Research corpus ScalingBLC-STUDY-0698

Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design

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.

Official external source only
Design paper
Official source

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Record

Authors: NEAR team
Date: 2019
Publisher: NEAR team
Version: Source cited by the 2019 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0698
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

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.

Direct answer

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.

Where to read

Official source — Nightshade paper
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

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.

What changed

A reading of the project's public design document. Not a copy, not a benchmark, and not an offer.

Relationships

Canonical readingNightshade study
Related paperNEAR
Related paperCelestia
Related paperHarmony

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

NEAR team (2019). Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design. NEAR team. https://www.near.org/papers/nightshade

BibTeX

@techreport{nightshadenear2019,
  title = {Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design},
  author = {NEAR team},
  year = {2019},
  institution = {NEAR team},
  url = {https://www.near.org/papers/nightshade},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/nightshade-near}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design
AU  - NEAR team
PY  - 2019
PB  - NEAR team
UR  - https://www.near.org/papers/nightshade
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0698",
    "title": "Nightshade: NEAR's sharding design",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "NEAR team"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2019
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "NEAR team",
    "URL": "https://www.near.org/papers/nightshade",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

JSON BibTeX file RIS file CSL-JSON

Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections