{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0698","slug":"nightshade-near","title":"Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design","authors":"NEAR team","year":2019,"date_label":"2019","publisher":"NEAR team","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Scaling","topics":["Scaling"],"source_url":"https://www.near.org/papers/nightshade","source_label":"Nightshade paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2019 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","repository":null,"editorial_line":"Nightshade is NEAR's sharding design: chunks of a block are produced per shard and a block attests to those chunks, so one validator need not execute every shard.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/nightshade-near","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/nightshade-near","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/nightshade-near","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Nightshade study","href":"/whitepaper/nightshade-near"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"NEAR","href":"/whitepaper/near"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Celestia","href":"/whitepaper/lazyledger"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Harmony","href":"/whitepaper/harmony"}]}