Mar 09, 2023
NEAR Protocol Staking Highlights: Interview with Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin
Interviews · 6 Minute Read · Written by Elton Shehdula
TL;DR:
- NEAR staking metrics have trended upwards YoY. Staked tokens increased by 19.73%, staking wallets grew by 80%, and the staking ratio reached 47%.
- NEAR has undertaken several initiatives to optimize for scale, including a sharding mechanism to manage demand spikes, named accounts, and 3) supporting common coding languages like JavaScript
- NEAR sharding, coined Nightshade Sharding, has been a work in progress since 2021, has four planned phases, and is currently in phase two – which splits the chain into four shards and only shards state but not transaction processing. The final two stages will shard both state and transactions, and make sharding dynamic, increasing/decreasing nodes depending on demand. Executing Nightshade Sharding is crucial for the future of NEAR scaling.
- NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin proposes a change to NEAR storage staking, which will remove the initializing requirement of funding new wallets with a minimum NEAR balance
- NEAR continues to rely on its community of validators and developers to implement validator standards, and best practices, along with incentivizing and growing the developer ecosystem