NEAR Protocol blockchain reaches 1 million TPS in public testing

The NEAR Protocol developers announced a significant achievement: their blockchain demonstrated a throughput of 1 million transactions per second (TPS) in a publicly verifiable benchmark. This achievement underscores the NEAR Protocol's potential as one of the most scalable blockchain solutions.

Technical Test Details

The NEAR team used real nearcore code and standard machines with 8-core processors to conduct the test. This demonstrates that scaling the blockchain does not require expensive infrastructure. The test was conducted on 70 shards, allowing for an assessment of the system's true performance under conditions that closely resemble real-world use cases.

Realistic Load and Traffic Distribution

The developers emphasized that the test simulated realistic load and traffic distribution across shards. This is important, as most high TPS results in the industry are achieved under conditions that do not reflect real-world use cases. The NEAR team deliberately excluded specialized servers and used hardware comparable to mainstream cloud services, making the results more meaningful.

Optimization and Improvements

This work allowed us to identify technical bottlenecks and optimize several layers of the protocol. A significant portion of these improvements have already been implemented in the latest mainnet version, demonstrating the team's ongoing commitment to improvement.

Further Protocol Development

NEAR representatives noted that reaching 1 million TPS is not the protocol's scalability limit. The NEAR architecture allows for further development through dynamic resharding and the separation of consensus and execution. These mechanisms allow for increased performance as the network grows without the need for hardware replacement.

Long-Term Scalability and Applications

The team is confident that horizontal scaling through sharding is the only long-term viable path for high-traffic blockchains. The achieved throughput ensures long-term scalability for the NEAR Intents ecosystem, which is particularly important for applications with large data flows and high transaction rates.

An Approach to the AI ​​Economy

The team emphasizes that the sharding architecture is well-suited for AI economy scenarios. Throughput limitations in such systems can be a significant obstacle, and NEAR Protocol aims to address these limitations by ensuring high performance and reliability.

In Conclusion

Achieving 1 million TPS in NEAR Protocol opens new horizons for the development and deployment of applications requiring high throughput. This milestone underscores NEAR's potential as a leading blockchain solution capable of meeting the growing demands of the modern digital world.