TL;DR

NEAR staking metrics have trended upwards YoY. Staked tokens increased by 20%, staking wallets grew by 80%, and the staking ratio reached 47%.
NEAR has undertaken several initiatives to optimize for scale, including a sharding mechanism to manage demand spikes, named accounts, and 3) supporting common coding languages like JavaScript
NEAR sharding, coined Nightshade Sharding, has been a work in progress since 2021, has four planned phases, and is currently in phase two - which splits the chain into four shards and only shards state but not transaction processing. The final two stages will shard both state and transactions, and make sharding dynamic, increasing/decreasing nodes depending on demand. Executing Nightshade Sharding is crucial for the future of NEAR scaling.
NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin proposes a change to NEAR storage staking, which will remove the initializing requirement of funding new wallets with a minimum NEAR balance
NEAR continues to rely on its community of validators and developers to implement validator standards, and best practices, along with incentivizing and growing the developer ecosystem
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