NEAR Protocol Targets 1M TPS for AI Agents and Micropayments

On May 31, Aurora co-founder Alex Shevchenko shared insights on NEAR Protocol's ambitious growth strategy, targeting 1 million transactions per second (TPS) by the end of 2025. Currently averaging 83 TPS with a peak of 4,135 TPS, NEAR plans to scale over 240 times its current capacity. This leap aims to support AI agents, micropayments, and decentralized services with lightning-fast processing and low fees.

Micropayments to Replace Subscriptions

Shevchenko predicts a shift in the payments ecosystem driven by AI agents, which will naturally optimize for low fees. He emphasized, "Subscription models will fade out, replaced by micropayments." This shift could disrupt traditional systems like VISA, MasterCard, and SWIFT, with blockchain becoming the backbone—if it can scale.

Shevchenko noted that parallel processing (sharding) is the only way to achieve this scale. NEAR’s 400ms finality beats VISA’s 3-second settlement by over 7x, making it a strong contender for this transition.

NEAR’s Scalability Breakthrough with Sharding

Bowen Wang, NEAR Protocol’s head, confirmed the use of Nightshade 2.0 sharding, stateless validation, and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to achieve the 1M TPS target. Nightshade 2.0 allows dynamic shard expansion within a single block, with future upgrades enabling shards to split and merge based on demand.

Current figures show NEAR’s theoretical capacity at 12,000 TPS, far behind the 1M TPS vision. However, Nightshade 2.0’s stateless validation and real-time resharding aim to overcome this bottleneck.

Stateless Validation and ZK Proofs for Efficiency

NEAR’s scalability hinges on stateless validation, where validators confirm transactions without downloading full data. This reduces bandwidth and verification time. Wang highlighted that future upgrades will likely use ZK proofs instead of merkle-based state witnesses, ensuring faster confirmation with minimal computational load.

This efficiency is critical for cross-chain interactions and growing AI agent involvement. NEAR also plans to use Chain Signatures to connect external blockchains seamlessly, avoiding UX disruptions common with layer-2 or multichain bridges.