Network Upgrade Gives Token 24% Price Boost

NEAR has continued to rally despite the market slipping by 2% today. According to CoinGecko, NEAR, the native token of the platform, achieved almost 23% gains since last week. This is largely due to positive on-chain developments, showing that the altcoin has enough muscle to remain in its current position within the market.

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Just recently, NEAR announced that Nightshade 2.0, NEAR’s touted “novel sharding design”, was deployed on the platform’s mainnet, improving the already robust and reliable system users have been enjoying for years. 

Nightshade 2.0 Brings New Light To The Validators

According to a recent blog post, network upgrade have brought in stateless validation, the new sharding architecture for the protocol. This new architecture improved upon the single-shard performance of the network. NEAR already has six shards deployed on the network with a target of ten by the end of the year. 

It also lowers hardware requirements to become a validator. Nightshade 2.0 improved the validator experience by omitting the need to track all of NEAR’s shards, stimulating the growth of the validator side of the crypto. 

“In particular, the new sharding implementation paves the way to significantly increase the coin’s already-fast transaction throughput,” said Bowen Wang, Head of Protocol at NEAR One.

According to Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and the CEO of the NEAR Foundation, the network upgrade fixes “the fundamental bottleneck issue on most L1s of how to scale while preserving both usability and security.”

Rejection Candle Forms Marking Start Of NEAR Correction Phase

With the market’s slippage on today’s trading activity, NEAR is currently trading on a red candle as the token is rejected by the $5.2 ceiling, flipping the momentum to the bears in the short term. This will make losses inevitable in the short term. 

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With the market dip flipping the momentum to the bears, it will continue to affect the crypto’s performance if the bearishness continues. However, NEAR’s recent developments might slow the fear, uncertainty, and doubt as the recent development helps network growth in the long term. 

Once Nightshade’s effect matures, NEAR will have a solid base for investor confidence to stand on. 

Right now, NEAR has two possible paths that it may take in the medium term. If the market rebounds after the current dip, it has the potential to break through $5.7 in the coming weeks. However, if the dip continues to worsen by the day, NEAR might return to $3.8 with the worse-case scenario being at $3.0 if the situation worsen. 

For now, investors should be cautious by monitoring the market’s broader movement as any swing can affect the altcoin’s performance. 

Featured image from Rebank, chart from TradingView