Bowen Wang
@BowenWang18
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Building the Open Web @NEARProtocol
Joined September 2018
NEAR has never gone down since mainnet launch in Oct 2020. Something that almost no one appreciates. .
The SUI network went down today!. A consequence of innovating on the cutting-edge. What SUI has done is still far more impressive than any dinosaur chain's uptime! 🦕☄️🌊. Cryptocurrencies should never go down. Early development has always been a painful exception to that rule. .
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On block height 52890665, @NEARProtocol mainnet has been successfully upgraded to four shards 🚀🚀🚀.
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Market is going down but @NEARProtocol is moving forward. We will launch another episode of stakewars in July to prepare for the sharding phase 1 launch in September. More details to come in the upcoming week. Sign up at if you are interested 😃.
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Took longer than expected but it is now done and we have 5 shards on mainnet!.
Second resharding in the history of @NEARProtocol going live in ~12 hrs. Very exciting🔥.
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18 protocol upgrades on @NEARProtocol since we launched mainnet less than a year ago, including one that just successfully completed earlier today. Looking forward to the next one where the transition to sharding will begin 😃.
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Nearcore 2.3 went live on mainnet this week. It reduces overall gas cost by 30-40% by significantly reducing storage costs. This is just the beginning of our quest to optimize single-shard performance and to learn more about our work, come to my talk at Redacted today!.
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We have upgraded @NEARProtocol testnet to four shards this week. For more details, please see this post
The @NEARProtocol Simple Nightshade Sharded Mainnet is approaching! 💥. ✅ Increase TPS by 5-8X.✅ Increase block producers to 100.✅ Reduce storage cost. Join the AMA w/ @bowenwang18, @janeylwang, and @rossegates on Thursday, Sept. 23 @ 5pm GMT. RSVP 🔽.
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Some new features coming to @NEARProtocol with the next nearcore release, including meta transactions and zero balance accounts 🚀 but there is also a change to account creation costs. If you are a developer on Near, check out this post for more details.
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We care a lot about decentralization @NEARProtocol. In the most recent release (2.2.1), the stake threshold of becoming a validator is lowered to ~11k NEAR, less than half of what it used to be. If you are a validator, it is a good time to join!.
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Nightshade 2.0 is now released to testnet! It is exciting to see the transition to stateless validation, which allows NEAR to both scale to more shards and also have much better single shard performance. Kudos to the team for delivering it!.
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Many people have complained about rpc user experience on @NEARProtocol recently and I'd like to provide an update on this. The team is well aware of the user experience issues and is working on a new version of the implementation that is going to be much faster.
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Thanks Illia! Let's get to 1 billion users 🚀.
I want to give a huge shout out to @BowenWang18 and everyone working on NEAR Protocol. NEAR network has went through an amazing growth over past 3 months, which led work group to add 2 more shards (4 => 6) increasing capacity by 50%. NEAR saw pick up in utilization as part of
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And mainnet has never gone down in those 4 years!.
Four years of NEAR Protocol Mainnet. 130m+ Accounts. Thousands of dApps. One user owned internet. Preparing to 10x usage.
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It is finally live on mainnet 🎉 Stake requirement to become a validator dropped to < 100k NEAR 😃.
Phase 1 of sharding is now released to mainnet Upgrade is expected to be done by Sep 28 once enough validators adopt the new version 😃.
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The testnet release for phase 1 of sharding @NEARProtocol is out Still on track for the mainnet release next month 😃.
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🧵 on recent @NEARProtocol user experience issues:.There is a surge of transactions on NEAR recently with the success of HOT and Kaiching. This, however, creates recurring congestion on shard 2 and shard 3.
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Rainbow bridge successfully defended against an attack to submit an invalid block The watchdog correctly submitted a challenge, which was mined by a MEV bot and the attacker lost 5 eth 🙂.
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NEAR Foundation has unstaked all of its validator nodes:.@NEARProtocol will very soon become fully decentralized!.
