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NEAR Stateless verification: Technological innovation in the NEAR protocol
In most blockchain networks, verifiers bear a heavy burden. To confirm the validity of a block, they must maintain a complete and up-to-date copy of the on-chain status, which means storing all account information, balances, and contract data on the network. As the chain continues to expand in size, this burden increases, gradually driving up the cost of running nodes and squeezing small participants out of the network.
@NearProtocol takes a different approach. Each block on NEAR contains a "state witness": this is a compact cryptographic proof that contains only the data needed to verify that particular block. Verifier can check the work on the shard without storing the entire state of the shard.
Practical mechanism for stateless verification
The practical result of this mechanism is a significant reduction in hardware requirements. NEAR's top 100 validators are responsible for both production blocks and tracking sharding, with memory requirements of approximately 48GB. Verifiers ranked below this threshold have a lighter inspection role and require only 8 to 16GB of memory.
Stateless verification comes with the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade, which will be launched on the NEAR main network in August 2024. According to The Defiant, the upgrade aims to increase transaction execution speed by 400% and increase the network's capacity cap.
Changes and future prospects since Nightshade 2.0
Since the release of Nightshade 2.0, the agreement has not stalled. The v2.13 upgrade will be launched on the main network on July 20, 2026, adding two important functions:
- Dynamic Reshardening: Networks can now automatically segment when the fragment reaches the capacity threshold, without the need for validator voting or manual protocol upgrades.
- Post-Quantum Signing: NEAR activates the FIPS-204 standard based on the ML-DSA-65 parameter set.
It is worth noting that this migration is voluntary. The Ed25519 and secp256k1 signature schemes remain in place, allowing users to rotate keys to ML-DSA-65 through a single on-chain transaction through NEAR CLI without having to transfer assets or change account addresses. The reason why NEAR keeps this switch voluntary is practical: ML-DSA has much larger keys and signatures than elliptic curve counterparts, which increases storage and processing requirements. NEAR's official press release states that this deployment makes it one of the first major Layer-1 blockchains to launch a NIST approved anti-quantum signature scheme in a real-time production environment.
Looking ahead, SPICE (Separation of Consensus and Execution) is the next major upgrade on the roadmap to Nightshade 3.0 and is already underway. SPICE decouples the process by which verifiers agree on block order from the execution of intra-block transactions, with the goal of compressing block time to 200 milliseconds and achieving final certainty of less than half a second.
Together, these upgrades form a coherent arc of technological evolution: reducing storage requirements for verifiers, automated capacity expansion, enhanced encryption security, and compression latency, each layer built on top of the previous layer.
