1 Million TPS on NEAR Protocol: Sharding Unlocks Next-Level Blockchain Scaling

• NEAR Protocol hits 1 million TPS in a public, verifiable benchmark.
• Sharded architecture and Nightshade 2.0 enable scalable, cost-effective blockchain operations.
• Benchmark results are reproducible, transparent, and achieved on consumer-grade hardware.

NEAR Protocol has achieved a milestone, reaching over 1 million transactions per second (TPS) in a publicly verifiable benchmark. The test used real NEAR core code, realistic workloads, and cost-efficient Google Compute Engine C4D machines distributed across 70 shards.

This achievement confirms the effectiveness of NEAR’s sharding design, demonstrating that blockchains can scale to meet high-volume demands without sacrificing decentralization or affordability.

The milestone is significant for the growing NEAR ecosystem, including high-load dApps and emerging on-chain AI solutions. It ensures that the network can handle complex workloads at a global scale while maintaining stability, predictable block production, and low operational costs.

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NEAR Uses Sharding to Scale TPS and Cut Costs

Unlike many blockchains that rely on monolithic designs, NEAR Protocol uses a sharded architecture where execution, storage, and state are distributed across multiple parallel shards.

This approach allows TPS to increase linearly as shards are added, supports decentralization with modest validator hardware, and keeps costs predictable even under heavy usage.

A recent upgrade called Nightshade 2.0 introduced stateless validation and gave the network a huge boost in speeds. The mainnet currently boasts nine shards, 600 milliseconds for block time, and 1.2-second finality.

This recently introduced Deterministic Accounts mechanism for shard execution of smart contracts ensures that NEAR remains a blockchain optimized for large-volume cross-chain DeFi and e-commerce.

NEAR Shows High-Speed Performance for DeFi and AI

The benchmark was meant to be more representative of practical use cases as opposed to lab environments. They utilized 1 million accounts for each shard and represented cross-shard traffic accurately.

Only native token transactions were used. All transactions were added directly to the mempool. Simulated network traffic was distributed across three Google Cloud regions.

Hardware used: C4D series VMs with 8-core CPUs. They were priced at less than $1,000 a month.

The system continued to handle more than 1 million transactions per second across 70 shards. In this test, critical optimizations included faster execution, faster checks for signatures, optimizing tree and database performance, and more powerful consensus paths.

Additionally, open-source scripts for this benchmark were available on NEAR for verification of any performance claim.

This milestone proves that NEAR has the capability to execute future-oriented blockchain applications, such as on-chain AI, fast DeFi trading, and enterprise-level software.

Future research directions include dynamic re-sharding, sharded smart contracts, and other performance tweaks to maintain affordability and scalability while maintaining decentralization.

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