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Roundup of a few major announcements from @NEARProtocol this week:.- NEAR DA - data availability layer.- zkwasm with @0xPolygon - execution layer.- Fast finality layer with @eigenlayer - settlement layer. NEAR is moving closer to Ethereum 🙂.
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Many have asked what will come next for NEAR's chain signatures. We have a new version going live on mainnet next week, cutting latency in half and significantly improving throughput. To learn more about what's next, please read our blog post 👇.
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Not sure why many people think NEAR has no usage. For a big chunk of 2024 NEAR had the most DAU and is still second in DAU and daily number of transactions
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When the Nightshade whitepaper was first published in 2019, @NEARProtocol was still in its infancy and blockchain scaling was a largely unsolved problem. Four and half years later, the industry has moved forward tremendously with research on different approaches to scaling.
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To clarify a few things:.1. NEAR does have cross contract call implemented since day 1 (see for more details) .2. We like to learn from others to evolve the protocol and not sure why the amount of funding matters. Small teams often deliver great work.
Reality : . @NEARProtocol team, funded with 350 fucking millions dollars, ask to a small team of Romanian geeks with 5 millions funding how to implement cross shards execution. Still not fully live on mainnet in 2024, 3 year after mainnet. They have 209 validators and only 100
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Just gave a talk on how NEAR's sharding works and the upcoming sharding launch 🚀.
Bowen Wang, head of Protocol @PagodaPlatform Reveals the technical details first time about "How NEAR's sharding works".#BewaterDevcon @NEARProtocol
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NEAR actually uses a similar design: only shard block headers, which are lightweight, go into consensus. Transactions do not. Blocks are similar to preconfirmations with a finality gadget finalizing forks onchain.
SUI's Narwhal is a paradigm shift in blockchain design!. Combining speed with reliability in a way that was impossible before. Overcoming a major trade-off in design; fast deterministic asynchronous verification!. All achieved with a DAG-based mem-pool with pre-conf qualities! 🧵
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NEAR learned a lot from Polkadot's design, especially the data availability part, but there are also a lot of differences. NEAR is more homogenous for example. All shards have the same execution environment. Would love to do a whiteboard session on JAM!.
Nice to hear some others are finally arriving at this “holy grail”. I guess the lessons from Polkadot’s Al really helped. A word of advice: sharding is no panacea. It breeds incoherency and impedes composition. That’s why, after implementing all of this.
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The latest update of @NEARProtocol roadmap just dropped A lot of exciting projects coming this year such as stateless validation and chain signatures. Look forward to another great year of innovating and evolving the protocol!.
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This is a great milestone for @NEARProtocol and also the beginning of a new chapter in the realm of blockchain scalability. Kudos to the team for the great work!.
Nightshade 2.0 is live on @NEARProtocol's Mainnet!. Introducing stateless validation and performance improvements to NEAR sharding, this is the biggest protocol upgrade since mainnet launched in 2020 – a major milestone unlocking even greater scalability and setting NEAR's.
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It's teamwork. I only made some minor contributions 🙂.
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We are getting closer to realizing the original Nightshade vision of dynamic resharding! I think it is also time to explore how to best shard smart contracts on @NEARProtocol.
One of the most under appreciated parts of Nightshade v2's Stateless Validation is that it enables instant resharding allowing to prevent congestion of one application affecting other applications in the network. Generally non sharded blockchains are not able to add capacity.
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In the future, when people say that they joined NEAR because of AI, it is hard to know whether they joined in 2018 or 2024 😉.
Today we announced that we will focus on making NEAR the home for User-Owned AI. We need AI that optimizes for the privacy and sovereignty of users. NEAR Foundation commits to incubate and invest in NEAR-based AI infrastructure projects including compute and inference, data.
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NEAR has very little failed transactions as shown in Also, as @rajgokal pointed out, failed transactions are not an issue since users pay gas for them and it is how blockchains work.
