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.