NEAR Shatters Speed Records, 600ms Blocks

NEAR’s new “optimistic block” update yields 600ms blocks and 1.2s finality, raising the bar for fast, secure blockchain apps.

NEAR Protocol just released something pretty amazing - version 3 of the NEAR PoA - which has a block time of 1s. 

To give you some perspective, you can submit a transaction, it’s locked in on-chain, and you’re sipping your coffee in less time than that, and it’s finally confirmed in 1.2 seconds.

Sure, all sorts of blockchains chat about being fast, but the real metric that matters is finality: i.e., when your transaction is said and done. And at 1.2 seconds, NEAR is practically flying by other speed demons such as Solana (which is at around 1.6 seconds) and Layer 2s still chained to the 12-second sloth of Ethereum.

But how did they do this? They modified their sharded consensus to process data much more aggressively: they don't wait for new blocks before they start doing work. That slashes the wait time in half. This is huge for real-time applications, particularly anything with AI or high-frequency DeFi trading.

 You can make apps that can interact quickly, without forcing users to twiddle tempus or click through a plague of confirmations. Think smooth real-time gaming, instant micropayments, seamless cross-chain transfers. If you run AI trading bots, EQ will wrap up trades in around a second instead of dragging them out to five or 10.

They also are talking about 200ms blocks by December - that’s faster than a thought. We’ll of course need to see how it scales when Family Feud crowd contestants start bombing the network with questions, but at the moment NEAR is making a very convincing argument to be the speed king of mainnets.

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