Solana blockchain is having 28% Tx failure rate right now. They temporarily lost the scalability war after reaching at its peak at 25M daily tx. They know they need offchain scaling at this stage. All eyes are on @EclipseFND to see if their tech works, as it has not been
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34 protocol upgrades in 3 years and we still have 100% uptime 😃.
Today the @NEARProtocol ecosystem celebrates 3 years since the community voted to launch MainNet!. Today, NEAR has achieved:.700K DAUs.1.7M daily transactions.3.1M monthly active wallets.30.5M accounts.2 of the top 5 apps in Web3: @sweateconomy & @Cosmose_ KAI-CHING.
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We are getting more scalable every week 🙂.
1400 receipts per second on @NEARProtocol mainnet. I think it's the new record. Including 500 function calls per second
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Mass adoption is NEAR!.
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The services are operational now. There were a large number of view calls (smart contract calls that are not transactions) within a very short time that caused rpc nodes to be overloaded. We will publish a more detailed postmortem soon.
Due to significant interest in the Aurora IDO, NEAR RPC nodes are currently experiencing high incoming requests. We are increasing our server capacity, and are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
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This is a big change to NEAR's sharding design and kudos to the team for making it happen! Join Stake Wars IV and help us test the implementation if you are interested.
Announcing Phase 2 of Sharding for NEAR Protocol. Introducing Stateless Validation. Phase 2 greatly improves the network’s capacity for user volume and is an important landmark on the road to global-scale usage of Web3. This isn't even my final form.
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Protocol development roadmap for @NEARProtocol Hopefully this provides more clarity on what we are working on and will work on in the next 1-2 years.
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I'll be talking about the evolution of @NEARProtocol in the past several years and how zk enables the next stage of evolution for NEAR. Please come to my talk at 2:40pm if you are interested!
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I'll be speaking at EthDenver this week on how the innovations of NEAR Protocol power the BOS. If you are at EthDenver, come to my talk to learn more about @NEARProtocol and the BOS 🙂
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NEAR is still working on homogeneous sharding 🙂 I wrote a blog post on why we believe this is the right approach /near/widget/PostPage?accountId=pagodaplatform.near&blockHeight=94183169.
At this point, almost every L1 has pivoted to an appchain-centric scaling roadmap. While this is a welcome pivot, I’m concerned that we’ll end up speedrunning through lessons already learned in the evolution of Polkadot and Cosmos over the past few years. 🧵.
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It was unfortunate that the disk space requirement was larger than expected, so some validators failed to perform the upgrade initially. The network is slow as a result. Resharding is currently expected to finish in ~4 hrs.
Resharding on @NEARProtocol is still ongoing. Many validators have finished the upgrade but also some validators ran out of disk space, which caused the network to slow down. We expect the network to be back to normal when most validators finish the upgrade.
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We are also working on sharded smart contracts to make it horizontally scalable :).
just used this to convert some ETH into SOL, pretty cool. the folks at NEAR built a cross-chain swap for SOL — powered by intents. non-centralized and open source, would recommend
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I'm running for the House of Merit in the upcoming NDC elections. Please support me here 😃.
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More than 20k receipts in a block on testnet 😃
🚨 FLASH POLL 🚨. Guess the maximum number of receipts we can get into a single block on NEAR Testnet right now. I plan to send transfers to all 6 shards for at least 10 blocks.
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The new Stake Wars is coming to @NEARProtocol! For those interested, what kind of rewards would be most exciting to you?.
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Chain Abstraction + AI -> An intent based future with no middlemen.
Every onchain agent will have a NEAR account.
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Sounds like a blockchain 🙂.
JUST IN: Elon Musk confirms X will begin charging all new users a "small fee" to post, like, bookmark, or reply.
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Nearcore 2.4 went live on mainnet today and this release includes a few major features:.- Epoch Sync. See - Contract caching for state witness: reduced state witness size by over 50% and as a result improved throughput on mainnet.
