NEAR Chinese official account announced that the team will launch the second phase of sharding in 2024, introducing stateless validation and extending the original Nightshade design to avoid fraud proof.

NEAR and Polygon networks have announced a collaboration to create a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for Web Assembly (WASM) blockchains. The new prover, called "zkWASM," will enable WASM-based networks to join the Polygon ecosystem for the first time, providing greater security, scalability, developer flexibility, and interoperability in the open web. The zkWASM prover is currently in active development and will be integrated into Polygon's chain development kit (CDK) once completed, allowing developers to create WASM networks and integrate them into the broader Polygon ecosystem. The collaboration will also improve validator efficiency on the NEAR network, resulting in better scalability and increased decentralization.