Speed you can trust. Finality you can feel. As @NEARProtocol is building the "Blockchain for AI," it recently announced the Nightshade 2.0 upgrade, which brought the implementation of "optimistic blocks." "What has changed?" Initially, in @NEARProtocol's sharding design, each shard had to wait for a block before they could do their job. The Nightshade 2.0 upgrade allows shards to act optimistically without waiting for block arrival. Now, in the time taken to blink an eye, a transaction can finalize on-chain, and also... The time it takes for @NEARProtocol to produce a new block has been dramatically reduced to 600ms. On @solana, by comparison, it takes 1.6 seconds for a block to be confirmed, and on L2s like @base, it takes at least 12 seconds to confirm a block (i.e. the time it takes to get included into an @ethereum block). "What about transaction finality?" Finality is now 1.2 seconds, which is 10x faster than @solana and over 600x faster than @ethereum. P.S. I believe it's obvious that developers now can have complete confidence in the execution of every smart contract call, thus build dApps with higher activity.