You can now sync nearcore on NEAR mainnet without any extra snapshots. Just compile, initialize and start. Total sync time to the head is 07:38:55. Attaching top highlights from the log with relative timestamps. Kudos to @BowenWang18 and Near One team!
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That is only part of this release. We also shipped contract caching, which significantly reduces state witness size and increases throughput for some shards. There is also epoch sync that allows you to sync a node from scratch (no snapshots) within a few hours. We keep shipping!.
Near One team has been pushing some major updates. 2.4 is releasing with decentralized state sync - effectively torrent-like p2p seeding protocol. This is something that has been missing in blockchain space and also speeds up syncing NEAR node. They just silently dropping bangers.
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It's a good overview of how NEAR works today as well as some future work, including stateless validation which is going to launch soon!.
This episode is special - @BowenWang18 and I are diving into how @NEARProtocol works: consensus, sharding, execution model and touch on MPC for Chain Signatures.
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@dragonisnear @ilblackdragon @NEARProtocol @DEVBOSE111 @atrox1382 @mraltantutar @illuminfti @bennybrown_nft Late to the game but
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Phase 1 of sharding is now released to mainnet Upgrade is expected to be done by Sep 28 once enough validators adopt the new version 😃.
If you're at @MessariCrypto’s #Mainnet2022, join for my talk today on "Why Sharding Matters" at 12:25p, Pier 36, Main Stage. Stop by to say hi and ask your burning questions about @NEARProtocol!.
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We currently suspect that it may be related to some specific kernel versions. Testnet crashed because we run a majority of the validators using the same OS and hardware. Fortunately this means likely it is not a threat to mainnet due to decentralization.
Validators, our testnet is currently undergoing a major incident with impacts to RPC and Explorer. Please follow the live status here:
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Also, I hope we can work together to advance the industry. When @ekuzyakov asked the questions back in the day, it was a friendly and technical discussion and it would be great to see more of that!.
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Many have criticized past decentralized governance attempts on @NEARProtocol. I am excited to see the new direction with stake based voting and delegation of endorsements. I am hopeful that the new proposal would bring about a more robust and engaging governance structure!.
Over the past few months, we've worked closely with various @NEARProtocol ecosystem contributors to design a comprehensive governance framework proposal for the NEAR Ecosystem, focused on transparency, accountability, efficiency, and — most importantly — long-term protocol
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If you are a validator on @NEARProtocol, please take a look at this proposal to build a healthy, functional, and self-governing validator ecosystem #Decentralization #NEAR.
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Currently on @NEARProtocol mainnet blocks are produced very fast (~1.3 bps), which, while great, slightly affects the inflation calculation. Here is a proposal to recalibrate inflation on the protocol level based on time instead of blocks
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I am curious what people think of emission on NEAR. Should we change it?.
🚨 New Proposal Alert: NEAR Protocol Token Emission Overhaul 🚨 .I’ve uploaded a proposal to reduce $NEAR emissions. The proposed changes would include: .1️⃣ Immediate reduction of total annual emission from 5% to 2.5%. 2️⃣Introduce a dynamic adjustment mechanism based on.
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Not all bridges are the same. The rainbow bridge developed by @auroraisnear runs NEAR light client on Ethereum and Eth light client on NEAR (as smart contracts). It is similar to how IBC works and is completely trustless 😃.
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People criticize NEAR for suboptimal composability due to async execution, but with the emergence of L2s, imo having cross shard transactions built into the protocol itself offers much better composability and developer experience.
1/ Enabling cross-chain composability: how @NEARProtocol’s Nightshade will disrupt DeFi. A thread 🧵👇.
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It has been great working with @jbaylina and the Polygon team on zkwasm. Excited to see where this brings us in the future!.
I made 2 exciting announcements at #NEARCON23 today about how the @NEARProtocol ecosystem is increasing alignment with the modular Ethereum stack: a collaboration with @0xPolygonLabs to build zkWASM, a ZK prover for WASM chains to unify liquidity across Web3, and a new NEAR DA.
