NEAR announces the next major protocol upgrade SPICE, which will shorten the block time to 200 milliseconds

NEAR officially announced the next major protocol upgrade SPICE (Separation of Consensus and Execution), which is a key step towards Nightshade 3. After the upgrade is completed, the NEAR block time will be reduced from the current 600 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, achieving about a 3x speedup, approaching the maximum speed allowed by physical conditions. The core of SPICE is to decouple the consensus layer from the execution layer, allowing validators to complete block consensus without waiting for transaction execution, thereby reducing latency and supporting more complex, time-consuming transactions.

NEAR stated that this upgrade will be the largest underlying architecture change since Stateless Validation in 2024. After the upgrade, the transaction experience of applications such as NEAR Intents and near.com will be further enhanced. Defuse Labs CEO Alex Shevchenko indicated that the final confirmation time for NEAR is expected to drop to about 0.4 seconds, faster than Visa's standard of about 3 seconds, achieving a payment experience close to "completed in the blink of an eye."

NEAR also mentioned that faster block times are crucial for the AI Agent economy, enabling high-speed payments and complex transactions between agents, and allowing longer tasks to be executed across multiple blocks. Additionally, SPICE will pave the way for Nightshade 3 and lay the foundation for achieving cross-shard atomic execution in the future. The NEAR development team stated that this will help address the development complexity and potential vulnerabilities brought by asynchronous environments, improving network scalability and security.