Key Highlights
- NEAR Protocol announced it reached 1 million transactions per second (TPS) using its Nightshade 2.0 sharding architecture.
- The 1M TPS milestone is driven by the network’s focus on meeting the high-volume needs of future decentralized AI agents and micropayments.
- The community is questioning whether this development will help the network generate more fees, which is currently about $5K in 24 hours.
NEAR Protocol, a decentralized Layer-1 blockchain, announced on December 8 that it has achieved a speed of over 1 million transactions per second (TPS).
The achievement leverages the network’s specialized sharding technology and validates NEAR’s long-standing architectural vision for horizontal scalability.
Despite this performance, the crypto community is noticing the network’s current daily revenue. While the platform has raised millions in funding and has notable traction, its chain revenue remains at an extremely low level, raising a question about the gap between technical capacity and economic utilization.
Experts are now asking if this development would help the protocol gain more active users and raise its chain revenue.
The revenue contradiction
The achievement of 1 million TPS should place NEAR Protocol at the forefront of crypto ecosystems, focusing on sharpening its infrastructure. Typically, protocols with high transaction volume capabilities drive millions of users and essentially an increase in transaction fees.
As per DeFiLlama data, the NEAR blockchain currently records a daily network revenue of only around $4,982 at the time of writing. The network’s current processing capacity is not in line with its real economic activity and user demand, as this figure shows.
Onchain data also shows that NEAR Protocol currently holds $158.02 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi, reflecting a 24-hour increase of 6.92%. Despite this growth in locked value, the network’s financial activity remains relatively low.
The protocol’s native token, NEAR, is priced at $1.75, contributing to a market capitalization of $2.24 billion, as per CoinMarketCap data.
High-volume adoption and AI
NEAR’s future vision focuses heavily on an onchain AI economy, which is expected to be accelerated by the recently confirmed scalability. The capacity for a million transactions per second opens the door for AI agents to execute thousands of micro-transactions rapidly and autonomously on the blockchain.
Moreover, this base is essential in supporting the increase of cross-chain volume through initiatives such as NEAR Intents. The next steps for the protocol include deploying the optimizations on mainnet in version 2.12 and continuing development on dynamic resharding.
The 1 million TPS establishes the NEAR Protocol as a leader. However, it is yet to be seen whether this speed can finally attract the applications and activity required to match its achievements with meaningful economic scale.
Also Read: Zcash Fee Revenue Surges 560% to $47.5M in 30 Days