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Close to 50% increase in daily number of transactions on @NEARProtocol mainnet last week. We are close to 300k transactions/day
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I recently came to appreciate the power of TEEs. They offer a very practical solution to verifiable and secure computation.
NEAR has been pushing on "Programmable Cryptography" for awhile now. NEAR Intents allow to create credible commitments between parties without needing to wait for consensus. MPC (NEAR Chain Signatures) provide a way to settle intents and value across all chains and abstract key.
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This is exactly one of the main benefits of Nightshade 2.0: lower barrier of entry -> more decentralization of the network.
Another crazy thing about NEAR Nightshade v2 is validator RAM usage dropped 90% from 20GB to 2-8GB (including OS& background tasks)!. That means as a validator, This significantly reduces the cost of running a #NEAR node, which already has 100% uptime through the upgrade 😱
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Would be great if we can one day pay transaction fees on @NEARProtocol using $USN 😉.
1/ Announcing $USN v2.0: Towards True Stability. $USN was designed with one question in mind: we know stablecoins can rapidly grow - but can we make them last? Our goal is to create a stablecoin that is truly stable, which can withstand a bear and thrive in a bull
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What is going on 👀.
👀.
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Epic! Also this is *before* any gas cost reduction as planned for post 2.0 launch. Cannot wait to see what nearcore 2.3 release brings us 🚀.
🥳The 2nd round was quite a success!. NEAR Testnet produced a block with 1745 transactions!.Since blocks are every second, it's 1745 TPS of smart contract calls. I think most devs are ready for the Mainnet round. Stay tuned.
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NEAR has the most daily active addresses among major L1s in the past 1.5 months .
This is the Top 3 undervalued blockchain protocols (L1's) for September: . 1) NEAR Protocol .2) Cosmos Hub .3) Fantom. Want to receive this insight every month for FREE? Join our community!
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It's great to see NEAR ecosystem teams working together to create the best tech!.
UPDATE: HOT Omni balance → NEAR Omnibridge 🔥. 🤝We will work together with the NEAR One team to create an omnibridge for @NEARProtocol . 💸 We will use shared liquidity for EVM, Solana and soon other chains. This will greatly expand the liquidity of the HOT Omni balance. 🎉 HOT.
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Very excited to see community contributions towards the protocol Makes me feel that we've built something that people truly care about. Still a long way to go until the development is fully decentralized but I am convinced that we will get there 😃.
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I remember messaging Alex at 4am his time and got a response immediately. I asked Alex what he was doing and he said "relentless execution" 🙂.
Full EVM scalability solution developed in 4 months; RPC that is 20x better than anything on the market in 6 months; Top3 bridge that was not hacked. This is Aurora. Join us if you want not only research or marketing, but deliver.
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I talked about this "end state" architecture for NEAR last year The problem is that until prover overhead is within 100x of native execution, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Hopefully we will get there in a couple of years.
Toly is right, Solana may not need ZK to vertically scale. But ZK is still key to the endgame. Solana is building the most performance, secure, and composable state machine. For that it may not need ZK. ZK is required to scale *beyond one state machine* with interoperability.
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I guess NEAR is the normal one: different network connections for approvals and transactions. Approvals are not transactions.
It’s insane that the Cosmos uses the same network connection to propagate votes and txs . It’s insane that Solana uses the same data types for votes and user txs.
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Thanks for summarizing my talk Altan! This is a good read and I am super excited about the future evolutions of @NEARProtocol, especially how zk could enable more scalability and decentralization!.
Just like everything else in crypto, @NEARProtocol is evolving at a light speed!. At NEARCON'23, @bowenwang18 unveiled alpha including Stateless Validation and Starsight (zk-centric sharding) 🛡️. Ready to explore the current and future state of @NEARProtocol?. Let's dive in 🧵.
