Near Protocol: 'Blockchains Cannot Scale Without Sharding!' - Illia Polosukhin & Alex Skidanov

Capacity Scaling

Scaling blockchain capacity efficiently is crucial to maintaining low fees and accommodating economic activity. Illia Polosukhin explains that without expanding capacity, blockchains face saturation, leading to higher fees for users as they compete for economic opportunities 1. He likens the situation to Netflix, where users should be able to access content without worrying about data center constraints or additional costs 2.

You need to pay more. So that's kind of the current state, right? And what we want to do is, you know, you go, you can pick any movie and you watch it and you pay kind of fixed fee.

--- Illia Polosukhin

To address this, Near Protocol increased its shards from four to six, boosting capacity by 50% to handle growing demand without raising fees 2.

   

Economic Models

The economic models of Solana and Near differ significantly in their approach to scalability and cost-effectiveness. Meher Roy contrasts Solana's reliance on high-performance validators with Near's sharding approach, which doesn't depend on hardware improvements to meet user demands 3. Illia emphasizes that Near's design allows users to transact without needing to know shard specifics, similar to how cell towers operate 4.

You want to have mechanisms beyond that type of scaling.

--- Meher Roy

This abstraction simplifies user experience and ensures scalability without compromising decentralization or security 4.