NEAR Reduces Block Time to 200ms with SPICE Protocol Upgrade

According to NEAR's official blog, the NEAR protocol's core development team Near One announced SPICE (Separating Consensus and Execution), a major protocol upgrade aimed at enabling Nightshade 3.0 sharding architecture. By decoupling consensus from execution, SPICE allows validators to reach consensus on transaction ordering and block hashes without waiting for state computation to complete, reducing block time from the current 600 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds.

Near One recently announced two additional upgrades planned for later this month: dynamic re-sharding to improve network scalability and the first post-quantum signature scheme for account security. The team said the simplified block structure, combined with live sharding smart contracts, will enhance network security. SPICE is currently in development, with implementation planned over the coming months.