, and fast protocol. The Near One team is already working to make improvements to Nightshade 2.0 and has started planning the next round of advancements. In this post, we describe what the protocol roadmap looks like for the rest of 2024 and into next year.
First of all, while the stateless validation launch is a major change to the protocol, it does not immediately improve the performance of mainnet. This is because we intentionally keep the upgrade as simple as possible to avoid adding more complexity into the already humongous upgrade. To fully reap the benefits of the new design, there are a number of improvements on top of the release that we will work on for the rest of 2024 following the August launch:
In addition to the immediate priorities listed above, there are some long-term improvements that we intend to work on starting in early 2025:
These initiatives will significantly improve the performance and scalability of NEAR and make it possible to support hundreds of millions, even a billion daily transactions. The new level of scalability lays a solid foundation for the different verticals of initiatives in the NEAR ecosystem, such as Chain Abstraction, Modularity, and User-Owned AI. Stay tuned for more on performance and efficiency improvements in the coming months and a more detailed future roadmap update towards the end of the year.
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]]>The post Open Call for Feedback on NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposals appeared first on NEAR Protocol.
]]>NEAR validators provided community feedback on how to improve the validator experience, and we collectively listened. Responses suggested that routes to secure funding were unclear, and that existing delegations from the NEAR Foundation lacked transparency.
The result of the community feedback process is a new NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposal and an open call RFP to coordinate the NEAR Protocol Institutional Validator Programme. The RFP will be open until Monday September 24th, 2023.
Drafted in collaboration with a number of ecosystem participants — Meta Pool, Banyan Collective, DevHub, Pagoda, Proximity, Validator Community, and NEAR Foundation — this proposal creates a framework for a refreshed validator delegation structure. It clearly defines a number of expectations for validators, aims to align incentives, assigns ownership, and enhances transparency around securing funding support.
The proposal’s framework addresses three delegation tracks — community validators, institutional validators, and 100% fee project validators — with the goals of improving transparency, strengthening the Nakamoto coefficient of the NEAR Protocol, and increasing validator selection at custody providers:
Firstly, check out the full NEAR Protocol Validator Delegation Proposal and provide any feedback publicly here. Your feedback is greatly appreciated to improve the proposal.
Secondly, since this is an open call RFP to run the NEAR Protocol Institutional Validator programme, please return any applications to finance@near.foundation.
Additionally, Restaking is coming to NEAR courtesy of Octopus Network. Under Octopus 2.0, $NEAR stakers will have the ability to secure appchains with their staked $NEAR. Find out more here
Many thanks for your continued support to improve the validator experience and help secure the NEAR Protocol.
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]]>The post NEAR Q2 Protocol Roadmap Update appeared first on NEAR Protocol.
]]>Pagoda made good progress on the protocol roadmap in Q2. For the experience section, there is now a NEP on account namespaces, a key stepping stone towards account extension. Account extension would allow users to easily compose different modules such as multisig, proxy, and so on. In addition, Aurora submitted a NEP on wasm submodules, which, if implemented, would enable a limited form of synchronous execution, or allowing transactions that touch multiple contracts to settle within a single block. Both proposals are still works in progress due to the complexity of the changes.
On top of these two proposed changes, there is a NEP on shared storage for contract code which could significantly lower the cost of deploying a common contract. These proposals aspire to bring to life the account extension idea, which allows an account to install different modules to different functionalities such as multisig, recovery, proxy, and so on.
For the core section of the roadmap, Pagoda delivered a few important improvements this quarter. Flat storage with value inlining is live on mainnet and brings an 8x improvement to state reads. Work on background writes is also in progress and the protocol team’s initial experiments show that it can potentially reduce the cost of state writes by 3x. In addition, cold storage is fully live on mainnet and drastically reduces the cost of running an archival node.
Pagoda has also made good progress to revamp state sync. With the growth of mainnet state, the previous version of state sync was too inefficient and practically unusable. The new state sync, which uses flat storage to speed up state part generation, allows a node to finish syncing mainnet state within 3 hours. The team is expected to deliver the fully functional version of the new state sync in Q3.
The team has also delivered finite wasm and its integration with nearcore, which improves the security and robustness of NEAR’s contract runtime immensely.
The experience section of the roadmap remains mostly the same, with two changes worth highlighting. One shift is that the changes required to implement account extension are temporarily on hold as we would like to see the impact on user experience by first emulating the changes through smart contracts. Another change is that the protocol team will work on the storage refund problem to prevent potential faucet-draining attacks in the new onboarding experience.
For the core section of the roadmap, the focus in Q3 will shift to Phase 2 of sharding, which includes both resharding the current mainnet state and turning off the requirement that block producers have to track all shards. This endeavor will take more than one quarter to finish and we will post more updates as we iron out details of the design.
To stay up to date with protocol changes as they happen, or to participate in protocol governance, please join the protocol community group and follow the NEAR Enhancement Proposal (NEP) process.
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