NEAR, the native coin of the AI-focused blockchain Near Protocol has rallied almost 30 percent over the past 24 hours. The platform is slated to introduce dynamic sharding next month, which is expected to help the network automatically add shards according to the growing demand.
NEAR explodes as dynamic sharding upgrades looms
Currently the 36th-largest cryptocurrency by reported market cap of slightly more than $2 billion, Near Protocol’s token has climbed 63 percent over the past month. The token is experiencing fresh interest from investors as one of its most anticipated upgrades nears.
Notably, the layer-1 blockchain’s upcoming dynamic sharing upgrade will enable the network to leverage AI to scale dynamically without any human intervention. The following chart shows the dramatic increase in the token’s price, jumping from around $1.57 on Wednesday to $2.24 on Friday.
For the uninitiated, a shard is a tiny independent partition of the blockchain network that processes transactions and smart contracts interactions side-by-side. As a result, Near is, theoretically, able to process more transactions than a standard smart contract network.
The problem until now has been that opening a new shard has been a manual, tedious process that required several weeks of coordination among validators. Once coordinated, it would require an on-chain vote and a phased rollout for full implementation.
Once the upgrade is live, shards on the Near blockchain wouldn’t need to wait for a human to fix them. Rather, they can just split on their own by adding more independent parallel validators to the network.
Preparing for the quantum threat
In an X post on Thursday Near Protocol shared that after its mainnet launch back in 2020, its sharding architecture has evolved through 5 major phases, as illustrated in the graphic below.
The upgrade will also introduce post-quantum-safe signing. This is timely, as researchers from Google have warned that a powerful quantum computer can break through the majority of today’s blockchain networks with much less energy than initially expected.
Similar sentiments were echoed by the Coinbase advisory board last month.
Consequently, Near is implementing post-quantum-safe signing which is essentially installing new locks on the network that will prohibit quantum computers from stealing user funds on the smart contract platform.
Several other entities in the crypto industry are preparing to tackle the quantum threat before it gets too late. On May 14, smart contract network Tezos rolled-out the Tezos Encrypted Ledger, geared toward private, post-quantum payments.