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We are working on a set of new precompiles on the protocol level to make such use cases easier. Instead of waiting by self calls, you can schedule a promise that will wait for some data to be submitted asynchronously.
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In our latest whiteboard session, I dived deep into @zksync with @MarcinM02 and @stasbreadless from @the_matter_labs Take a look if you are interested in zksync or Eth L2s in general 🙂.
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Number of transactions isn't the best metric for capacity - gas usage is. shows that NEAR is at about 25k Pgas/day and the fees would start go up if we reach around 330k Pgas/day, so there is still quite some capacity 😃.
$NEAR protocol currently rising up to nearly 1mm transactions a day - a level I've seen many EVM coins reach before fees go up drastically and growth stalls starting with ETH, then Matic, then Fantom, then Avalanche. This is the true test. @ilblackdragon.
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Another whiteboard session! It was a pleasure to dive deep into how Polygon zkevm works with the one and only @jbaylina.
Whiteboard Series with NEAR | Ep: 51. Director of NEAR Protocol @BowenWang18 discusses Polygon zkEVM with @jbaylina, cofounder of @0xPolygonLabs. They unpack proving systems, polynomial commitments and L2/L1 interactions. You don't want to miss this.
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We don't need real-time proof generation per se, a 10x slowdown could be tolerable. See my talk at NEARCON last year on how this could work
Stateless validation is the unlock to achieve true sharding in blockchains, which provides true scale while keeping validators hardware requirements low. There is a lot of talk about ZK, but rarely mentioned that proving time is extremely slow right now (300-1000x slower than.
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But it is coming 🙂.
NEAR needs MEV and gas priority. Resharding can’t come fast enough either.
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it's NEAR 😃.
Cross settlement.
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The new version of the paper is live at and I've also written a eth research post If you want to learn more about the new Nightshade design, please come to my talk at EthDenver!.
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Still remember those sleepless nights leading up to the mainnet launch 😃😃😃 Looking forward to the sharding phase 0 launch next month 🚀🚀🚀.
🎉 Today is The Day of the one year anniversary since #NEAR launched its mainnet. Discover and celebrate NEAR’s ecosystem, the numbers are showing the results of such work 📈. Join us at NEARCON! 🔽 .
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Looking forward to that! We are going to relax shard congestion parameters in the next release (2.4), so 2 and 3 should be easy afterwards.
In the next couple weeks we will conduct a series of TPS benchmarks on NEAR mainnet. Here are some of our goals:.1) 20K+ transactions in a single block.2) 100K+ transfers within 10 consecutive blocks.3) 50K+ contract calls within 10 consecutive blocks. 🧵.
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It was a nice discussion with my friend @theyisun on what enables Axiom to prove computation on Ethereum history and offer those proofs to smart contracts.
Ep 52 of Whiteboard Series: Director of NEAR, @BowenWang18, joins @theyisun, cofounder of @axiom_xyz. Explore Axiom, an @ethereum ZK coprocessor leveraging zero-knowledge proofs for devs to compute on otherwise infeasible historical data. Dive in!
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It has been a pleasure working with the EigenLayer team. The fast finality of NEAR and Eigen restaking together offer a fast settlement layer for Eth L2s.
More exciting news from #NEARCON23: @eigenlayer and @NEARProtocol are partnering to build a fast finality layer for Ethereum rollups. Fast finality enables cross-rollup tx processing within 3 seconds (rather than hours or days) and 4000x more cheaply than the current options,.
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Again, it is great to see the usage on @NEARProtocol skyrocketing and we are confident that the UX issues caused by congestion will be addressed very soon!.
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Fun fact: more than 100 NEAR have been burnt in transaction fees on @NEARProtocol mainnet since genesis :).
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We recently fixed a critical bug in @NEARProtocol's runtime TLDR: an improvement to our fuzzer caught a critical bug where exporting an import in a smart contract would cause the network to crash. Thanks Simonas for the fix and the detailed writeup 🚀.
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