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Bowen Wang
Building the Open Web @NEARProtocol
NEAR mainnet just finished upgrading from 8 to 9 shards today, improving throughput by 12.5%.
It was a seamless live upgrade and the network remained stable throughout the upgrade process. The previous upgrade from 6 to 8 shards was the real technical challenge, where we implemented the fundamental change of resharding and made it work with stateless validation.
The upgrade was motivated by the state of one shard getting pretty large and potentially requiring chunk producers to have machines with more memory, a problem that many blockchains face. Luckily we can split the state of a shard into two through resharding and elegantly address the state growth problem.
We now have a very straightforward pathway for continuing to add more shards and scale the capacity of the @NEARProtocol.
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NEAR’s hard work at the protocol level is paying off at the application level.
Chain Signatures, fast finality, Shade Agents running in TEEs—these innovations are what unlock cross-chain yield, one-click DeFi transactions, verifiable AI.
Excited to see more apps getting built on NEAR's great infra!
Jul 31, 2025
This month in NEAR:
✦ NEAR Intents hit $570M+ in total volume, with 1.2M+ total swaps and 100+ supported assets.
✦ NEAR Staking ETP launched with Bitwise, one of the world’s largest crypto index fund managers with $12B+ in AUM.
✦ NEAR partnered with Everclear, a clearing and settlement protocol with $1B+ in total transaction volume.
✦ NEAR Intents integrated with Sui, a top 10 DeFi chain with $2B+ TVL.
✦ NEAR-native stablecoins now supported on BitGo to expand institutional-grade coverage of NEAR assets.
✦ NEAR House of Stake AI Copilot proof of concept from Meta Pool.
✦ NEAR Intents Launchpad (Calyx) now live to power 2025 token season.
✦ Shade Agent Sandbox released for devs to launch verifiable AI agents with NEAR’s stack.
✦ SurgeSwap alpha go live, 1-click cross-chain swaps using NEAR Intents.
✦ MoreMarkets mainnet launch, using NEAR’s Chain Signatures to unlock cross-chain liquidity.
✦ HOT Craft launch, the first chain-abstracted NFT marketplace, powered by NEAR Intents.
And much more.
NEAR ecosystem is shipping and will keep shipping 🚢
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One of @NEARProtocol’s superpowers is its super lightweight node infrastructure. It takes 7 minutes to sync a chunk validator on NEAR mainnet and about $27/month to operate.
This is one of the major unlocks of NEAR’s stateless validation. Bulletproof state transition is at the core of what crypto is about (blockchains are ultimately just state machines). But the state is massive and inefficient to store. Stateless validation on NEAR means validators can prove that a transaction belonged to the previous state without needing to maintain the entire state of a shard locally.
A bunch of benefits from this lightweight design:
-Reduces devops requirements to support a more decentralized network
-Reduces gas costs for storage operations by ensuring that state accesses are all in memory
-Enables validator rotation on every single block to ensure security
Every NEAR protocol upgrade and product release is really an ensemble of very complex, low-level technological improvements. Grateful to have the opportunity to unpack NEAR’s innovations in depth with @tw_tter on @epicenterbtc.
Jul 18, 2025
🚀 NEW EPISODE 🚀
Scaling the Agentic Internet
@tw_tter chats with @bowenwang18, Head of Protocol @ Near One, about blockchain scaling, AI, and how @NEARProtocol sets the ground for AI-native apps & the agentic economy.
‘Attention Is All You Need’, co-wrote by Illia Polosukhin in 2017, laid the foundation for arguably one of the most consequential tech breakthroughs in our recent history. 1 year later, Illia founded Near AI, which later became @NEARProtocol.
They were visionaries ahead of their time and, although AI took several more years before becoming a viable product, the experience of scaling databases would later prove valuable and applicable in blockchain world.
As a result, @NEARProtocol is one of the first blockchains to implement execution layer sharding, asynchronous execution and stateless validation, bringing the finality time down to 1.2 seconds, with a block time of 0.6 seconds.
Don't forget to RT & follow @epicenterbtc!
Topics discussed in this episode:
0:00 - Introduction
3:30 - Bowen’s background
4:47 - Near’s pivot from AI to blockchains
8:26 - The role of Near One
9:13 - Near’s tech stack upgrades
13:39 - Optimizing network architecture
17:08 - Stateless validation & block propagation
21:10 - Sharding & asynchronous execution
29:12 - Message passing between shards & shard ‘equality’
35:51 - Challenges of implementing stateless validation
41:05 - Applications benefiting from Near’s finality speed
44:18 - Intent-based infrastructure
47:10 - AI use cases on Near
52:27 - Expanding Near’s ecosystem
54:43 - Development challenges
57:55 - Near’s vision and goals
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