Anton Astafiev, CTO at Near One, and Mally Anderson, writer at NEAR
The Near One team recently announced two major upgrades to the NEAR Protocol, both launching later this month: dynamic resharding, which increases the network’s scalability, and the addition of the first quantum signing scheme, which delivers post-quantum safety to NEAR account holders. This post outlines the next step on the NEAR Protocol roadmap: SPICE, or “separation of consensus and execution.” Currently in development, SPICE is the next major upgrade on the way to Nightshade 3.0, the next iteration of NEAR sharding. (See the recent post on dynamic resharding for a brief history of sharding upgrades since 2019 and Bowen Wang’s NEARCON 2026 keynote on Nightshade 3.0 for an overview of how NEAR Protocol is evolving.)
When SPICE launches, NEAR block times will become 3x faster, enabling 200 millisecond blocks. NEAR already has fast blocks at 600ms with 1.2s finality, as of May 2025. This major improvement to speed is possible thanks to decoupling consensus and execution, which means consensus can run as fast as it can without needing to wait for execution to produce a block. It’s worth noting that 200ms is about as fast as it’s physically possible for a block time to be, given the speed of light and the minimum required time to send and receive a message for consensus.
Consensus and execution running separately allows for three major improvements: it unlocks faster blocks and lower latency, while also supporting long-running, more complex transactions.
How SPICE Accelerates the Protocol
Separating consensus and execution is a fundamental and high-impact upgrade to the NEAR Protocol, the biggest change since stateless validation in 2024 and a major technical undertaking for the Near One team. First introduced as an idea at NEAR’s [REDACTED] conference in late 2024, SPICE research is now accelerating because other important upgrades such as gas keys (in release 2.12), sharded smart contracts, and dynamic resharding are complete.
While achieving this separation is extremely complex, here is the high-level idea. What blockchains deliver is a guaranteed order of events that is unchangeable and unretractable. This is delivered by BFT consensus rules, which include ordered transactions and balance changes in every (slow) block. But the protocol can process transactions much faster by separating the sequencing from execution: if all the validators need to agree upon is the list of transactions and a hash of the block, with a guarantee that they won’t be reordered, that can happen quite quickly while still preserving determinism. You can produce a block just by validating signatures without any compute: the block is complete while the state is not yet calculated. Execution would now be decoupled from sequencing, meaning that state roots are not necessarily posted every consensus block.
SPICE not only makes NEAR’s block time 3x faster, reducing it from 600 to 200 milliseconds, but it allows more actions to take place in a shorter timespan while also letting more complex transactions happen much faster (or allowing for longer-running transactions across multiple blocks). NEAR blocks are already optimistic, but SPICE reduces the maximum wait significantly. Currently, if a transaction requires additional input, the user has to wait for a full block to pass in order to take the next action. With SPICE, three actions can now take place in the span of one current block.
SPICE will also make near.com and NEAR Intents much faster. Per Defuse Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko: “NEAR blocks getting faster means the finality will be faster, which means the UX will become smoother and closer to ‘blink and it’s done.’ Super fast sub-second trades and payments, as well as confidential payments. Visa’s standard is three seconds. NEAR’s will be 0.4 seconds. Faster than you can type a PIN or lift your phone up to the PoS terminal.”
This impressive speed is also required for the agent economy: agents operate much faster than human users and legacy financial infrastructure. By introducing the fastest block times allowed by physics, NEAR unleashes agents to work at their optimal speed and conduct fiat and crypto commerce seamlessly. In addition, agents can initiate longer-running and more complex transactions in parallel.
The Road to Nightshade 3.0
Separation of consensus and execution is the first big step towards implementing Nightshade 3.0. Achieving this separation is a first among sharded blockchains (Monad has the same separation but for EVM, i.e. a non-sharded setup). In addition to speed, SPICE also allows better scalability via further parallelization. In NEAR currently, execution is sharded by account ID, so if the load is high on one shard, there could be a delay for all accounts on that shard. SPICE enables future sync across shard transactions. In addition, SPICE introduces more bandwidth thanks to more effective execution without gaps, or so-called “bubble filling”: the execution queue doesn’t need to wait for any networking, while block production doesn’t need to wait for any execution.
Introducing faster blocks works alongside sharded smart contracts – an upgrade already in production – to improve security. Sharded smart contracts on NEAR are effectively small accounts, i.e. per user and per use case. Combined with shorter and simpler blocks, everything on NEAR can spread more easily across shards and the network can adjust dynamically. This is not only a scaling improvement, but enables better security. Simpler blocks and smaller contracts are easier overall to protect and secure in the era of AI-accelerated hacks and exploits. As NEAR moves towards implementing formal verification and proving every contract, faster and simpler blocks make everything easier to formally verify without being too expensive or compute-intensive.
SPICE also paves the way for further exciting upgrades down the road to Nightshade 3.0. SPICE will enable atomic (i.e. indivisible and irreversible) execution of transactions across multiple shards (this will require a further update after SPICE, but it is a key reason to separate consensus and execution first.) This is the holy grail of sharding and NEAR developers have been asking for this, particularly for NEAR Intents, because atomicity enables more complex transactions to happen faster and without the complexity required in an async environment. This complexity has been a source of bugs and delays in the development of NEAR smart contracts and will be mitigated when execution evolves. The key idea is that SPICE, by decoupling execution from consensus, allows moving execution into nodes that already have the state of every shard that the given transaction touches. Because NEAR already has stateless validation, even a single execution node producing proof is enough for everyone else to validate. This keeps requirements low for validators while enabling execution to speed up even more.
The Near One team is hard at work to make SPICE a reality in the coming months. Stay tuned for technical updates on nearone.org and watch for protocol news on the NEAR X account.
