Blink and it’s final. @NEARProtocol's Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade brings latency upgrades that will enable the next generation of AI use cases 👇 —🟪 What is Nightshade 2.0? NEAR is building the “Blockchain for AI”, and recently announced the Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade – bringing implementation of “optimistic blocks”. In NEAR’s sharding design, each shard usually has to wait for a block before they can do their job. The Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade allows shards to act optimistically without waiting for block arrival. In the time taken to blink an eye, a NEAR transaction can finalize on-chain with the Nightshade 2.0 Upgrade. Key Benefits: • 600-Millisecond Block Time: The time it takes for NEAR to produce a new block has been dramatically reduced. • 1.2-Second Finality: Finality (i.e., the time required for a transaction to become irreversible) is now 1.2 seconds, which is 10x faster than Solana and over 600x faster than Ethereum and L2s. —🟪 Solving the blockchain trilemma? Users and developers are often forced to compromise between speed and security when choosing a blockchain. By combining cutting-edge sharding, robust consensus mechanisms, and now optimistic block production, NEAR achieves a powerful trifecta: 1️⃣ Real-Time Composability: Build user experiences where multi-step transactions can finalize within seconds, enabling more interactive and seamless dApps. 2️⃣ Secure Finality: Near-instant finality ensures minimal risk of transaction reversion — critical for enterprise-grade and real-world applications. 3️⃣ Sustainable Scalability: With sharding and a continually evolving architecture, NEAR is built to scale without sacrificing performance. —🟪 Unlocking New Next-Generation Use Cases The emergence of AI-driven apps, autonomous agents, and complex decentralized systems alike all rely on near-instant transaction finality to function seamlessly in real-time environments. With NEAR’s swift block times and final confirmation, developers can have complete confidence in the execution of every smart contract call. 1️⃣ Real-Time Composability: Build user experiences where multi-step transactions can finalize within seconds, enabling more interactive and seamless dApps. 2️⃣ Autonomous Agents: AI agents can trigger on-chain actions and receive feedback almost instantly, paving the way for novel applications in finance, supply chain, and more. 3️⃣ Confidence in Execution: Because finality is achieved in 1.2 seconds, developers can drastically reduce complexity around transaction confirmations, reorgs, and network delays. Disclosure: Have a position in $NEAR.