It seems that the whole crypto community decided to just give up on talking positively about the industry as the crypto winter keeps getting colder. The whole news cycle is filled with stories about the upcoming Ethereum merge and Cardano’s hard fork as well as interesting takes on the adoption of crypto around the world.
Under the public radar, a very important development is happening in the NEAR community. NEAR is a very interesting protocol that has a unique take on building the network. Instead of creating chains of blocks, it shards the data and makes everything simpler. The lack of immense complexity facilitates the faster transaction. It is currently preparing for phase 1 of the development process. The zero phases are a testing ground for the network with just 100 validators.
Somewhere in October, the network will go live with the release of a new feature — producers of chunks. A chunk-only producer will be working on tracking the shard and won’t use any of the resources available to the network. The produce will be wholly responsible for its shard. At this stage, the network will support 400 validators.
The true expansion will start during the second phase when validators will allow for the creation of new shards and new validators making it much more complex but without putting pressure on the ecosystem. The introduction of so-called “challenges” will allow the network to continue growing until it can sustain continuous splitting and merging depending on the requirements without any intervention from developers.
When the third phase kicks in, the layer-1 network will be ready to host layer-2 solutions and provide a sprawling dynamic infrastructure that will adapt to external challenges in real time. The unique architecture of NEAR makes it a very interesting investment prospect for many people. Some traders are already using this asset.
As the development of this intriguing network enters its pivotal stages, we should pay more attention to it and dedicate at least our precious time to reading more about the future of this potentially disrupting technology. The world of crypto is not limited to Bitcoin and Ethereum only.